East to the Dawn (15 page)

 

The plan had been for Amy and Amelia and Muriel to live somewhere in the Morgan Park district of Chicago near the Shedds and for Amelia and Muriel to go to the Morgan Park high school with the Shedd daughter. When Amelia, however, saw the school, she was appalled by its low standards (she likened the chemistry lab to a kitchen sink) and refused to enroll.

The Chicago public school system operated on the “neighborhood” concept—one went to the high school in the district where one lived. So when Amelia chose Hyde Park High School, in the Hyde Park district, it meant they had to find lodgings there.

Amy had never been a match for Amelia. Even when Amelia was young, she had been able to bend her mother to her will. As a tot, she had succeeded in dawdling for over an hour over a glass of milk to keep Amy reading
Ivanhoe
because her mother had promised to read until the milk was finished. Now no more than before could Amy stand up to her, even though she wanted to live near her friends and Muriel had her heart set on going to the same school the Shedd daughter attended.

Hyde Park was the best public high school in Chicago. Located near the University of Chicago, challenged by the infusion of the bright, motivated children of University of Chicago faculty, Hyde Park excelled in all disciplines and offered extensive extracurricular activities. Its student body was notable for the high percentage who went on to attend top colleges, as well as for the extraordinary number of alumni and alumnae who would become distinguished musicians, artists, scientists, and athletes—among them, in later generations, TV personality Steve Allen, jazz vocalist Mel Torme, economist Paul Samuelson, and Olympic medalist Jim Fuchs.

But Amelia made no friends and participated in no activities. She was seventeen when school opened that fall of 1914. She never made the slightest effort to fit in. In contrast to the exuberance she had exhibited the previous spring, enabling her to rise above her disastrous home life and take part in the various activities in St. Paul, Amelia participated in none of the organized student activities at Hyde Park. She arrived that fall the outsider in the senior class, and she remained the outsider. Each day when classes were over, she left and went home and cared for Amy.

Hyde Park was a school way ahead of its time. The sports facilities
were not only superb but were available to girls as well as boys. The glorious sports she had worked so enthusiastically to master and to teach her friends to play when she had been at College Preparatory School—basketball and baseball—were played with full teams and official rules by girls as well as boys. There was even a girls' indoor baseball team. Here was an incredible cornucopia of riches—and Amelia took no part. She played on no team at all.

Nor was that the extent of her nonparticipation in school activities. Hyde Park had dozens of extracurricular student clubs covering every possible activity. Amelia was among the few who belonged to none—not the Dramatic Club, the Discussion Club, the Civics Club, the Choral Society, the Camera Club, Honor Society, Pythagorean Club, or the Glee Club, to single out a few.

In
The Aitchpe,
the senior class yearbook, there is a very odd description of Amelia, as well as a very odd picture. The description reads, “Meek loveliness is ‘round thee spread.” It is so far off the mark that it indicates beyond question that she had remained an unknown quantity to her classmates who produced the book. The square space next to her photo—which for other students contains a list of achievements, hopes, and interests—is a blank. For the first and last time in her life, Amelia was too preoccupied to interact with her peers. There is a picture of her in the yearbook: her hair is attractively piled on her head, and she is wearing a ribbon choker. She looks collected, and composed—serious and very mature—but old for her years as she stares off into the distance. And different. There is a hint of primness, a sense of tenseness—she is unlike her usual self. The painfully neat clothes bear witness that, depressed as she was, she allowed no chink in her armor. Among the many things her classmates did not know about Amelia was that her family was so poor, she and her mother and sister were living in rooms in an apartment belonging to two spinster sisters who made their life miserable. And she went home to those rooms every day after school to be with Amy.

The Aitchpe
also listed college choices, and Amelia's choice was Bryn Mawr; she was at least still holding on to her dream of going there with Ginger, as they had planned together for so many years.

She kept so much to herself that her Hyde Park classmates used the words “boy shy” and “reticent” and “diffident” to describe her. They would also remember that she did not attend graduation or bother to pick up her diploma and that she was the only one in her class who “dared to break the school tradition by refusing to attend the senior class banquet.”

Even though Amelia participated so little in school activities, she harbored no ill feelings toward Hyde Park. In 1928, within weeks of
her return to the United States after the
Friendship
flight, she visited the school, in the process enthralling everyone with whom she came in contact. (She laughingly remarked that what she remembered most vividly was her German teacher always asking
“Was meint das Fraulein?”
because the teacher couldn't understand her German.) And her picture was taken while she stepping onto a piano on her way down from the auditorium stage.

Edwin, meanwhile, after the disaster in Springfield, attempted to resurrect his law practice in St. Paul. When the lease on the house ran out, he moved to Kansas City, Missouri, to live with his elderly widowed sister Mary Woodworth, at seventy-two almost a generation older than he. Sometime in the fall of 1915, Amy and Amelia and Muriel left Chicago and moved there too, into a small house at 3621 Charlotte Avenue. Edwin joined them. It looked terribly good after all they had been through. But there was still no money, and Amelia wanted to finish her education in a proper manner at a private school or college. It was a difficult time for her. Her own plans had to be put on hold. Mitigating that state of affairs, however, was the positive change in her father: Edwin had pulled himself together and was again functioning.

Amy had never given up trying to get control of her inheritance. Now, with Edwin drawing on his knowledge of the law, his anger redirected into positive channels, husband and wife joined forces to fight Mark. Edwin began probing into the dealings of the Otis Real Estate Company, looking for evidence of financial mismanagement. At every turn Mark rebuffed him, and as he did so, Mark's enmity toward Amy became more and more apparent. As Edwin pressed him, he and Amy became surer of their ground. In September 1915 Amy filed suit. Edwin's brief sought an accounting from Mark, challenged the legality of the Otis Real Estate Company to function as a company in the state of Illinois, and demonstrated that Mark hadn't had the courtesy to be civil to his brother-in-law: “... and he refused to show said books and records of said corporation, and said agent then wrote a letter to Mark E. Otis, demanding an inspection of said books, which letter was refused by said Mark E. Otis, and returned to the writer unopened.”

Things began to move, although at a glacial pace, in Amy's favor. On February 17, 1917, the Atchison County District Court granted the petition. “Except for the funds in the hands of the Northern Trust Company,” the
Journal
entry stated, Mark had to turn over to his sister all the real estate legally hers—forthwith, upon presentation of her shares of stock, and
“the Otis Real Estate Company upon receipt of said stock, [shall] deed to the plaintiff all the said property within two days thereafter.” The property involved “certain real estate described as follows”—listing more than thirty pieces of property in Kansas City, Kansas, and several in Kansas City, Missouri.

And then, finally, the long agony came to an end. On April 16, Amy was notified, her brother had died in Chicago.

That summer Amy sought control over the funds still managed by the Northern Trust Company, and with Mark dead, she encountered no opposition. On August 21, 1917, Amy's inheritance was finally, totally, irrevocably hers.

It would take a while for Mark's financial records to be unraveled, but when they were, Margaret Balis and Theodore Otis would find out that of the extensive holdings their father had so carefully built up, virtually nothing was left. Mark had wasted and spent it all—all except Amy's portion. Margaret would be forced to recognize that Amy had been correct in her assessment of their brother and that she had been wrong. The sisters, reunited, would pick up the closeness they had once enjoyed, and their children would once again become friends.

In the fall of 1916 Ginger Park, but not Amelia Earhart, became a freshman at Bryn Mawr. Amelia became a student at one of the most exclusive finishing schools in the country, a school called Ogontz. A mix of factors were at work. Money was certainly a major consideration, as were location and academic background.

Ogontz had the attribute of being located in a suburb of Philadelphia, near both Bryn Mawr and Margaret Balis, who would be able to look after her niece. Amelia must have considered it temporary—assuming that in another year she would be at Bryn Mawr- and in the meantime she would be nearby, and near the Balis family, with whom she got along well.

But Ogontz was a particularly social school—so social that virtually everyone, including the Challiss family, thought it a great mistake for Amelia to go there. Rilla Challiss thought Ogontz “a very silly place for Amy to have sent her”—it was that dreaded thing, Rilla thought, “rather
too
stylish.” Lucy Challiss was going to Wheaton and would have liked her to go there; Edwin favored Kansas State. Nor did Ogontz appeal to Margaret Balis, who was strongly bound to the Quaker tradition of their great-grandmother Maria. She would send her daughters, a few years younger than Amelia, to Germantown Friends for their final years and then to Bryn Mawr.

Amy had always had social pretensions. She alone, of all her aunts and uncles and cousins, in her description in the family history book of the large ancestral Harres home in Philadelphia, where her mother and Mary Ann Challiss had grown up—she alone claimed the house was on Chestnut Street, the most fashionable street in the city, when in fact it had been on more modest South Third Street, by no means as fine. Her yearning for gentility, her insistence on patrician ancestry would impress Muriel (but not Amelia, who never made any such claims). When Muriel wrote her biography of her sister, she made much of their supposed grand lineage, claiming that they were descended from a niece of a king of France through Edwin, as well as being direct descendants of the Revolutionary War hero James Otis.

The years of being snubbed, of being so poor in Chicago that rooms in a dismal apartment were the best she could do, had taken their toll on Amy. After what she had endured in St. Paul, social standing became not just one interest among many but a serious goal in life. While in earlier years her efforts had been directed at maintaining the family position, now she felt they had slipped, and she and her daughters had to regain their place. With such a goal, an ultrasocial finishing school would help—it would add a certain cachet to her daughter's social standing.

Margaret and Clarence Balis lived a few miles away from Ogontz, at 137 East Johnson Street, in a big house with their five children—fifteen-year-old Otis, eleven-year-old Mark Edwin, ten-year-old Clarence, and the twins, Nancy and Jane, six—plus niece Annie, by then grown and about to be married. The Balises were a happy, normal family, something Amelia, except during her brief visit with the Challisses, had not been around in years. It would have been comforting for Amelia to be near her first cousins and her aunt, always the family caregiver, now devoted to taking young relatives under her wing. (A few years later Margaret would even gather into her fold Charles Otis's son James, and James's children, whom Amy had so desperately tried to become friendly with in St. Paul.) Margaret managed to accomplish so much even though she was almost totally deaf—something her own children were made aware of only when they started school and their classmates asked them, “Why are you shouting?”