East to the Dawn (19 page)

Flying a plane was not at all a safe proposition in the early 1920s—things always went wrong. The Curtiss Jenny and the Canuck were among the safest planes flying, which was the reason the United States and Canada had extensively used them as training planes during the recent war. But they were far from safe; the Curtiss handbook that accompanied
each new plane worriedly advised fliers to “never forget that the engine may stop, and at all times keep this in mind.”

That summer of 1920, when Amelia moved to Los Angeles, Laura Bromwell, the most famous American female pilot, the “foremost American aviatrix” as the newspapers styled her, holder of the women's speed record, got into her plane for the last time. A few weeks earlier, she had enthralled the crowd of ten thousand assembled for the opening of Curtiss field on Long Island by completing an incredible record-breaking 199 loop-the-loops. Now, on a June day, as she was halfway through a loop, she fell to her death. The plane, upside down with Laura still in it, fluttered downward “like a falling leaf,” crushing her under the wreckage. Her body was badly mutilated, the newspapers reported. She was exactly Amelia's age. A few weeks later, Owen Locklear, “greatest of all daredevil fliers,” the first pilot to do aerial stunts for the movies, while working on a film sequence, put his plane into a tailspin he never came out of, and crashed within the environs of Hollywood.

Of the first forty pilots hired by the post office to deliver the aerial mail, as it was called in those days—all highly trained, the best of their day—all but nine died. In the one year, 1920—the year Amelia fell in love with flying—fifteen aerial mail pilots died.

No doubt it was a deadly pastime in those years. George Dade, growing up near Curtiss field, became a pilot even though he knew the dark side of aviation in the 1920s. He kept a diary of those killed: “I stopped counting when the list reached one hundred.”

“In those days the motor was not what it is today. It would drop out, for example, without warning and with a great rattle like the crash of crockery,” wrote the novelist and aviator Antoine de Saint Exupéry, “and one would simply throw in one's hand: there was no hope of refuge.” Clarence Chamberlin, one of the best pilots, was in ten plane crashes, due either to faulty engines or to poor landing fields; he walked away from them all.

But the risk was part of the magic of those early years—the fact that every pilot had narrow escapes, near misses, that Chamberlin's experience was the norm. There were no walking wounded, no agonized hospital stays, no maimed pilots to mar the scene. Suffering was not part of the picture—there was only excitement and daring to balance against sudden, clean death.

When Amelia learned to fly in 1921, Lieutenant Harris's parachute jump was still almost two years in the future. There was no Caterpillar Club yet, no way out of a doomed plane.

The danger was part of the fascination.

It was not surprising that Amelia went to an air meet soon after she
arrived. California was preoccupied with flying, and new airfields were opening virtually every week. It was the promised land for this newest outdoor sport: the temperature was balmy, the climate dry, the land flat and open. The movie moguls were taking it up. Stars, directors, writers, and studio heads, including Will Rogers and Cecil B. DeMille, bought planes and hired pilots to teach them how to fly. DeMille went on to buy his own field, and thereafter countless stars began flying or posing in flying clothes to get noticed. Colleen Moore, a starlet as wise in the ways of the world as she was pretty, put it best: “It's the fashion and I cannot afford to be out of fashion.”

When Amelia evinced a desire to go to an air meet, whatever her father's private reservations, he had to admit it was just about the most popular outdoor activity around. There were twenty fields in the Los Angeles area alone, and each weekend something was going on at at least one of them. The most famous airfield, the one with the biggest runway—500 feet wide and 4,000 feet long—and the busiest, was Earl Daugherty's airfield, just west of Los Angeles. It was there that Amelia saw her first California air meet.

The meet featured a hundred-mile free-for-all and shorter handicap races, most of which were won by army and navy pilots. As a matter of course, it included the standard heart-stoppers that drew the crowds: plane-changing and wing-walking, which looked and sometimes was incredibly dangerous. And because the lighter-than-air machines were still in the running as rivals for the heavier-than-air airplanes, there were also dirigible races, and rides were available in a blimp.

Amelia went to every air meet she could. By December, she had talked Edwin into making inquiries about instruction. The first step was to get someone to take her aloft.

Earl Daugherty, thirty-three, had been flying since 1911 and was the acknowledged dean of flying in the United States. He had rolled up more hours in the air than any other pilot. Undoubtedly Edwin would, given the chance, have preferred that Amelia make her first flight with him. “Experience is insurance” was Earl's motto. Instead, she took her trial hop a few days later at Rogers airport, run by Emery Rogers, a personable, young, handsome ex-army flier. Emery, whose field lay across from DeMille's Mercury field at the intersection of Fairfax Road and Wilshire Boulevard, had new Pacific Standards, two Curtiss Jennys, and a Curtiss Oriole, which seated three. The day was “characteristically fair,” as Amelia remembered, when she and her father arrived at the field. It fell to Frank Hawks, also a young ex-army officer, short and stocky, good looking, with curly hair, to take Amelia up for her first ride. Frank, who had learned to
fly at the army's Brooks field in San Antonio, Texas, would later become famous for setting all kinds of speed records, but at that moment in his life he was still merely a “local air thrill maker” whom Rogers paid fifty dollars a week to fly wing-walkers, teach flying, and occasionally give rides to passengers.

Amelia loved her trial hop. Nothing could spoil it for her, not even that Frank had another pilot aboard because he was afraid that, being female, she might jump out. It was instant infatuation—she “knew” she had to learn. But not with Frank, whose attitude bothered her. His boss, Emery Rogers, was at the time teaching at least one other woman how to fly—Cornelia McLoughlin would get her license that June. Nevertheless, Amelia went to another field where there was a female instructor, Neta Snook, because she felt that she would learn more quickly and easily from a woman.

Neta, twenty-four, who owned a Canadian Canuck, had left Iowa for California the year before so she could fly in the winter as well as the summer. That fall she had leased commercial rights to Kinner airport and immediately became notorious as the only female flier in southern California who was in the business of carrying passengers and giving lessons.

A thin young woman with a mop of curly red hair, when she was flying she dressed in the universal fashion that pilots had adopted—which is to say in variations on the uniform of the cavalry: high boots and jodhpurs and a leather coat. But she spent a great deal of time working on her plane, which she serviced herself, so more often than not, she was in grimy overalls.

Neta would never forget her first glimpse of Amelia. On a hot December day in 1920, as she was about to climb into her Canuck to give a lesson, she saw a tall, slender young woman approach, accompanied by an elderly man.

She stated her objective, which Neta remembered because she put it so succinctly: “I want to fly. Will you teach me?” The meeting was mutually agreeable, and the first lesson was scheduled. There was a problem—Amelia's lack of funds—but it was solved when Neta agreed to take payments when Amelia found the money, “so in a few days I began hopping about on credit with her.”

Neta and Amelia had much in common. They were both from the Midwest, had both attended college (Neta had gone to Iowa State University), and were near the same age (Neta was a year older). Of even more significance, both were elder daughters in families that consisted of two girls only, and both had fathers who approved of and fostered their early childhood activist ways.

It seemed like a perfect pairing, and for a while it was, but they were miles apart in terms of character and personality. Neta was much more single-minded about flying than Amelia. In the middle of her sophomore year at the university, she had suddenly quit to enroll in a flying school nearby. When the school abruptly folded, she was broke, but instead of throwing in the towel and returning home, she walked, hitchhiked, and hopped freight trains across the country to Newport News, Virginia, where the famous Curtiss School of Aviation was located, and talked her way into the all-male program. The United States entered World War I, and Curtiss was forced to shut down before Neta had a chance to solo. After the armistice, Neta bought an old wrecked plane, the Canadian version of the Curtiss JN4 called a Canuck. She brought it to her home in Ames, Iowa, and using the knowledge of plane construction she had gained in the flying schools, where students had first had to build the planes they would fly, she rebuilt it in the backyard. She had never soloed, but when she finished, she took the Canuck up for a trial spin. She wasn't worried about herself, only about her plane because, as she explained, “I knew I could fly.”

Kinner Airport was a large tract of weeds and grass rimmed by truck gardens in what was then farm country south of Los Angeles. It was reasonably accessible from the city—an electric streetcar ran partway out, leaving only the last few miles, to the intersection of Tweedy Road and Long Beach Boulevard, to be covered on foot or by car. It was a sleepy place, as laid back as a flying field could be. There was only one building—a hangar big enough to hold three planes. A wind sock flew from the roof.

Neta had been at Kinner field for several months by the time Amelia arrived on the scene. The owner was Bert Kinner, a tall, slightly stooped forty-year-old with friendly black eyes and a mop of ragged black hair who spent all his time in the hangar working on a revolutionary new sport
plane. Neta did aerial advertising (at one point she had “Wilshire Gasoline” painted in big letters on the bottom of the Canuck's lower wings), gave lessons, and conducted aerial tours of the neighboring towns of Santa Ana, Corona, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Pasadena, which she grandly publicized as “The Orange Empire Air Voyage.”

On the day of her lesson Amelia arrived at Kinner field dressed in brown jodhpurs, laced boots reaching to midcalf, and jacket. She hadn't bought it recently, as Neta would learn; it was her riding outfit. The date was January 3, 1921. Amelia, ever the student, ever the library ferret, arrived on that day with a book on aerodynamics tucked under her arm. That book and the many others that followed became the basis for endless discussions between the two women.

Amelia had a splendid time with Neta. In these early golden moments, before anyone she knew was killed, nothing went wrong. There was just the experience of mastery of a new element, the glorious sense of power, and the freedom.

Amelia's flying outfit was either jodhpurs or slacks, for since planes of the day had no doors, access was via the top—the flier climbed up the side, swung a leg over, and then dropped into the open cockpit. To get into Neta's Canadian Jenny—every plane, including the one Amelia would shortly buy—meant doing a giant leg stretch, bracing the lower leg against an indented toehold and swinging the upper leg into the cockpit. Since male pilots the world over wore the uniform of the cavalry—breeches and high boots—women adopted it too, rather than simple slacks. Those few who wore dresses did so at their peril.

Amelia had always been acutely aware of her own attributes—and self-conscious about her drawbacks. She was rather vain of her hands, which were beautiful, with long tapering fingers. She didn't mind her blond hair, except that it was straight and needed constant curling. But she knew she had a problem—she had been aware of it at a very young age: her legs. They were long but far from shapely. The problem specifically was her fat ankles. Her observant cousin Katch Challiss thought she showed great objectivity, that she was quite right not to like her legs, that because of her thick ankles her legs “seemed to be the same all the way down.” Piano legs, they are sometimes called.