East to the Dawn (58 page)

That year the Bendix was revamped and the direction reversed, for the National Air Races were being held at Mines field in Los Angeles. The start was from Floyd Bennett field. There Amelia, with George's aid, got ready for the transcontinental endurance contest. Ruth Nichols, even with Clarence Chamberlin helping her, had the bad luck of running into serious
problems with her borrowed Vega. As a result she started a day late (with Henderson's permission) but the retractable landing gear kept giving her trouble, and it took her three days to complete the course. She was overlooked by the media; very few people even realized she was a contestant.

Amelia as usual drew a crowd—close to two thousand people gathered on the evening of June 30 at Floyd Bennett field to see her take off. It was planned for shortly before midnight, but at dusk a violent electrical storm suddenly rolled in, bringing with it pelting rain and powerful wind gusts. As it became obvious that her departure would have to be postponed, the numbers of onlookers dwindled, Amelia retired to a lounge at the airport and, as was her habit, quickly went to sleep. George was in his element, keeping everything organized, gathering the weather reports, bustling about. Some three hours later, when all the turbulence had blown out to sea, he woke her up, and at 3:50 A.M. she was the first contestant off, zooming down the long concrete runway in her Vega, leading a field of six. The men waited longer, more cautiously letting the weather settle down even further: a prudent move, rationalized the
New York Times
(male) reporter, because
their
ships “were faster and harder to control.” Roscoe Turner was second off, over an hour later; followed by Lee Gehlbach, flying Haizlip's plane, which had won the Bendix the year before; followed by Russell Thaw, in a Gee Bee racer; followed by Russell Boardman in another Gee Bee.

Boardman had trouble taking off. His Gee Bee yawed, slipped off the runway and hurtled through the tall grass for a hundred feet before he finally got control and pulled it safely into the air. At Indianapolis, where he stopped for fuel, he was not so lucky. On takeoff, as he swept away at the end of the runway, having gained an altitude of about forty feet, the Gee Bee again went out of control, flipped over, and fell upside down to the earth. Boardman, pinned under the wreckage, suffered a fractured skull, a punctured lung, and a broken shoulder; he died the next day.

Thaw too had trouble at Indianapolis. His Gee Bee suddenly dropped a wing and ground-looped, damaging the plane to such an extent that he was forced to drop out of the race.

Gehlbach had problems with a clogged gas fuel line, and while making a forced landing at New Bethel, Indiana, he crashed through a fence in a field; he was not seriously injured, but he was out of the race.

Amelia, somewhere west of Wichita, Kansas, reported that her motor was heating up badly in the headwinds, causing her to make such poor time, she was “hopelessly” out of the race; as a result she decided to spend the night on the ground and not even try to make the deadline. She continued westward the next day and then had the misfortune to have the hatch
cover of her plane blow open; she landed in Winslow, Arizona, to have it repaired. When she arrived at the Los Angeles municipal field (Mines field), it was at a peak moment of interest. The stands were jammed, for the Thompson trophy race, a fifty-mile free-for-all—probably the most exciting contest at the National Air Races—was in progress: Amelia couldn't land. She circled the field for half an hour until the race was over. Tired and frustrated as she was, she undoubtedly enjoyed the idea that all those thousands of people sitting in the stands had a chance to see her pretty red machine silhouetted against the canopy of blue, for by the time she landed, everyone knew she was up there. And even though she hadn't finished by the 6 P.M. Bendix deadline, everyone knew she, the first woman to dare fly in the Bendix,
had finished,
proving her particular toughness of character and her competence and by extension the “rightness” of allowing women to enter the race. She won an extra bonus—a two-thousand-dollar prize—for being the first woman to finish.

The winner, Roscoe Turner, also had had problems. Finding himself low on fuel after crossing the Alleghenies in darkness, he had had to make an unscheduled and therefore dangerous stop in Columbus, Ohio. The only pilot who had an uneventful flight was James Wedell, who came in twenty-eight minutes after Turner.

Amelia's calm demonstration of competence was lost in the furor created by a tragedy two days later. Florence Klingensmith, twenty-six, of Fargo, North Dakota, a fine flier with a solid competitive record in closed-course racing, the only woman entered in the hundred-mile Philips trophy race, had completed three-quarters of the race, was in the middle of the pack holding fourth place, and was leading four of the ablest men pilots of the country when the fabric of one wing of her Gee Bee gave way, and she crashed to her death.

Cliff Henderson, who had only grudgingly allowed women to compete in the Bendix and the National Air Races to start with, used Klingensmith's death as the excuse to reimpose the ban on women flying competitively. The idea being bruited about by misogynists (starting with him) was that Florence had died only because she lost her head; if Florence had kept her head, he asserted, she would have pulled up and bailed out. It was a patently absurd idea. Gee Bees were known to be dangerous planes. Florence's was the third Gee Bee to crash in three days, but no disparaging comments had been made about the men who crashed—Boardman, who died, and Thaw, who didn't. Nor, earlier, had anyone cast aspersions on the flying skills of Lowell Bayles, killed when his Gee Bee crashed in 1931, or on Jimmy Haizlip, whose Gee Bee's wings broke off, followed by both wheels, as he came in for a landing, throwing
the plane end over end before it came to rest. Nevertheless Henderson was not to be denied: he wanted the women out of his hair, and he decreed that none would fly in the Bendix or in the National Air Races in 1934.

Within three days Amelia was again trying to better her long-distance Los Angeles-to-New York record. Typically, she told inquiring reporters that she had little hope of breaking her previous time. Then, taking off from Los Angeles and landing in Newark 17 hours and 7 minutes later, she did just that, flying 1 hour and 56 minutes better than she had done before and maintaining an average speed of 165 miles an hour. But she made two stops, having announced she would make none. The first, in Amarillo, Texas, was to fix the hatch, broken again, that she had been holding closed with her right hand for some seventy-five miles. The second, in Columbus, Ohio, was for gasoline. When she appeared finally at Newark, her white coveralls streaked with grease, she apologized for looking dirtier than usual. Compared to Roscoe Turner's time flying against the wind, her time was slow, but for a Vega driven by a 500-horsepower engine, it was very respectable indeed.

When she and George, who was at the airport waiting for her, walked to their car to go home, she got in on the driver's side, gunned the engine, and set off for home. She was still not sleepy.

George had business in Europe and was pushing Amelia to go with him. She refused to go. “It is a business trip and I don't look forward to a stuffy ride over for a week there and a stuffy one back,” she confided to her mother. George put off the trip in the face of her intransigence, hoping that later he could prevail upon her to change her mind.

But life was just too pleasant for Amelia in Rye. There was entirely too much going on. Lucy was there, Katch was visiting again—they would spend leisurely days swimming at the Manursing Island Club. Amelia took them all with her to dine at the palatial estate of Helen and Ogden Reid, owners of
The New York Herald Tribune,
in nearby Purchase, on Sunday evening. It was while they were there that they heard that Amy Mollison, England's star flier, and her husband James, overdue from England, had crash-landed in a marsh near Bridgeport, Connecticut. (Amelia had hoped to welcome them to New York upon their arrival, but instead saw them first in the Bridgeport hospital on her way to Boston the next day. She invited them to visit, which they did the following weekend, both still swathed in bandages. She took them to visit the Roosevelts in Hyde Park.)

Lucy went to visit friends in the Hamptons but had to return to Rye: “Call for help from Amelia. She picked me up and we drove out in time
for dinner. George arrived from Washington. He to go abroad next week.” The next afternoon Amelia left for Boston, to meet Paul Collins and Gene Vidal. Was there a full-blown fight, or the threat of one, between Amelia and George over Gene? Was Lucy summoned to be a buffer between them? While Amelia was in Boston, Lucy and George dined alone. “We talked on terrace” was all she told her diary.

The following day Amelia returned—with Gene and Paul.

Later in the week Amelia was in New York generating publicity for the Boston-Maine Airways, where David Binney Putnam had just started working. She posed with David, who had been diamond-hunting in British Guiana, and his dead tarantula, on the occasion of his being hired by the Boston-Maine Airways as a dispatcher, an event that resulted in a charming story (with picture) that appeared in
The New York Times.
David took the dead tarantula out of its jar, but when he tried to pour boiling water over its legs to make them extend to normal length, “Miss Earhart, who was guiding him through the intriciacies of an interview, advised against it.” Amelia, in her element, started to tell various tall tales, such as when she and friends, trying to find out who was taking bites out of the fruit in her dining room, outwaited a chipmunk one night and watched the animal waddle in and get to his task; how a Ludington Airways plane had had a live pigeon sitting between the cylinder heads when it landed at Washington D.C., which meant the bird had passed through propeller blades that were turning at fifteen hundred revolutions a minute. When she was finished, she suggested that the reporters tell some stories, which they did. “At 4 o‘clock Miss Earhart was elected president of the Monday Afternoon Exaggerated Narratives Club, which was founded on the spot. She adjourned the meeting ‘until the next time' and promised to brush up on tall tales,” the
Times
reported.

George, finally realizing there was no hope of getting Amelia to go with him, left for France—by himself. It was a cliff-hanger, as Amelia wrote to Dot Leh: “After all I did not go to Paris with the honorable husband. We decided at the last minute I had so much to do that it was better to stay at home.”

George was abroad for most of September. Gene came to visit Sunday, September 10.

Amelia had become a force to contend with in Washington by way of her friendship with the Roosevelts. Her influence was put to the test as she championed Gene. He wanted to become a major player on the U.S. aviation
scene, and when Franklin Roosevelt was elected to the presidency, it looked as if his time had come. One of the first things Roosevelt did after assuming office in March 1933 was to reorganize the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce, which had jurisdiction over all civil aviation matters, under a new director. That was the job that Gene wanted. So did many others, forty-three candidates in all, some powerful and qualified, some political hacks, some just well-connected Washingtonians—a formidable field. Gene was a clear front-runner with his West Point background, his flying experience, his years of organizing and running airlines, his powerful Democratic father-in-law, and Amelia's active sponsorship. Still, faced with finding solutions to the enormous problems involved with getting the economy on its feet and with such a plethora of politically well-connected candidates pressuring him (even John Nance Garner, the vice-president, was pushing a candidate), FDR backed off and decided not to fill the post right away. Instead, he divided up the duties three ways: he appointed J. Carroll Cone chief of the aeronautical development division, Gene chief of the regulation division, and Rex Martin chief of the airways division. All summer Gene and the other two chiefs jockeyed for the vacant post.