Amelia Earhart (7 page)

Her approach to this first record would be repeated again and again. She was secretive about her plan to set it and insisted on calling it an attempt at “a calibration of the ceiling” (for that particular aircraft) instead of admitting she was trying to set an altitude record. She was meticulous in arranging for the barograph to prove what she had done but showed far less concern about the capabilities of the plane or her own safety.

Seven months after her “calibration of the ceiling” at Rogers Field, nine weeks before her twenty-sixth birthday, on May 15, 1923, she received a license from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the international aviation organization of which the American National Aeronautic Association was a member. She was the
sixteenth woman in the world to receive one.

I
n 1924, less than nine months after she received her FAI license, Amelia Earhart was hospitalized for another sinus operation. She was not only ill, she was broke. Almost twenty-seven, she had spent the last three years racing on a treadmill of multiple, menial jobs to pay for flying. It was a matter, she said, of “
no pay, no fly and no work, no pay.” Her only financial help had come from her mother, who gave her the money for the little Airster from the sale of the Otis house in Atchison.

Amy Earhart had been spending capital as well as income ever since she gained control of her inheritance. By 1921 her capital had shrunk from more than sixty thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars, at a time when a ten-room house could be built for ten thousand dollars. She decided to recoup her losses by investing in a gypsum mine managed by Peter Barnes, a young friend of Sam Chapman’s. It was a foolish venture, one in which both Edwin and Amelia became involved.

Edwin bought a used truck for Barnes. When it broke down he asked Amelia’s friend, Lloyd Royer, a master mechanic at Bert Kinner’s, for his advice. Amelia told Royer not to bother. “
I think,” she said, “that Dad imagines all mechanically inclined gentlemen
like
to play with broken-down automobiles.” The broken-down automobile was only one of the many misfortunes suffered by Barnes as he struggled to get all the
gypsum he could out of the old mine before the rainy season began in February or March.

In January of 1922 Barnes told the Earharts that production had fallen behind schedule and asked for their help. Amelia and Edwin took the train to Las Vegas, where Barnes met them and drove them to the mine site. Amelia shoveled gypsum into one of the two trucks Barnes had and Edwin lifted sandbags to shore up the approach to a small bridge over a gulley that the trucks had to cross. While they worked, a rainstorm swept over the area, creating flash-flood waters that rushed down the gulley, washing away its banks. Amelia, Edwin, and two of Barnes’s friends who were helping load gypsum escaped over the bridge in one truck, but when Barnes followed in the second, the bridge collapsed and he was trapped in the overturned cab. Amelia wrote to Muriel at Smith College: “
There is no way I can soften the blow for you. We have to take these things as they come. Peter is drowned, the mine irreparably flooded and all of Mother’s investment gone.”

During the next two years all the Earharts’ efforts to keep the family together and solvent failed. Muriel had to leave Smith at the end of her third year and take a teaching job in Huntington Beach. Amy Earhart gave up her attempt at reconciliation with Edwin and asked him for a divorce. By spring of 1924 both she and Muriel decided to return to New England where the latter had enrolled in summer school at Harvard. Amelia proposed to join her mother and sister there by flying the Airster to Boston. For once Amy flatly countermanded one of Amelia’s plans with one of her own—Amelia could drive her to Boston and Amy would pay travel expenses. Amelia accepted the offer.

Before she left California Amelia sold the Airster to a novice flyer who crashed the first time he took it up, killing himself and his passenger, a young university student. Cora Kinner said, “
The kid must have frozen to the stick … we had to pry his hands away from it … It looked like a bombing … fire all over the boulevard.” Amelia thought the accident tragic but unnecessary, the result of ignorance and overconfidence on the part of the pilot.

With the money from her sale of the ill-fated Airster Amelia bought a car—not a cheap, practical Model T Ford like one Kinner lent her, but a 1922 Kissel Kar. A beautiful vehicle with a convertible top, big nickel headlamps, and a long, low, yellow body with black fenders, the car was
the equivalent of a modern-day Alfa Romeo. The Kissel was named the
Yellow Peril
by its new owner, whose penchant for beauty preempted the threat of unemployment and unpaid bills. More aware of economic reality than Amy, Amelia was still her mother’s daughter, a member of the impoverished gentry. At Ogontz she copied a poem by “Moslin [sic] Eddin Saudi, Mohmmadan [sic] Sheik and Persian Poet”:

The Kissel was her hyacinthe.

When she packed up for the trip east she took an odd collection of books and notes. One small notebook contained notes from her
photography class at the University of California, Los Angeles, along with her thoughts on two widely different subjects:

The engineer and moralist also showed an interest in economic justice, copying this poem in another book:

Stupidity Street

Ralph Hodgson

Amelia and Amy left Hollywood on a bright May day. Barely recovered from one operation and knowing another would be necessary as soon as she reached Boston, Amelia was determined to see something on the way. She drove to the Sequoia National Park, then to Yosemite and Crater Lake in early June. When Amy asked if they were ever going east, her daughter said, “Not until we reach Seattle.” After Seattle she drove to Banff, Alberta, and Lake Louise before
crossing Calgary’s prairie land on her way to Yellowstone National Park where they arrived June 30. The seven-thousand-mile trip to Boston took six weeks. Two weeks later Amelia entered Boston General Hospital for more surgery. After her release she joined Amy and Muriel in
Medford, a suburb of Boston, where Muriel was teaching at Lincoln Junior High.

The house Amy rented at 47 Brooks Street was a large, turn-of-the-century, two-storied structure. The neighborhood, so near the crowded, urban center of Boston, was very like the one Amelia had lived in as a child in Atchison. Its large houses were set back from the street with shrubs and flowerbeds in the front yard and vegetable gardens at the rear. Tall trees arched over streets where children played and friendly dogs roamed without leash or owner. Unlike the Ford and Chevrolet sedans parked in nearby drives, the
Yellow Peril
left the neighborhood children awe-stricken.

While she recuperated, Amelia set about trying to raise money to pay some of her bills. In August she wrote to Lloyd Royer, who was building a plane with Monte Montijo at Kinner’s new field in Glenwood. Royer had sold the old Moreland truck for her, left from the Earharts’ ill-fated mining venture, but the buyer was slow in paying. “I certainly wish the gentleman would come across,” she wrote. “
I need the money.”

In another letter to Royer she referred to an airplane motor she had left with Bert Kinner: “
As long as I have that motor, I’ll have days when I just couldn’t sell it. Either I’ll have to let him [Kinner] sell it soon at any price or let you [Royer] take it and pull down the motor and fix it. Then we’ll think about building a plane for it.”

Before Amelia could think about another plane, Amy offered her the money for a second year at Columbia University and Amelia accepted, returning there in September of 1924. She renewed her friendship with Marian Stabler, who had become an insurance statistician after abandoning efforts to make a living as an artist. “
This time she lived poorly,”
Marian said, “and went without everything but essentials, in order to maintain the Kissel car, which she loved like a pet dog.”

Marian thought her old friend looked pale and tired. Her bobbed hair had darkened, its sheen dulled by illness and repeated use of a curling iron. Yet whenever she seemed near total exhaustion Amelia would take a twenty-minute nap and awaken completely rested. She was never too tired to discuss art, science, poetry, religion, or politics, but told Marian nothing of a personal nature. Not until years later, when she heard it from a Hollywood reporter, did Marian learn that Edwin Earhart was an alcoholic.

Marian’s parents had moved from their Manhattan apartment to a big house in Great Neck, Long Island, where their childrens’ friends came in droves from the city for dinner and dancing to records in the living room or a game of deck tennis on the porch. One of the regulars, Elise von R. Owen, a music student who was living “on a nickel a day” in the city, was fascinated by Amelia’s powers of concentration. After dinner she would withdraw from the crowd to a desk at the far end of the room where she studied, ignoring the noise of records and conversation. But she turned on the radio beside the desk to listen to
classical music, which she told Elise helped her to concentrate.

Elise was not the only one to be impressed by Marian’s tall, quiet friend. On a night when Amelia and Marian were at a party given by a woman artist, another guest, the art director of an advertising agency, kept watching Amelia, who was sitting on the floor by the fire. The next time he asked the hostess to do an illustration for the agency he said, “
I want a figure that’s really lovely. Someone like that Amelia Earhart.”

Amelia’s second year at Columbia was her last. Amy could no longer afford the tuition. After the three-time college dropout returned to Boston, she wrote to Marian: “
No, I did not get into MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] as planned, owing to financial difficulties. No, I’m not coming back to New York, much, ah, much as I would like doing it. When I leave Boston, I think I’ll never go back.” In the fall of 1925 she found work of a sort, teaching English to foreign students for a University of Massachusetts extension program. Her wages for this part-time work were barely enough to pay for meals and gas for the Kissel.

Sam Chapman who had followed her back east and was working at the Boston Edison Company offered her an alternative to this hand-to-mouth
existence when he proposed again. Not long after he returned,
Amelia met Marian in the Boston train station, where they sat at the lunch counter waiting for Marian’s connection. It was one of the few occasions on which Amelia confided in anyone about her emotional reactions. “I don’t want to marry him,” she said. “I don’t want to marry anyone.”

She looked away from Marian and sighed. “There’s something the matter with me, Marian. I went to a doctor and he’s giving me pills. He said he’s going to be able to make me fall in love. I can’t. I just don’t want to.” She slowly turned her head and looked into Marian’s eyes, a sly grin widening into a broad smile. “But I’m taking my pills!”

The pills didn’t work, at least not for Sam. He thought perhaps his working schedule was objectionable and offered to change jobs. Amelia was not flattered; she was irritated. “I don’t want to tell Sam what he should do,” she told Muriel. “He ought to know what makes him happiest, and then do it, no matter what other people say. I know what I want to do and I expect to do it, married or single!” Sam continued to see Amelia but he still disapproved of working wives, while the woman he loved referred to marriage as “living the life of a domestic robot.”

It was evident from the clippings and notes Amelia kept adding to her
scrapbook that she had not given up her hopes for a career:

The supporter of careers for women looked for additional work for herself and found it in October, another part-time job, this one at Denison House, a settlement house in a Boston neighborhood of rundown tenements occupied by immigrants, most of whom were Chinese, Armenian, or Syrian and whose
children were to be her charges. At first she captivated the children with her beautiful car in which she often gave them rides. But her obvious patience and affection for them soon aroused a deeper admiration. More companion than mother, Amelia played games with them, bandaged their playground wounds, taught them English, and visited their often chaotic and always impoverished homes. When Marian
visited her once at
Denison House she noticed Amelia’s “
tenderness for children, even the occasionally smelly little children of the settlement.” Amelia assured her, “Chinese are an
adorable
people. You can’t realize it until you really know them.”