East to the Dawn (63 page)

Courtesy of Vanity Fair. Copyright
©
1931 the Condé Nast Publications, Inc.

Helping promote Gene's $700 airplane. The occasion is the granting of $500,000 for the project from the Public Works Administration. From the left, sitting: Amelia; Ewing Mitchell, assistant secretary of commerce; J. Carroll Cone, assistant director, Bureau of Air Commerce; Edward P. Warner, Society of Automotive Engineers. In rear: Dr. George Lewis, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; Leighton Rogers, Bureau of Air Commerce; Gene Vidal; Fred L. Smith, National Association of State Aviation Officials; Robert Renfro, editor of Sportsman Pilot; Al Williams, American Petroleum Institute.

Courtesy of FPG International Corp.

Just after the fateful crash in Hawaii. By the time the plane was repaired, world weather patterns had changed and Amelia had to change the direction of her world flight from west to east. Courtesy of AP Wide World Photos.

Amelia and Fred, with a map showing the Pacific stretch of the flight. They finally took off May 21 from Oakland, California. Courtesy of AP Wide World Photos.

Amelia and Fred in Jakarta (then called Batavia).

Courtesy of AP Wide World Photos.

One of the last photos of Amelia and Fred, taken in Lae, New Guinea (with them is F.C. Jacobs, manager of a New Guinea gold mine). They took off for Howland Island and were never seen again. Courtesy of AP Wide World Photos.

Amelia was just as patient with young people. A St. Paul newspaper reporter, watching her field questions from the young representatives of high school weekly papers, watching her give them kindly, courteous attention even though their questions were long, distracting, and silly, declared she should get a special record for patience.

The amount of time she spent on the circuit was awesome, the schedules (often two speeches in one day) incredible, the distances she traveled amazing. The stamina that allowed her to fly such long distances is apparent in the more mundane pursuits of her life as well. She could spend a month doing one-night stands and not appear tired. She could drive a car astonishing distances with no ill effects. The day she started out on one jaunt, at the beginning of October 1933 in the Midwest, she took her mother, in Chicago visiting the Shedds, shopping for clothes at Marshall Field's. Then in early afternoon she got into her car and drove to Sioux City, Iowa, a distance of almost six hundred miles, where she was due the next day at 12:15 for lunch prior to giving a lecture at 1:30 at the Sioux City Women's Club. “I drove here all the way and arrived about 4:30 A.M.,” she wrote Amy. “It was a gorgeous night and I thought I'd rather sleep for a few hours after I reached Sioux City than to get up at an early hour and drive.” She spent the next two weeks crisscrossing Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Kansas, and Missouri, giving speeches at four more women's clubs, three college groups, two men's clubs, and an automobile association, ending up back in Chicago, where she gave two speeches on the twentieth. During the tour she spent a night in Atchison with the Challisses, taking the time to visit her uncle Theodore and the mothers of some of her childhood friends whom she felt close to, and giving an interview to
The Atchison Globe.
Starting October 21, she spoke in Oak Park, Rockford, and Janesville, Illinois; Whitewater, Wisconsin; Danville, Illinois; South Bend, Indiana; Toledo, Ohio; Lansing, Michigan; and Springfield, Illinois, ending up with two lectures—afternoon and evening—at the Detroit Institute of Arts, thirteen speeches in twelve days. Later she was off to Texas. Nor did she slow down as the years went by. Fourteen days in January 1936 saw her give lectures in South Carolina, Kentucky, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arizona.

The amazing thing was that the curiosity of the public remained unabated; it was matched by Amelia's continuing enthusiasm to the task at hand. No matter that in 1935 she spoke before 136 groups totaling 80,000. She was telling men and women about a brave new world where people would hop on planes the way they hopped on trains, where Europe would be just hours away. And she was telling them it was theirs for the taking. She was telling the women—thirty years before Betty Friedan wrote
The Feminine Mystique,
forty years before Gloria Steinem launched
Ms.
magazine—that they should fulfill themselves and be more than wives and mothers. She saw every lecture as a new opportunity to win people over.
She probably would have done it for nothing—being paid to give advice was
almost
irresistible.

In the fall of 1934, as the result of a speech, Amelia met Edward C. Elliott, president of Purdue University. He looked conservative—stiff collar, proper suit, graying hair slicked down and parted in the middle—but he was not. He was a college president committed to educating women for a life outside the home, an extreme view for his time. More typical was the traditional mindset of Henry Moore, president of Skidmore College, who made sure Skidmore coeds concentrated on art and good manners, dressed well, and developed a taste for music, since their goal in life was to maintain beautiful households. Elliott, head of a coed land grant college—he liked to refer to himself as a Hoosier schoolmaster—would cite the opening of the first Purdue residence hall for women, South Hall, as giving distinction to the year 1934 at Purdue. He wanted women to have careers and saw his job as giving them the necessary training. He was so forward looking and so committed to his vision and at the same time so practical that he realized he had to change the culture of Purdue if his ideas were to have impact. Nebraska born, his father, like Amelia's, had worked for the Union Pacific. He was bright and disarming, a brilliant talker, and an original thinker who delighted in unconventional solutions to problems. He was also interested in flying, with the result that Purdue boasted a flying field, planes, a new hangar, and a curriculum that included aeronautics as a subject of study.

The occasion of his meeting with Amelia was the fourth annual Conference on Current Problems sponsored by
The New York Herald Tribune
in September 1934, which took place shortly after the new hangar was completed and the women's residence opened. The audience at the conference—three thousand strong—filled every seat in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. It seemed as if everyone important in American public life was seated on the dais, each in turn expounding their pet idea on how to rescue America from the doldrums of the Depression. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke about bettering relations between capital and labor; Mayor of New York Fiorello LaGuardia spoke about defending the Constitution; Dr. Glenn Frank, president of the University of Wisconsin, spoke about the changes being wrought in Washington. Everyone, including the superintendent of New York schools, spoke in generalities.