East to the Dawn (68 page)

Within a few days George came up with another thought: Would she like to write a piece for Ray Long, formerly of Cosmopolitan and now running “the best of the movie magazines Photo
Play”?
Ray Long, according to George, wanted an article about the movies the president and the family watched: “No discussion of specific pictures, of course, but a general informal article on the kind of pictures which are liked best.” Eleanor considered it, but what she really wanted was for Amelia to fly her around the country—just the two of them—in a little two-seater plane, as she told George in her letter to him in mid-March, so she could gather information on the New Deal Federal Emergency Relief projects and particularly the Arthurdale project in West Virginia that would kick off the Subsistence Homestead Act and provide housing and employment for two hundred desperately poor familites. What better way to travel, and what an incredible publicity coup to have Amelia as her pilot. Her letter went on that she was looking for a plane to borrow “if Amelia is free.” George leaped at her suggestion like a fish to a fly, but he had more grandiose ideas: “Definitely a plane is available. It is a new four place closed ship. It has very fine equipment, including telephonic radio receiving and sending apparatus, plus the new radio ‘homing compass.' ” It might have worked out, and both women were looking forward to the trip (whether they were two or four). But the relief programs were just about to be reorganized with the undersecretary of agriculture, Rexford G. Tugwell, as their new administrator, and Tugwell felt Eleanor was jumping the gun—he advised against it. He wanted them to wait six months, he
wrote Eleanor, until the various programs were coordinated and running smoothly.

Eleanor was quite taken with the idea, however, and continued to pursue it: possibly an autumn tour, she thought, and offered suggestions for dividing up the funds that would accrue from radio talks and magazine articles.

By the end of May, much to George's disappointment, Eleanor had decided to work not with him but with another agent, George Bye. Unfazed by the rejection, George wrote her back that he thought her decision “admirable,” that Bye was an old friend, indeed, had worked for George for several years “at the beginning of his agency career.” Within a short time Bye had signed her up with United Features Syndicate for a six-day-a-week column of five hundred words. Called “My Day” it became staple reading for millions. Eleanor became almost as popular and well known as her husband.

That spring the Mexican government had inaugurated a radio campaign over NBC in an effort to promote goodwill and the all-important United States tourist trade. Noting all the good publicity that Amelia's flight had churned up for Hawaii, it decided to invite Amelia to fly to their country in hopes she could generate as much good will for them.

To tempt her, the Mexican government offered, through the Mexican consul general Eduardo Villasenor, a small but colorful issue of 780 air-mail stamps of December 1, 1934, showing the Aztec emperor Cuauhtemoc contemplating the snowcapped volcano Popocatepetl, which would be overprinted with “Vuelo de Amelia Earhart, Mexico, 1935.” Amelia was to be given 200 of the stamps to carry home with her to sell, the remainder were to be put on sale in Mexico. The terms would cover the costs of the flight, and Amelia decided a nonstop, California-Mexico flight would be an interesting challenge. George, warned about corruption in Mexico, went down to Mexico City to oversee the stamp operation himself. He actually took with him the electro and the violet ink to be used in the overprinting—necessary to prevent copying—because the Mexicans did not have such equipment, and he was savvy enough to pick up Amelia's allotted two hundred stamps at the post office department on April 18, the day before she was scheduled to take off. His caution was rewarded: Mexican officials tried to talk him into accepting only 140 stamps, giving as the excuse that 60 stamps were needed for a library. He held firm. As the
Diario Official
of the Mexican government put it, he was “highly irritated at the failure of the Post Office Department to comply
with the agreement” and threatened to call off the flight. The stamps were found and put in his hand, and Amelia proceeded as scheduled. (Their sale, some reputedly for as much as a hundred dollars apiece, covered the costs of the flight.)

She took off on a moonlit night from the Burbank airport on the nineteenth of April. So clear was the air that the moon gilded the hills, but as she traveled south over the coast and the Sea of Cortés, a white haze blended sandy coast and water into a muddle. Her engine seemed to be overheating, which she rectified by resetting the propeller. She was again following a chart that gave her hourly course headings. She successfully located Tepic and Guadalajara, but at the hour she was supposed to be over Mexico City (if her dead reckoning was correct), as she was hand-pumping gasoline, she saw a railroad beneath her—which according to her chart shouldn't have been there. Just then something—a speck of dirt or an insect—irritated her eye, and she decided to set down. It is possible that she was feeling a bit light-headed as the combination of her lack of sleep and the altitude (she was flying at ten thousand feet) took their toll.

Looking down, Amelia saw a flat dry lakebed beneath her and set down. Mexicans appeared, speaking Spanish to her, which she didn't understand. She pulled out her chart, and although there was a language barrier, a “bright, dark-skinned boy” established her location on it as Nopala, and after the cowboys cleared a path through the children, goats, and cattle that had gathered and she had mentally marked off clear space free from the cactus and prickly pear dotting the landscape, she took off for Mexico City, some sixty miles away.

At the Mexico City airport the largest crowd since Lindbergh flew in 1927 was gathered and wildly applauding as she drew to a stop.
The
New York Times and most other newspapers again put her safe arrival on the front page. The flight raised her reputation another few notches, but she was disappointed and, interviewed shortly after landing, called her flight “unsuccessful” and vowed to “do a better job of flying non-stop to New York.”

She was declared an official guest of Mexico, given a private audience with President Lázaro Cárdenas, and invited to a presidential garden party, and she took part in the regular Foreign Office Sunday radio show. She received a platinum medal from Amalia de Cárdenas, wife of the president, inscribed, unfortunately not to Amelia Earhart but to Amelia Earhart Putnam. A gold medal from Aida de Rodriguez, wife of the ex-president, was also presented to her with a degree of pomp. Both ceremonies left her underwhelmed—she felt frustrated at not getting an opportunity to talk to less privileged women or find
out what Mexican law and tradition permitted them to do outside the home.

Having set down in Nopala on the way down, Amelia's resolve to make the return trip to Newark nonstop was uppermost in her mind. Because Mexico City is at 7,500 feet and the air at that elevation is thin, taking off with sufficient gasoline—470 gallons, weighing thousands of pounds—necessitated a very long runway that would enable the Vega to get up to a speed of a hundred miles per hour or better. None existed; both the civil and the military fields were too short. The heavily loaded Vega needed three miles to become airborne.

Again a government put an army at her disposal. Mexican soldiers under the direction of Colonel Roberto Fierro, chief of Mexican Military Aviation, filled ditches and shaved off hummocks on the mud-caked but mostly level flats of what had been Lake Texcoco, until they had fashioned a three-mile runway, which they even staked out with flags. The Mexican government also transported the requisite drums of gasoline to the lakebed, located six miles outside Mexico City, and provided soldiers to guard them and her plane. The soldiers would remain on duty to clear the area of cows, people, horses, and goats when she was ready to take off. Pan American Airways also helped: Her plane had been housed in the Pan Am hangar at the Mexico City airport and worked over by Pan Am mechanics.

Her stay in Mexico City stretched to eighteen days before weather permitted her to take off. James Kimball, at his post in New York, was in charge, as usual. Amelia was impatient to get off and made more than one abortive trip to the field. Her comment after an unexpected weather delay forced her to return to the hotel can be taken as a commentary on the too-elaborate ceremonies the Mexican government was putting her through: “Nature does as thorough a job as man.” George did leave, by means unknown; the following day he was in Dallas, on his way home.

A few days later, finally the weather cooperated. Casasolo, Pan Am's star mechanic, drove out to the makeshift field for the last time, and by the light of automobile headlights, gave the Vega's engine a final check. General Samuel Rojas, commander of the First Air Regiment, not to be left out of any ceremony, bade her a formal good-bye, as did Mexican foreign affairs officials. The leavetaking was interrupted when Amelia noticed that for some reason there was only one gasoline pump at the field and dashed off in a car to the nearest airport to borrow another.

The takeoff itself, at just after six A.M. went smoothly, although it took almost four minutes and most of the length of the dusty lakebed before her wheels lifted off the ground; Amelia was relaxed, almost ecstatic
to be airborne—finally. “Slowly I climbed to 10,000 feet, to skim over the mountains that hem in the high central valley where the city lies, separating it from the lands that slope down to the sea. Majestic Popocatépetl raised its snowy head to the south, luminous in the rays of the rising sun. A fairyland of beauty lay below and about me—so lovely as almost to distract a pilot's attention from the task at hand, that of herding a heavy plane out of that great upland saucer and over the mountains that make its rim.”

Wiley Post practically dared Amelia to fly over the Gulf of Mexico on the Mexico City—Newark leg—a distance of some seven hundred miles—by saying to her that she shouldn't.

Wiley, onetime barnstormer, parachute jumper, oil field roustabout (where he had lost an eye), and superb flier, so casual, confident, and thorough that on long-distance flights he habitually drained each tank until the engine quit before switching to another (“that way I know exactly how much gas I've got in each tank,” he explained), who with Harold Gatty had flown around the world in eight days in 1931, did not make idle comments about important things.

“Did Wiley Post, the man who had braved every sort of hazard in his stratosphere flying, really regard a simple little flight from Mexico City to New York across the Gulf as too hazardous? If so I could scarcely wait to be on my way,” declared Amelia. After the Atlantic and the Pacific, it seemed to her eminently feasible. She didn't give it too much thought and, following the Pan American Airways route, headed northeast for Tampico, on its western shore, where she shot out over the Gulf.

Six hours and ten minutes later she was over New Orleans, where she made radio contact with the Department of Commerce radio station. “Everything O.K,” she reported. From there north she followed the air route of Eastern Air Lines. The manager of Eastern, Eddie Rickenbacker, the famous World War I ace, had broadcast instructions to all landing fields of the system to be on the watch for her and to have weather reports ready. Tuning in, she heard the Eastern radio operators reporting adverse winds below 7,000 feet, so she was flying at 10,000 feet, where the wind was behind her. Mobile, Alabama, reported her over the city at 3:02. Two hours later she passed over Atlanta, 305 miles away, going 150 miles an hour. She was over the Spartanburg, South Carolina, airport, a distance of 169 miles, one hour later.

Charles Lindbergh had flown nonstop between Mexico City and Washington in twenty-seven hours seven years before. Others had tried to
fly from Mexico to the New York area nonstop, but heretofore the rarefied atmosphere of Mexico City had prevented fliers from loading their planes with enough fuel to make it possible. As Amelia's progress north was broadcast, a crowd gathered at Washington's Hoover airport. She roared across Hoover airport 13 hours 6 minutes after takeoff—cutting nearly fourteen hours off Lindbergh's time. As her green and red navigation lights flashed overhead, Gene, waiting and watching below, radioed her to land, even though as he and everyone else knew, if she made it on to Newark, it would be a big first. “You've done a splendid job, so come down,” Gene pleaded, to which Amelia composedly replied, “Thanks for the invitation. I'm going through.”