East to the Dawn (48 page)

It was still unthinkable for young women to live in hotels—unthinkable and dangerous—and the boarding houses of an earlier generation had disappeared. The women flocking to the cities needed proper places to stay: women needed women's residences. There was one place, the Martha Washington Hotel in New York City, dating from 1904, the first hotel to open its doors solely to women. It was so strait-laced, no males were allowed on the staff: no male bellhops, no doorman; everything was done by women. The suffrage pioneers stayed there.

Next, in New York, came the Barbizon and the Panhellenic, elaborate club hotels offering a wholesome environment in addition to rooms. They screened their clientele, made them fill out detailed forms, and actually asked for references. These hotels provided musical afternoons, teas,
bridge parties, lectures, dances, and sports facilities. The Barbizon boasted a swimming pool, a gymnasium, and even a fencing instructor.

But still, they were for-profit hotels, not real clubs.

The American Woman's Association (AWA) bridged the gap. The AWA had a membership of more than three thousand business and professional women headquartered in New York, and when they announced they were going to build a clubhouse in the city that would be as lavish and complete as any men's club in existence, the initial response was overwhelming. When the AWA held its first fund-raising meeting at Carnegie Hall in April 1925, so many women appeared they had to call the police to maintain order.

Ten thousand women showed up for the grand opening of the clubhouse April 13, 1929. The building, at 323 West Fifty-seventh Street, was a wonder: twenty-eight stories high, faced with brick, built around a courtyard that contained four fountains, it boasted 1,250 rooms, each with bath. It was lavishly decorated, its public rooms were filled with antiques, it had roof gardens, solariums, a library, a music room, a cafeteria, dining rooms, an auditorium, and a fully equipped gymnasium with swimming pool.
The New York Times
called it a temple to the spirit of emancipated womanhood. To the women it meant they finally had a place where they could live in comfort and safety, freely able to take advantage of club dinners, musicales, and professional meetings—a complete social calendar. One of the first galas at the AWA was for Margaret Sanger, who was awarded the AWA medal before an audience that included John Dewey and other famous educators of the day. The rooms were quickly taken.

Amelia couldn't live forever at Greenwich House, no matter how accommodating Mary Simkhovitch and her husband were. By this time she had a secretary, Nora Alstulund, living with her. Instead of taking an apartment of her own, she became the AWA's most illustrious tenant, moving into the new residence with Nora. It was perfect for her—so easy, and given her hatred of all forms of housekeeping, so appropriate—as well as being so convenient to the
Cosmopolitan
offices, located just east of the AWA on Eighth Avenue. She could walk to work. She stayed there till she married, adding her luster to the address.

In November 1929 Amelia was again winging west in her Vega. This was her third transcontinental flight in three years, and its differences from the others showed her transformation. She was no longer vagabonding in a toy plane like the Avian, no longer flying a Vega whose characteristics were a mystery to her; this time she was in her light green Vega, which she knew
like the back of her hand and flew with assurance. She was bound for Los Angeles to stay with Jack Maddux, her boss, the new president of the TAT. She stopped along the way to try and drum up support for the still-unnamed women's flying association. One such overnight stop was in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to stay with and enlist the support of pilot Dorothy Leh. With her was Nora Alstulund, her secretary, for she needed to keep current with correspondence and articles as she went.

Jack, a rugged adventurer, ex-Lincoln car dealer, ex-bus line owner, and his wife Helen, who kept the books for Maddux Air Lines, lived in a house notable for having the latest and best in labor-saving and mechanical devices—radios, appliances, and plumbing, as well as, according to Anne Lindbergh, the worst taste in furnishings: a lighted red and green glass parrot, heavy dark plush curtains, sconces in the semblance of candles dripping over the edge. But the Madduxes were generous hosts, totally caught up in the flying world, and thought nothing of having Amelia plus her secretary staying with them for weeks on end. Nor did they mind the fact that she was constantly picking up and leaving for short periods to fulfill speaking engagements elsewhere. Their warm hospitality was a measure of Amelia's standing: in January she would share her guest quarters with another Maddux employee, America's most famous couple, the Lindberghs, perfectly comfortably. In the meantime Amelia's capacity for work and play was impressive. She was still sporadically writing articles for
Cosmopolitan,
although she was spending more and more time at TAT and had been given responsibility for making sure everything ran smoothly on the western division as well as the eastern, and she was working on the Ninety-Nines and doing public relations for the Pennsylvania Railroad.

When she had been in Santa Monica signing up at Clover field for the derby, Amelia had run into Bobbi Trout, a twenty-three-year-old slim, boyish Californian who had once briefly held the unofficial women's altitude record and was then holder of the women's unofficial endurance record of seventeen hours. Bobbi had been asked by a Los Angeles promotion company, Ullman and Associates, if she would be interested in going for the first women's endurance-refueling flight if Ullman bankrolled it and handled the publicity. Bobbi, who had agreed as long as the flight would be after the derby, was looking for a co-pilot. She didn't know Amelia but Amelia had written her a nice congratulatory letter in February. (“May I add my congratulations for your endurance mark, seventeen hours? I am, of course, very much interested in what women are doing in the air.”) Now Bobbi decided Amelia would be the perfect co-pilot and asked her.

Amelia was intrigued—the flight would be a great feather in her cap if it was successful, and Bobbi was a top pilot. An endurance record
involving in-flight refueling would, as she said, be a “terrific” new type of record for women. But Ullman and Associates was a Los Angeles firm, the attempt would be made on the West Coast after the derby Bobbi was going for the
world
endurance-refueling record, which stood at four hundred hours—over two weeks in the air. Just getting organized would take months, the flight itself would take weeks, and she was committed to
Cosmopolitan
and TAT—all of which meant she had a lot of work cut out for her in New York City. Amelia thought it over, checked it out with George Putnam, and regretfully demurred. (She was carefully encouraging Bobbi in the process, however, and kept her as a friend; Bobbi ended up asking Elinor Smith, although “I don't know why I didn't ask Louise Thaden,” she remarked years later, regretfully.) On November 26 Bobbi and Elinor took off, but after forty-two hours their refueling plane developed engine trouble and they had to abort the flight, much to Bobbi's disappointment, and after having devoted all of October and most of November to the effort, she called it quits. Even so it was a new women's record.

By the time Bobbi and Elinor took to the air, Amelia was back out in California at the Madduxes'. A few days before Bobbi and Elinor took off, however, Lockheed gave Amelia a chance to make a record of her own. They put a gleaming white Vega Executive two days out of the shop at her disposal to play with—and asked her if she wanted to use the plane, equipped with a powerful 425-horsepower Wasp engine (almost twice the power of hers) to try and beat the existing women's speed record of 156 miles an hour. She couldn't refuse such a tempting offer. With bespectacled Joe Nikrent of the NAA as her official timer, on November 22 she ripped around the three-kilometer course at Metropolitan airport in Van Nuys averaging 184.17 miles an hour; on one leg she went much faster, writing jubilantly in her logbook, “Speed run, 197 mph on one leg. Hooray!”

It was an especially satisfying performance because she had been fighting for recognition for special records for women every chance she got (as she had mentioned in her congratulatory letter to Bobbi Trout) and had gone to Washington to appear before the NAA Contest Committee earlier in the year to press her case for their official imprimatur. Her argument had been that since there were separate women's tennis, high-jumping, running, swimming, and golf records, separate aeronautical records made sense as well, “inasmuch as women haven't traveled so far as men aeronautically.” Her point of view had prevailed; Joe Nikrent's presence was necessary if the record was to be officially recognized.

There was a small ceremony at the new Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale—a gathering of noted pilots to celebrate the new women's speed record, probably organized by Lockheed. Amelia's old friend Waldo
Waterman attended, along with Pancho Barnes, Bobbi Trout, and Elinor Smith. For the event, which garnered newspaper coverage, Amelia was photographed standing holding a huge bouquet of flowers and wearing a cloche hat, chic dress, and scarf. She looked altogether feminine and demure, very much in keeping with the public relations image that airlines were fostering—that flying was such a cinch that a slip of girl could excel.

Her brief taste of flying the powerful recording-setting Vega Executive whetted Amelia's appetite for a more powerful model of her own. On March 17 she traded in her plane to Lockheed for a five-passenger Vega powered by a 425-horsepower Wasp engine. It was state of the art. By April, as the weather warmed and she became used to her plane, she began thinking of the next Women's Air Derby. She wanted the derby to be better run, naturally, and at the request of the Contest Committee (quite possibly she put the idea in their head), she began gathering thoughts from the other contestants and Ninety Nine members so that everyone who wanted to would have input, there would be consensus on the changes, and this time it would be run more to their satisfaction. The suggestions, Amelia noted, helped paint a picture of what the women had gone through the previous summer, racing in the first derby. The public relations demands had put them under too much strain. The women wanted at least two hours to be allowed at midday for rest and servicing their planes, “without scheduled entertainment” (no luncheons to attend), two free hours on the field before dinners, and dinners that ended by nine P.M. Finally they wanted a provision that not all the contestants had to turn up at each town's entertainment in return for the prize money that local businessmen put up: they could rotate. A knottier problem to solve, as Amelia wrote Ruth Nichols, was how to divide the field into separate classes, so that no matter what kind of plane was entered—a powerful big model or a small, light displacement model—everyone had a chance at a prize. Amelia was chewing it over, undecided.

In the end, as she learned to her bitter disappointment later in the summer, all the work, all the time, all the effort she had put in was for naught. The men's race committee decreed that this year the women had to fly planes with engines severely restricted in size. That meant Amelia, with her Vega powered by a 425-horsepower Wasp engine, was ineligible, as were Blanche Noyes, Elinor Smith, and Ruth Nichols, who also flew powerful planes. The race committee also decreed that two army pilots and a flight surgeon had to accompany the planes on their flights east—another slap in the face. The race committee turned a deaf ear to the objections of
Amelia and the other fliers. Again delegated to be spokeswoman, speaking for Blanche, Louise Thaden, Elinor Smith, and Ruth Nichols as well as herself, Amelia went public in early August, announcing to the media that all five of them “definitely refused to compete” in the race, scheduled for later in the month. As
The New York Times
reported, “Miss Earhart explained that the women have outgrown the small craft used in last year's race and take great pride in their ability to perform to higher standards of piloting ability.” The idea of being chaperoned she dismissed out of hand; it was “not welcome among women competitors unless similar precautions are taken with the men's races.” The race was run, but with no one of interest competing, it was ignored as an event.