East to the Dawn (52 page)

She did enjoy living in a real house, and as she began thinking of her family's possessions, she pestered her mother to send her the family heirlooms. “I should like the old quilts etc. and the things which were Grandma‘s,” she wrote Amy shortly after the marriage, directing her mother to send her grandmother's old music books. (A bit later she berated her mother for sending only two of Amelia Otis's music books when “I remember three.”) She also asked for and received the family silver and linen, some family books, a walnut table that had been in the Otis family, and various other objects. “The candlesticks were sweet. I've had 'em on the table ever since they came,” she wrote, thanking Amy. And she softened to the extent of buying herself two canaries, something she had wanted “for ever so long.”

One has the impression that if ever she thought of having a baby, it was now, right after her marriage. She was never again quite so home-minded as when she first moved into George's house in Rye.

Within a year she was working on a second book. She wrote about her youth, giving the reader a cheery look at the uneventful childhood of an adventurous tomboy, and about her early flying adventures. She included a bit of history about famous women fliers and tried to gather information (not too successfully) on women who managed to make a living out of flying. Certainly it was because of George that her thoughts were so directed.

He delighted in playing the injured husband role.

When Ninety-Nines' business seemed to consume too much of Amelia's time, George announced that he was forming the 49.5 Club, composed “of the lesser halves of the 99 Club.” When Frances Marsalis and Helen Richey broke the women's world endurance record in 1933, George sent them a teasing telegram.

CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU BOTH. NOW THAT YOU HAVE DEMONSTRATED HOW LONG WOMEN CAN STAY UP IN THE AIR, WILL YOU ENTER ENDURANCE CONTEST TO BE UNDERWRITTEN BY 49.5 CLUB? OUR ORGANIZATION PROPOSES OFFERING APPROPRIATE TROPHY FORWOMEN FLYERWHO ESTABLISHES 1934 ENDURANCE RECORD OF LONGEST CONSECUTIVE SOJOURN IN HER OWN HOME.

Many people—including many ofAmelia's pilot friends—didn't like George Putnam. They didn't think he was “good enough” for her. They didn't like the way he always puffed her up—sometimes at the expense of others. They didn't like his brusque manner and his rather obvious lack of interest in other women pilots—he literally only had eyes for Amelia. He even gradually centered his business life on her, to the point that he lost interest in his own projects—while he was married to her, his own authoring came to a stunning halt. He was a prolific writer and the author of twelve books in his lifetime, but five were published before he and Amelia were married, and seven afterward. He published nothing from 1931 until she disappeared.

He was an unusual combination: a huckster, but one with impeccable taste. What he was pushing was his favorite person in the world. He arranged Amelia's lectures, published her books, promoted her interests, and last but far from least, cultivated important people. Nor was he self-effacing; a bit of a ham, he craved center stage for himself as well as for her. He had always lived in a world of celebrities and excitement, and ordinary people leading pedestrian lives simply bored him. In a word, he was spoiled.

There were those who thought Amelia put up with him merely because she needed him to showcase her. But in fact observers of their home life indicate that it was much more than a marriage of convenience. They had fun together. They enjoyed the same things. It would be said in later years that she had grown tired of George and the busy schedule he set. And yet no one, certainly none of her Ninety-Nine friends, none of the students and faculty at Purdue, where she later spent so much time, would have thought of her that way. For she had an aptitude for handling people and handling her husband, and the way she handled the pressure he put upon her was just an indication of that. Quite obviously, like any
relationship, theirs had its moments of strain. But Amelia was sufficiently independent to balance her personality and wishes against his wishes, as he appreciated: “No client of any counselor ever received counsel more reasonably—or on occasion, refused with more firmness to act on it. For, endowed with a will of her own, no phase of her life ever modified it—least of all marriage.”

George was always nearby, always joshing, always part of the action. He was always intimately concerned with every detail of her flights and usually was the last person to say good-bye to her and the first to greet her when she landed. Moments before takeoff in Oakland for Honolulu, with the Electra ready to go at the end of the runway, Paul Mantz had to throttle down the powerful engines so that George could climb up on the wing “for a final farewell with his wife,” and even after the farewell George and William Miller, of the Bureau of Air Commerce, in Miller's car, chased after the plane as it roared down the field. After the accident, the first thing she did was call him. And yet he learned to share her with others.

After the wedding, Amelia was back at work the following Monday. To be fair, she had announced immediately that Monday would find them both back at their desks. They were.

14

The Lindbergh Trail

• • • • Ruth Nichols had been news for most of 1931; that was the year she became the top American aviatrix. In March she flew her Vega to 28,140 feet, taking the altitude record away from Elinor Smith. In April she flew it 210.74 miles per hour, taking the speed record away from Amelia—25 miles an hour faster.

In the spring of that year she announced that she was “going to follow the Lindbergh trail” and be the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic to Paris. From then on Ruth was definitely front-page news.

Ruth's aeronautical adviser was Clarence Chamberlin, the pilot who flew Levine's Bellanca to Germany in 1927 right after Lindbergh. Chamberlin put a new, powerful 600-horsepower Wasp engine in Ruth's Vega and, to save weight, replaced the landing gear with a gear that was ultralight but had a safety factor of only three to one. Clarence's flight plan called for Ruth to fly to Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, the favorite jumping-off spot for transatlantic flyers, the closest point to Europe, and take off from there.

From the day in April when the story hit the papers, Ruth was dogged by reporters and overwhelmed with fan mail, to such an extent that she hid away for several days to adjust. She gave optimistic, detailed interviews,
telling one reporter that she believed her chances were “98 percent” in favor of success, and that “at Newfoundland I will await definite word of good weather from Dr. Kimball.” She decided it would be a good idea to have Hilton Railey at her side to help her cope in Europe.

Hilton sailed for France. Ruth took off on the afternoon of June 22 for Harbor Grace, with a light load of gasoline, planning to make one stop along the way. After flying four hours, she found herself over the St. John's airport in New Brunswick as scheduled. She circled the small, rock-enclosed field, studying it none too happily, only too aware of her delicate landing gear and the tight landing pattern the field demanded. She had no choice but to land—it was getting dark, and she didn't have enough fuel to go further. She made her approach and, worried about her landing gear, touched the wheels down too gently and too late—and couldn't stop before hitting the cliffs at the end of the field. She wrecked the plane and broke five vertebrae in her back.

She was tough. Her plane was repaired, her back mended in a cast, and as fall approached, she was flying again. She and her orthopedist worked out the optimum posture angle for her cockpit seat, and she hoped to make another attempt before fall storms began. But by the time she and the plane were ready, the weather was getting dicey, so instead of flying the Atlantic, she decided to rack up the women's long-distance record—the only one she was missing. She won that handily, flying the 1,950 miles from Oakland, California, to Louisville, Kentucky, her broken back encased in a steel corset. When spring came, she and Clarence Chamberlin were ready for another transatlantic attempt; by mid-May it appeared that she would take off any day.

Elinor Smith planned to beat her out. Three years before, as a photogenic seventeen-year-old brunette, she had hit the headlines in New York when she flew, on a dare, under each of the East River bridges. It had been easy, she said at the time, but there was a navy destroyer right in her path as she flew under the Brooklyn Bridge, and she had to make a quick vertical bank to get through. Actually, pilots flew under the East River bridges all the time, and the George Washington Bridge as well. But they didn't do it dodging ships; they waited for clear space. And they didn't have newsreel cameras photographing it. The Department of Commerce, definitely not impressed, grounded Elinor for fifteen days for the escapade.

Now she was twenty, seasoned, with a commercial license under her belt; she announced on the eighteenth of April in an NBC radio interview with Grantland Rice that she was going to fly from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, to Dublin, Ireland, sometime in early May in her Wasp-powered Vega. She had been preparing for a transatlantic flight since the
previous August. In fact, she too was on the Lindbergh trail—her flight plan, filed with the Department of Commerce, was to fly to Newfoundland, Ireland, and France—but by announcing for Ireland she took some of the pressure off herself.

Laura Ingalls, another expert pilot, was also in the running. She was an aerial acrobat—so fearless, she had casually set a record of 714 consecutive barrel rolls over St. Louis and 980 loops over Muskogee, Oklahoma, explaining, “the chamber of commerce paid me a dollar a loop, expecting me to make maybe fifty or sixty, so I just kept looping until I ran out of gas.” Her backer, the Atlantic Exhibition Company, had chosen Laura as the most likely candidate to successfully fly their Lockheed
Air Express
from New York to Paris to win the title “Lady Lindbergh.” She too spent the winter of 1931-32 getting ready.

Amelia, serenely leading her life in Rye, enjoying her luxurious home and married life, was off on a different tack. She spent 1931 flying Harold Pitcairn's autogiro.

Harold Pitcairn knew that if he could seriously interest Amelia, future sales would be assured, so in early December, just weeks after the first production models rolled out of his plant, he arranged for her to come out to Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, and take a ride with Jim Ray, his chief test pilot. On December 19 she soloed, stating that she found the craft easier to handle than she expected.

She and Pitcairn and George, getting along so well, decided that Amelia would go for an altitude record in the autogiro, a challenge for Amelia and great publicity for the PCA-2. On a spring day in April, while her confreres were concentrating on emulating Lindbergh, Amelia was back at Willow Grove, having accepted Harold Pitcairn's invitation to establish a “ceiling” for the new windmill plane. Not a “stunt altitude flight,” she hastened to say, because such things were unpopular, but that is exactly what it was. Luke Christopher, there as official observer for the NAA, installed a sealed barograph, and there was an oxygen tank, but otherwise it was a standard PCA-2. Shortly after noon she took the autogiro aloft and in an hour and a half nursed it up to 18,500 feet, but at that altitude trouble developed in the fuel line, and she came down. She had a light lunch and a nap while one of the Pitcairn test pilots worked over the engine, then decided to make another attempt. Loaded with forty-two gallons of gasoline, she took the autogiro aloft and held it ascending until it wouldn't go any further—at which point her altimeter registered 19,500 feet. The actual record, when the barograph was examined, was 18,415 feet, which became the official altitude record for autogiros and stood for years.

With the enthusiastic backing of George, Amelia now proceeded to
order an autogiro for herself, planning to make the first transcontinental flight of an autogiro ever—which would make another record. A few days later it was announced that Harold Pitcairn had won the prestigious Collier trophy for 1930, given for the year's highest aeronautical achievement, for the revolutionary new safe autogiro. It was a major event in the flying world, as well as a dramatic media event: he accepted it on the south lawn of the White House, flanked by one of his autogiros, which had just landed on the White House lawn. Orville Wright as well as everyone else who mattered in the flying world watched as President Hoover did the honors.

One result of all the publicity was that various American companies began eyeing the autogiro as a possible vehicle to publicize their products. The Beech-Nut Company placed an order. Probably on George's initiative, they entered into negotiations with Amelia: they would sponsor her on an epoch-making flight across the country, and she could use the plane thereafter, if she would fly their model with their name printed in large letters on the fuselage. She agreed.

On May 29 she took off from Newark. But autogiros were not by any means perfected, so with her was Eddie Gorski, a mechanic, and with him was a hundred pounds of spare parts and tools to deal with the heavy maintenance that the experimental craft required. She took the northern route, crossing the Rockies over Colorado, and arrived June 6 in Oakland without incident, only to find, to her chagrin, that a professional pilot from Poughkeepsie, New York, had beaten her to the coast by a week. By June 22 she was back in Newark, having flown 11,000 miles in a total of 150 air hours.

Amelia turned the autogiro into one of her best
Cosmopolitan
articles. Titled, appropriately, “Your Next Garage May House an Autogiro,” it appeared in the August issue. She predicted the day would come when country houses would have wind cones flying from their roofs to guide guests to the front lawn landing area (Harold Pitcairn's home, Cairncrest, already did), and she held out a future for the autogiro for weekend fishing and hunting trips and quick sorties to golf and aviation country clubs, as well as a new painless way to commute to work.