East to the Dawn (60 page)

To touch your hand or see your face, today,
Is joy. Your casual presence in a room
Recalls the stars that watched us as we lay.

I mark you in the moving crowd
And see again those stars
A warm night lent us long ago.
We loved so then—we love so now.

George found this poem, one of the few Amelia wrote that was not destroyed by a smoke fire that destroyed much in their Rye house in the fall of 1934. If she had written the poem for him, George would have known about it. Of her passion there can be no doubt: Could the subject be other than Gene?

On the surface Gene and George continued to be friends.

Try as he might, George was sometimes only on the fringe of Amelia's business interests, where Gene was central. Amelia was also a good friend of Paul Collins, a superb pilot, one of the few who flew the U.S. mail in the early years and lived to tell about it, who was also a close friend of Gene's from the Ludington line days. Ernie Pyle described him as tall, well set up, with coal black hair, light skin, “great” eyes. Six years older than Amelia, like Amelia looking years younger than his age, and like her intelligent, he had made the transition into the business world and was perfectly at home behind a desk. He was a fine organizer, had been general superintendent of TAT and helped Gene set up the Ludington line. When Pan American Airways pulled out of New England, where they had been managing Boston-Maine Airways for the Boston and Maine Railroad and the Maine Central Railroads, railroad officials approached Paul to provide the management, equipment, and service in their place. Paul came to Rye to visit Amelia, Gene Vidal, and Sam Solomon, a very astute businessman involved with aviation who, among his other enterprises, managed Washington, D.C.'s, Hoover airport. The four of them sat on the floor (because, as Sam remembered, Amelia liked sitting on the floor) tossing around various business plans and finally decided that they would go into the airline business as equal investment partners. Each invested $2,500; that was sufficient financial muscle to form National Airways, Inc., their new corporate name for what was still called the Boston-Maine Airways, whose route was from Boston northward; it would eventually become Northeast Airlines. Paul was president, Amelia first vice-president, and Sam Solomon second vice-president. (Gene, already director of aeronautics, was a director but had no title.)

The first meeting with the railroad officials to hammer out details of the route and other organizational matters was held on Monday morning, July 24, 1933, Amelia's thirty-sixth birthday. Paul and Amelia left Rye at four thirty A.M., and in a marathon meeting they settled on the general schedule: the railroad wanted to have plane service to Portland, Rockland, Bangor, and either Waterville or Augusta, Maine. With the meeting concluded, it remained for Paul and Amelia to physically survey the route, for as the railroad officials pointed out, “How do you know that you can fly from the towns we designate as stops on the line with safety?” Paul asked
for a car and driver and twenty-four hours. Then he and Amelia took the train to Portland, where the driver picked them up, and drove the 80 miles to Rockland; they checked out the field, then drove the 63 miles to Bangor, checked its field, drove 55 miles to Waterville, then 20 miles to Augusta (which they found had too small a field), then 60 miles to the Scarborough field south of Portland, took the train back to Boston, and sat down with the railroad people as promised at two P.M. and settled the last detail: it would be Waterville. Then Paul raided Eastern for personnel—former Ludington workers unhappy at Eastern—Clarence Belinn, whom he put in charge of maintenance, and three pilots. On August 7 Paul took delivery from Eastern on two ten-passenger Stinson trimotors, which he had gotten for a very good price.

Amelia went to Boston periodically to work with Paul and tend to public relations and sales, her special responsibilities. She also helped him peg mileage tariffs, for which she had a good feel. By August 9, a sunny, cloudless day in Boston, everything was ready to roll. Sam Solomon and his wife Alma, Paul Collins, Amelia, the chief executive officer of the railroad, the general traffic manager, and three reporters stepped into the Stinson and flew to Portland, Rockland, Bangor, and Waterville. Advance notice had been given that Amelia was on the plane, and gratifyingly large crowds turned out at each airfield to see her and to hear her speak on the wonders of flight.

Two days later was the formal opening of the airline. One Stinson was at Logan airport in Boston, the other at Portland. Amelia, Gene, and eight first-time passengers flew the ninety miles to Portland and then went on to Bangor. The following weekend Paul and Gene were both with Amelia in Rye.

By October the line had added a feeder service through Burlington, Vermont, and by March 1934 the Burlington route was extended to Montreal. But it was hard for the airline—the first to continue service in that part of the world in winter. All the hangars, including the one the line used at Logan airport, were unheated. Every night the temperature dropped below 32 degrees, newspapers had to be stuffed into the engine exhaust stacks to block moisture and prevent freezing; the oil had to be drained out and stored in a heated office; and each engine had to be wrapped up. Each morning the procedure had to be reversed. The public was apprehensive, therefore business was slow. With public relations executive Herbert Baldwin, Amelia visited the cities, talked up air travel, and contacted civic groups. On Saturdays when only one plane flew (because of lack of business), the other was used to visit cities along the route and offer free ten-minute flights. But there were few takers—until Amelia began focusing
on women's groups, in the hope that if she could convince the wives that flying was safe the husbands would follow. It worked: the demonstrations became more popular. When the Bangor Chamber of Commerce held a Women's Day, ten thousand women turned out; two hundred went up in the air. Nothing could quite beat having her, all dressed up in mink coat, chic boots, and hat, standing on the tarmac prior to one of the line's pioneering flights. With Amelia standing next to the Stinson on a bitter cold icy day at the Portland airport, apprehensive fliers never even thought to question why there were automobile tire chains on the wheels—something of a necessity when plowing wasn't possible and the runway was slick with ice. Because of her, Burlington, Vermont's, number-one citizen, William Appleyard, sold $10,000 worth of tickets before the airline made its first flight there, on February 7, 1934.

Still later, intent on expanding, Paul and Amelia formulated a plan for Boston-Maine Airways to fly from LaGuardia airport, then called North Beach airport, to a racetrack eight miles from Boston that they knew they could easily convert into a field. That one the company didn't buy.

Amelia's business interests were prospering, but her home life was giving her a bit of trouble as 1934 drew to a close. That Christmas the card George and Amelia sent out had a somber note. Their ship was the “George and Amelia” and the text ran, “Although no models ourselves, at least we're still afloat.”