East to the Dawn (73 page)

According to Harry Bruno, the pilot and public relations genius who raised the money for Wiley's flights, twice around the world wasn't enough for Wiley. When he and Will Rogers took off in the summer of 1935, their real destination was another round-the-world jaunt—the North Pole was just the first step. Wiley wanted to be the first person to do it three times. He thought it was a wonderful way to raise money, have fun, and stay in the public eye. It never occurred to him that he would crash and be killed.

Now Amy Mollison was studying celestial navigation to prepare herself for her own globe-girdling flight; she thought she would be ready in 1938.

Amelia planned to do it around the earth's waist. It was the longest way to do it, of course, 27,000 miles, and would involve crossing the equator four times. But it had never been done that way at all, meaning Amelia had no need to hurry to beat someone else's time. “My frosting on the cake,” she called the flight one day. Why circle the globe at all? Her explanation was clearly rendered, carefully thought out:

Of course there was more to it than that—more than the fact that she had already flown the oceans and there was “just” the world left; more than the fact that the achievement would have been the capstone of her career, that she would be the first woman to fly the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the world. Her internal clock was urging her on: her fortieth birthday
was coming up July 24, 1937. She had to rack it up by then, then she could relax and turn her mind to less taxing but no less interesting tasks. She was very aware of time breathing down her neck—she always had been. In Boston in 1926, having passed her twenty-ninth birthday, highly aware of how close she was to hitting thirty, with her career still going nowhere, she had been so driven, she had lied on her job application to the WEIU. Now, no one realized that she was about to turn forty because of the one lie she always told—the lie about her age. She had been habitually taking off one year since she was a student at Columbia. Her friends would have better understood the pressure she felt if they had known her real age. 1936 had seen only a series of shakedown flights. Now she was ready, the plane was ready, and she was restless to start.

19

The Plan

• • • • Many people, over the years, have thought that Amelia's desire to fly around the world was foolish. Even Hilton Railey, who had helped her cope with her first Atlantic passage in 1928, didn't understand it. “She was caught up in the hero racket which compelled her to strive for increasingly dramatic records,” he wrote soon after she died, trying to exonerate her from her decision, to make it seem as if it were external forces that had pushed her on. Louise Thaden, however, who was close to Amelia, was closer to the truth when she observed that “it is the only major flight she ever attempted for purely selfish reasons. She wanted to fly around the world, because it would be fun.”

There was no doubt what women across the country thought of Amelia's proposed circumnavigation when they found out. In the spring of 1937
McCall's
kicked off a new series of covers to sell the magazine—a gallery of great women, starting in March with Anne Lindbergh, followed by Katharine Cornell in April. They put Amelia on the cover of the May issue, roughly coinciding with the beginning of her trip. It was a wonderful likeness: the smile, the tousled hair, the white silk scarf. “Amelia Earhart has dared to blaze the earth's uncharted skyways, spanning a continent, an ocean's vastness, the globe we call the world. She is America's Number One
Aviatrix and it is fitting therefore, that her portrait be included in
McCall's
gallery of Great American Women,” ran the text.

Purdue also liked the idea. The Purdue Research Foundation statement was that they expected the flight would “develop scientific and engineering data of vital importance to the aviation industry.” She had asked for a formal leave of absence from the university in April 1936, and they open-handedly gave it to her, authorizing Elliott to grant her a leave “at such time and for such duration as may be necessary to permit her to make proper preparations for said flight, and to undertake same.” They must initially have been worried that they
might
be criticized for backing such an undertaking, for they concluded that the university and the PRF could “become associated in the cooperative research project without fear of correctly being charged with sponsoring a publicity stunt.”

Purdue had already been involved in practical flight research in scientific aeronautics, doing experimental work in aviation for the Department of Commerce, putting down a runway system composed of various types of runway materials to determine their suitability for airport purposes. Experimental work was also under way in applying television and shortwave radio to low-visibility flying.

Originally, Amelia intended to work within this aeronautical program with the Electra, then afterward fly around the world testing the effects of long-distance flights on pilots and equipment, in a “flying laboratory.” But then she decided she wanted to do the flight first, then hang up her spurs and work with Purdue. By August reporters were sniffing around, looking for a story, asking questions. Amelia told them: “I'm nearly sold on the idea of flying around the world because I'd like to do it, but I'm a busy person this year. I have a lot of things to do. Next year? Well, one never knows.”

Even as she prepared to take leave from Purdue, she made some parting shots to keep women focused on their future.

While Amelia tended to her new plane, the university considered plans for expanding the PRF into a permanent Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research, or possibly funding a two- or three-year scholarship to be given to a girl interested in aviation, as well as working with Amelia's proposed future experimental flights.

As always during preparation for a flight, Amelia's life went on as before. George tended to getting the new house finished and furnished. He arranged for a leading mail-order house to lavishly equip the kitchen—in return for permission to advertise the fact. The furnishings were contemporary in feeling—simple pieces of good quality and clean lines. Amelia must have been thinking of returning to her first love, the piano, for there was a piano in the living room. It was a light, cheery house, with sliding-glass doors and tall windows. The stone patio faced a golf course, but was separated from it by shrubs and a low stone wall.

Amelia had sent out from Rye the most precious of her books, some dating from her school years; an
Ivanhoe
she had doodled in, books of verse, a three-volume edition of Kipling, the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a signed first edition of
Lazarus Laughed
by Eugene O'Neill. There were books on aviation as well, including
Air Babies
by her friend Elvy Kalep, and many others. All were arranged on the shelves of her study. During her flight, Amy was going to live in the house. A special luxurious bathroom was installed for her, “The bathroom is a Roman dream of elegance, of which I am particularly envious,” wrote George.

Besides her usual lecturing, Amelia was dealing with her mother and Muriel. Although Amelia was always scolding her mother for being such a soft touch for all her relatives, in fact Amelia was an even softer touch. She had just discovered, to her chagrin, that although she herself was helping out Nancy Balis's sister and husband—Amy was sending them money as well. Muriel's marital problems, of several years' duration, had worsened. Amelia and George continued to help Muriel in spite of their strong negative feelings about her husband, Albert. Amelia made no bones about calling Albert not only a bad businessman but a selfish person who neglected his family. At one point, while Amy was staying with Muriel and him, he would have had Amy paying room and board, if Amelia hadn't squashed the idea. Albert habitually put his own activities and interests before Muriel's. Unable to meet the payments, they had lost the house that Amelia and George had helped them buy. Then Albert lost a substantial amount of additional money that they had given him. (“I am deeply sorry to hear further reports of your unhappy domestic situation. I had hoped that the money which George and I advanced would help Albert grow up. However, it appears just to have aggravated the petty side of his nature and made
him really mean. I was so hopeful he would make good, I did not exact any moral guarantee,” wrote Amelia.)

Moreover, Muriel's dependence on Albert ran against everything Amelia believed in; visiting her sister in recent years had been enough to set her teeth on edge. Because of Albert's injudicious spending, Muriel was always doing housework—sometimes with Amy's help—much to Amelia's irritation. In the fall of the previous year Amelia had accepted a dinner invitation from Muriel—and then reneged, put off by the idea of her sister slaving over preparing a dinner. She wrote to Amy to apologize: “Please tell Pidge when I wrote her about cancelling a dinner she was planning in Cambridge, I did not mean that George and I would not eat at home with just the family if she wishes. That is, if she will have a maid come in for whom I will gladly pay.” Her sister exemplified everything in male-female relations that Amelia hated: housework, dependency, unquestioning obedience to a husband. All the things from which Amelia was trying to free women still bound her sister. It made her, in the case of the dinner, unreasonable, for it would have brought no pleasure to Muriel to have had a maid come in and cook the meal.

Now Amelia decided to do as much as possible for her sister before her trip. She wrote Muriel in January, deeply worried, advising her not to sign any legal papers, not to move out of her house, “no matter how tough things may get,” and to come out to California so that they could talk. Muriel did. It was the first time in years that the two sisters had spent time together. For the moment all was well. It was as much as Amelia could do for Muriel before she left.

The effort to help her sister didn't deflect Amelia from her flight preparations. The living room of the North Hollywood house, according to Muriel, “was just completely covered with equipment. They had three different types of rubber rafts they were testing, one that you had to inflate yourself; another that was supposed to be automatic; then there was still another shape that could be used upside down as well as rightside up, and it still wouldn't capsize; and all things of that kind.”

There was so much to consider. The Department of Agriculture was supplying the Electra with aluminum cylinders to take air samples at various altitudes in different parts of the world. For her own part Amelia intended to keep an accurate record of every detail to establish the fatigue point on long-distance and high-altitude flights: she planned to track the performance of the plane, and the magnetic, meteorological, and radio variables of the upper air in different parts of the world—data sorely needed before international air travel could become safe.

She wanted of course to find out whether altitude affected digestion,
and whether some foods were easier to digest than others. “Also I should like to know the rate at which fatigue is induced by the myriad instruments a modern pilot must use. Are men and women different in their reactions to air travel? If so, how?” Eye fatigue was also on her mind. (Her red-rimmed eyes had been commented upon several times after long-distance flights.) To prevent eyestrain—another “vital aspect”—she was planning to take a “battery” of sunglasses made up especially for her. All aspects of mental and physical fatigue, a pilot's major problem, interested her. She originally planned to test the products of several manufacturers, including a sort of fog-dispelling product that she was supposed to use over San Francisco.

Planning for the flight actually started even before Amelia accepted delivery of the Electra. Everything had to be thought out in advance and dealt with. The nitty-gritty work—requiring hundreds of phone calls and letters and cables—was done by George, whose job it was to turn all Amelia's needs and requests into reality. Among other things, he had to organize caches of gasoline and oil—more than thirty—at various points along the route. He did this through their friend Count Jacques de Sibour, a pilot (as was his wife), whose book he had published who now worked for Standard Oil. Then they had to decide at what stops the plane would be overhauled—no plane could go 27,000 miles without considerable maintenance—and send the necessary engine parts and mechanics to those places. But that was the easy part.

The hard part was to figure out the logistics and involve the U.S. government in the project. That required Gene. George worked through Gene's department (The Bureau of Air Commerce) and, whenever necessary, through Gene personally. Would Gene find out about the navy field in Honolulu? asked George in August. We need, he said, “an exact description of the new runways, the total length of the pavement, the extra run and the nature of the approaches ... what the condition will be as of, say, February. I do so hope you can get the information from the Navy Department.”