East to the Dawn (75 page)

Amelia knew about the airstrip on Howland before the president, for on January 8 she sent FDR a wire that threw various aides into convulsions and resulted in the following memo to FDR from the acting director of the Bureau of the Budget.

She wrote about her proposed round the world flight this spring and hoped for Navy cooperation in refuelling west of Hawaii, which was subsequently kindly arranged by Admiral Standley. Says since then the necessity for such difficult and costly maneuvers
has been obviated and instead she hopes to land on Howland Island where the Government is about to establish an emergency field. Says Dept. of Commerce approves her plan and the Interior Dept. is very cooperative as is the Coast Guard. Says all details are arranged and the construction party with equipment due to sail from Honolulu next week. Says she is now informed that apparently some question re WPA [Works Progress Administration] appropriation in amount of $3000 which covers all costs other than those borne by her for this mid-pacific pioneer landing field which will be permanently useful and valuable aeronautically and nationally. Understands its moving requires executive approval and asks that it be expedited.

On January 11 Amelia learned that the president had released WPA funds to the Bureau of Air Commerce to build the field on Howland Island. Richard Black, Air Commerce aide Robert Campbell, the additional workers, and the machinery left Hawaii the next day. So that most vexing problem was taken care of, courtesy of Gene.

The next Bureau of Air Commerce intervention for Amelia involved the army—the only branch of the armed services not yet helping the flight. Here, too, George relied on help from Gene's bureau. George wrote a letter to the secretary of war saying that he was looking for housing for the Electra, and for maintenance work by army aviation mechanics, “competent aviation mechanics to service her plane, check her Wasp H engines, and Hamilton constant speed propellers,” when she landed at Wheeler field in Honolulu. “We are fortunate in having the kindly cooperation of the Department of Commerce and the Navy and the Coast Guard,” he baldly wrote. To insure that the secretary of war actually issued the specified instructions, George requested that ubiquitous Commerce aide William Miller personally deliver the letter.

Amelia knew she needed a navigator for the over-water portion of the flight. Several were under consideration. George, with his restless, creative mind, inevitably had a suggestion: Brad Washburn, whose book he had published ten years before, in the boy explorer series; Brad had gone on to make a great name for himself as an explorer and was now a professor at Harvard. George knew Brad had been in Alaska and had taken the first photographs of Mount McKinley while flying an Electra. Brad received a phone call from George one day asking him to come and talk to them. Although he had known George well, he didn't know Amelia except by
reputation, but he felt as if he knew her, for before she was married, his wife had worked at Denison House and had lived in Amelia's room. When Brad arrived, it was to see Amelia sprawled on the floor with her maps lying around her. They had supper and talked all evening. She showed him the itinerary, marking out the first two legs, Hawaii to Howland Island, Howland to New Guinea. She traced the lines on the maps with a finger, mentioning the distances between points. Brad spent most of the evening next to her on the floor, talking about the flight, with George in a chair next to them. She charmed him—and probably knew instantly that he wouldn't do.

Brad asked what radio signals there would be on Howland for them to home in on and was told there wouldn't be any. He thought that was unwise, since her 50-watt radio wouldn't be powerful enough to pick up ground stations. He knew he didn't have the navigational experience to hit such a tiny island as Howland: “I backed out of it with their clearly not having asked me to be navigator. She would naturally have wanted someone who agreed with her plan, and I didn't. I would have turned it down anyway because my navigation experience was not adequate to handle that kind of a job. Very frankly I knew all about how to get it done, but I couldn't do it.”

Another prospective navigator whom Amelia consulted in the early stages was Paul Collins. He, too, remembered spreading maps on the floor and discussing the feasibility of the routes, but he now ran an airline—he couldn't up and leave. She finally settled on Harry Manning, who had been captain of the
President Roosevelt,
the ship that had brought her home from England after the triumphal flight of the
Friendship.
He too was a pilot; they had talked during the crossing of possibly someday teaming up for a flight.

Harry Manning graduated from the Marine Academy, worked his way up from able seaman, and rose rapidly in rank. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1929 for rescuing thirty-two passengers from a sinking ocean liner. When Amelia asked him to be her navigator as far as Port Darwin, Australia, he agreed and arranged a leave of absence.

In mid-February 1937, with all the decisions for Amelia's flight having been made, the only thing left for Gene to arrange was the smooth execution of the flight itself. He assigned William Miller to officially interface with the navy and coordinate the plans for Amelia's flight. The navy was notified by telegram. MR. MILLER AIRWAYS SUPERINTENDENT DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE WILL COORDINATE PLANS FOR FLIGHT. HE WILL ARRIVE OAKLAND ABOUT TWENTY FIVE FEBRARY AND WILL CONTACT NAVAL
DISTRICT AUTHORITIES KEEPING ADDRESSEES ADVISED REGARDING DEVEL OPMENTS. All the big decisions had been made. It was a rare moment in history—Amelia had wrapped the entire U.S. government—up to and including President Roosevelt—right around her finger. She was planning to take off within two weeks.

Gene's unprecedented step of assigning one of his best men, Miller, a government employee, to a nongovernmental project, was one of his last acts. His final act was to issue a bureau directive requiring all commercial planes to have radio direction finders and antennae shielded against snow, rain, fog, and dust static. Radio direction finders had become operational just that spring. DFs, as they were called, had been developed by Bendix Aviation at the behest of Pan Am for the Clippers. Then, on the last day in February, tired of government inflighting, too entrepreneurial to be happy in bureaucratic Washington, probably realizing that his dream of building planes for the common man would continue to be blocked, Gene threw in the towel and resigned. He would be visiting his mother in Santa Barbara, he announced, and flew out to California a few days later, to be met at the Burbank airport by Amelia, with George in tow.

There was much speculation about Gene's plans. Rumors floated about that he was going to form a connection with a company that would set up sea dromes in the ocean and fly land planes across the sea in competition with the Pan Am Clippers. Other rumors had it that he would join Bendix Aviation. The idea of forming a new airline resurfaced; there was talk that he would join Amelia, George, and Floyd Odlum, head of the immensely powerful Atlas Corporation, in the formation of a transatlantic air service. Gene did nothing to dispel the rumors, saying, “I can say this much, however. It'll be something quite unusual in the way of aviation. Airline operations will enter into it.” Theirs would have been a natural alliance, fueled by his closeness to and respect for Amelia, the powerful financial aid of her friend Floyd Odium, and the enmity that existed between Gene and Juan Trippe, the head of Pan American.

Gene's orders to William Miller to facilitate naval aid to Amelia once she had left the United States provided for the following: that a seaplane tender would take a station midway between Honolulu and Howland and return to Pearl Harbor after she had landed at Howland; that the coast guard cutter
Duane,
with two aviation mechanics, would proceed to Howland to service Amelia's plane while she was there; that weather information would be collected from the governor of Samoa and other points; that the USS
Ontario
would take up a station midway between Howland and New
Guinea; and that personnel would be available on Howland Island to scare away the birds.

The countdown to the world flight had begun. By Tuesday, March 9, ever-present reporters noted food, maps, and a hodgepodge of other necessary articles piled on a small table in the hangar next to the plane. On Thursday, March 11, Amelia flew the Electra into Oakland, the takeoff point, accompanied by George, Bo McNeely, her mechanic, and a representative of Bendix Aviation, who was checking out both the direction finder and the radio. Amelia was undoubtedly the first private pilot to receive a radio direction under—indeed, a Bendix official had made a special flight from Washington at the end of February so that Lockheed could install it on the plane. It had a loop, carried on the outside of the plane just above the cockpit (Amelia posed with the loop: it was a circle just big enough to frame her face), which the pilot could turn to face the direction of a radio signal. Pan American relied heavily on radio direction finders—in fact, they would not start service until the direction finder at each refueling stop was up and calibrated and ready to guide them in. The new system was unerring, according to Amelia's friend Carl Allen, as he wrote in one of his columns, coming to point “as unerringly as a bird dog questing a quail-scented breeze.”

Upon their arrival in Oakland, she and George movedinto the Oakland Airport Inn along with Allen, her chosen observer who was syndicating the story for the
Herald Tribune.
She was planning to leave Monday, she announced, “unless the weather goes against me.” In fact, if the weather permitted she planned to take off on Sunday, shortening the agony of expectation by one day. It was raining that Thursday. The next day it was also raining, and the weekend prospects were for heavy rain. Friday saw the lowest barometric reading in seven years for San Francisco. Amelia was handling the waiting better than George. As usual before one of her flights, he was wound up tighter than a drum. As newsreel photographers were asking Amelia for yet another pose, he startled them by taking center stage and asking, “What's the idea of flying around the world? Don't you know a woman's place is in the home?” He immediately laughed and promised to say something nice, and the scene went off according to the best of newsreel intentions, according to the newsmen present. But the day before when he was asked if he wanted to go too, he replied, “Well, between 185 pounds of husband and 185 pounds of gasoline, there's a lot of difference—and the gasoline wins.”

On March 13 Pan American announced the imminent opening of
its aerial service to New Zealand. The Pan Am plan was to fly from San Francisco to New Zealand in four travel days. Captain Musick was poised to make the first survey flight over the seven-thousand-mile route in one of the new Sikorsky Clippers, to check out weather patterns, seaplane landing facilities, and the new direction finders. He also had to see if the refueling station—actually a six-thousand-ton motor ship, the
North Wind,
anchored next to the coral outcropping of tiny Kingman Reef—would do to fuel, provision, and service the seaplanes. Pan Am was also surveying and planning to begin a run from someplace on the East Coast to Bermuda, as well as airmail service from Manila to Hong Kong. Captain Musick was twiddling his thumbs at Alameda waiting for the weather to break so he could set off across the Pacific on the first leg of the trip to New Zealand. To Gene and the others, it seemed like the perfect time to challenge Juan Trippe and his still-nascent airline with some heavyweight competition.