East to the Dawn (28 page)

Marion, almost as new at her job as Amelia (she had started that May), saw in her new assistant a kindred dynamic spirit. Over the years the free, open give-and-take between clients and staff—the hallmark of the settlement house in its early years—had succumbed to the exigencies of organizational hierarchy. Marion Perkins sought to bring it back. She formed a council consisting of staff members and children to inaugurate the new policy: “The House is no longer a power outside, granting favors
or withholding them. It is a part of each one, and he is not a beneficiary, but a member.” Then, seeing how superbly Amelia interacted with the children, she put her in charge of the girls' program.

One of Amelia's tasks was to ferry children who needed outside specialized medical help back and forth from the hospital. Often as she put some child into her sporty car for a trip to the hospital, she first had to explain to the fearful immigrant mother that hospitals were not dreadful places. The parents were as grateful for her patience as were their children.

Wrote one Syrian mother, who baked Amelia meat pies by way of thanks for taking her daughter to Massachusetts General Hospital, “I can still see her, tucking those little meat pies inside her leather jacket. Then she'd be walking down the street and pull one out and nibble on it, that yellow hair all curly and windblown.” She drove another Syrian child, a boy blinded by the explosion of a kerosene heater, out to the Perkins Institute for the Blind three times a week for classes in Braille. This remarkable institution, which had trained Annie Sullivan and then recommended Sullivan as teacher for Helen Keller, prided itself on the normalcy of its environment and the diversity of its classes, all of which every year resulted in a “surprising number” of young people who succeeded in making good. Amelia, with her background of teaching trigonometry to blind men—certainly not an easy assignment—was so impressed by the Institute that she thereupon spent several hours a week there as a reader.

Within a year Amelia was working full time at Denison House, and was in charge of the kindergarten, of the girls from five to fourteen, and of so many other activities that they jokingly called her the “official secretary.” Her groups were well organized, it was noted, and the children happy. The janitor, who had been there for years and seen good and bad social workers, thought Amelia excellent because the children liked her so. “She never had any favorites, never picked a child out for special attention, and that's what the children consider fair.” Under her guidance and in response to the increasing number of Chinese (there were now more than a hundred Chinese families in the neighborhood), two new Chinese girls' clubs, one called the Octopus Club, were flourishing at the settlement house. There were also new home classes in English for the Chinese mothers, who had been living isolated lives in their Boston tenements.

Amelia's Chinese girls soon were enthusiastic basketball players and fielded a team that “had a fine year,” even venturing to play a New York City team from Greenwich Settlement House, run by an ex-Bostonian, Mary Simkhovitch. The girls also had a fencing team, popular at the time, a sport Amelia tried and enjoyed. Amelia took it upon herself to open up the American experience to the first-generation Syrian and Chinese girls
who were reared by their families “under racial traditions that cut them off from the freedom our American girls enjoy.”

Within the year Amelia had moved into Denison House. Her room was on the second floor and simply furnished, but it had windows overlooking the busy scene that was Tyler Street. She took her meals in the dining room with the other resident workers, who usually numbered four, Amelia, Marion Perkins, Vernis Shuttleworth, and George Ludlam, the latter of whom was in charge of the boys. She prevailed on George Ludlam, who became her good friend, to make the boys, who used the linked backyards as their own private gym, to allow the girls to play there too. Vernis, too, became her friend and would eventually buy her car.

The staff were freely encouraged to invite interesting guests to share their repast, for as was usual in settlement houses, there was a housekeeping staff who cooked and served the residents. Amelia endeared herself to the other resident workers by braving down the housekeeper, who insisted upon serving the staff breakfast precisely at seven thirty A.M. and then only if they were fully dressed, even though there were days when the residents, working late, were tired. The punctilious housekeeper relented to the extent of telling the residents she didn't care what they wore as long as they were on time. On the first morning after this pronouncement, Amelia, looking terrible, her hair in curlers, dressed in a “disreputable” borrowed bathrobe, and headed into the dining room first; the housekeeper relented on the time, also.

The settlement house, because of its mission and its clients, was neighborhood- and street-oriented and always full of people. Neighborhood groups such as the Syrian Ladies' Aid Society, the Syrian Relief Association, the Syrian Junior League, the Chinese Students of Greater Boston, and the Loyalist League of America (a group of Greek businessmen) all met at Denison House in the afternoons, evenings, and weekends with some degree of regularity. Friday night was “open night” for adults, as well as the night Mademoiselle DuPont taught French.

Amelia fitted in a visit from Nancy Balis, her sixteen-year-old cousin, in transit to summer camp, late because of a broken ankle. The last time Nancy had seen Amelia had been several years before, when Amelia had pulled up in front of the Balis house in Germantown one day in her long, low, glamorous yellow car with the top folded back (“a marvelous contraption,” thought Nancy), accompanied by a beau. Now, teenage Nancy was so dazzled by Amelia and her stay at Denison House that it almost made up for the broken ankle—nothing quite equaled her cousin, who was so nice to her, who “always made her feel like her equal,” who, better yet, “insisted we call each other cuz.”

Six hundred boys and girls attended classes and activities and clubs ranging from cooper-working and ship-model building to sewing, embroidery folk dancing, handicrafts, dramatics, choral singing, scouting, table games, and storytelling, which met through the day and into the evening. Sometimes after dinner, for those so inclined, there would be volleyball games in the street with the neighborhood children, or a performance at the Chinese theater. If Amelia found a free moment she could always play the piano—there was an excellent music program, with twenty-four pupils studying piano; twelve, violin; and six, harmony and rhythm.

By 1928 Amelia was a member of an intersettlement committee working on child-study records and, even more impressive, had become a director of Denison House, a signal honor for a new staff worker; she was one of the very few on its board. She was as well made secretary.

It is from this period that Amelia's poem “Courage” dates. It embodies the sentiments of a person who has found herself.

 

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.

The soul that knows it not, knows no release

From little things:

Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,

Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear

The sound of wings.

How can life grant us boon of living, compensate

For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate

Unless we dare

The soul's dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay

With courage to behold resistless day,

And count it fair.

Within a short time her influence in the field of social work spread beyond the confines of Denison House. Regarded by the elders “as one of the most thoughtful and promising of the younger group,” she became a Denison House delegate to the Conference of the National Federation of Settlements held in Boston. There she impressed a wider group of social work leaders with her seriousness. She was one of the few of the younger generation who took the time to take seriously a conference questionnaire. Her thoughtful and insightful answers, wrote one of the older social workers, began to cause ripples.

To the question “What keeps you in settlement work?” she answered,

To the question “How would you replace settlement traditions which you believe no longer have functional values?” she responded with a condemnation of meddling donors.

The philanthropy of the good old days—the tradition of giving clothing, service, etc., free—has to be supplanted gradually. The task is materially helped if responsibility can be shared by House members (in a self-governing body, perhaps) who can be made to see the situation.... Cultivating an “angel” and letting him or her dictate policies because of money given is one of the most reprehensible forms of bowing to tradition.

She ended on a brusque note, answering the question, “Have you any suggestion to offer for discussion at next year's conference?” as follows. “Next year's Conference should be a discussion, not an experience meeting. A subject like ‘Cooperation' or any topic of interest to staff workers should be discussed in such a manner as to get ‘somewhere'”.

Had Amelia been a participant at the 1929 conference, she would have been asked to take a more active part—the older workers were casting their nets, looking for keen young leaders whose thinking was not “paralyzed by their reverence for the pioneers.”

Not only did Amelia have Vida Scudder, Emily Balch, and Katherine Coman as role models to help spur her on and reach her potential, she had the climate of Boston itself. Cleveland Amory remarking on the qualities of the proper Bostonian female would touch on “her incredible vitality... tradition of hardihood ... a zeal for reform.” Boston gloried in its unique women. Boston women exuded energy. In Boston the notion of “decent” women keeping their names out of the papers except when they were born, married, or died was a truism observed in the breach. Boston women reveled in being news—as long as it was done tastefully. They raised money for charities through publicity in the papers, they partied in the papers, and their sporting exploits were written up in the papers.

As it happened, Amelia's two activities—settlement work and flying—dovetailed, and as in Los Angeles, she began to be noticed. It began May 26, 1927, when she flew over the city scattering free passes to the upcoming Memorial weekend country carnival at Cedar Hill in Waltham for the benefit of Denison House. Amelia was merely a passenger—the pilot was Harvard student Crocker Snow, member of the Harvard Flying Club, which owned the plane. Nevertheless as a female pilot, she was news, and photos of her in her flying garb—goggles, helmet, fur-trimmed flying jacket—sitting in the open cockpit of the plane promptly appeared in the Boston newspapers. Amelia had planned to do the stunt incognito, but Marion Perkins, aware of Boston's thirst for female achievers, alert to the publicity a female flier might create for Denison House, talked her out of such an action. Marion was right; the newspapers wrote it up: “Miss Amelia Earhart Flies in a Plane over Boston; Advertises Cedar Hill Carnival” ran one headline, going on to give details of the carnival. “Flies over Boston Despite Rain” ran another.

That summer a new airfield opened on the banks of the Neponset River in nearby Quincy. The ambitious enterprise was started by Harold T. Dennison, an architect from Quincy who had promised himself that when he made his first $100,000, he “would begin to realize his dream” of establishing a great chain of flying fields across New England. Dennison had gone to California looking for planes to sell at his field, met Bert Kinner, and became the Boston agent for Kinner Airsters. Bert suggested he contact Amelia when he returned to Boston. When Harold met her, he was impressed with her assurance and authority (certainly not by her money), for he made her a director and one of the five incorporators of the enterprise, put her on the staff, and sought her help with the interior decoration.

Harold Dennison designed the main hangar in the Spanish style, with an exterior finish of stucco and brilliant tile. There were two airplane show-rooms and a tower that served as a classroom for student fliers, on top of which was a revolving beacon that could be seen at night for twenty miles. Dennison instituted an air charter service as well as regular service between Hyannis and Boston. There were two full-time pilots, Allan P. Bourdon and Franklin Kurt; Amelia was on the flying staff, although her duties were not defined, but when the article on the new airport came out, it would have been hard for anyone to guess that Amelia was the only one of the three who was not a full-time employee. Two paragraphs were devoted to her: “Woman on the Staff” ran the subhead, going into her being “social worker at Denison House college settlement, professor of English in the State Extension ... sportswoman ... held the altitude record.” The men were briefly mentioned.