East to the Dawn (9 page)

In the time-honored fashion of the day, girls didn't play team sports. Their role was to cheer on the boys at the school basketball and baseball games by yelling the school chant:

It wasn't enough for Amelia; she wanted more. She wanted to play basketball too, although being a realist, she probably didn't expect to play at school, only on her own with her girl friends. To play, she needed to know the rules. If she had been a timid child, she would probably have asked her friend Balie Waggener. But no; she went to the top of the school world—to team captain Frank Baker, who was older and whom she barely knew. One day during basketball practice, she approached him. They had
never talked because she was so much younger and because boys hung out with boys and girls with girls; in approaching him, she was breaking custom. “We girls would like to play,” she threw out, which startled him, but he agreed to teach her how to hold a ball and shoot for the basket. Amelia thereupon taught Ginger Park and Lucy. This game, too, they played across the road in Charlie's Park, where there was a single basketball hoop on the side of a barn—all their game required. (The boys at the school also played with just one hoop.) Under Amelia's guidance, they also played a form of baseball they called One-O-Cat that required only three people—pitcher, catcher, and batter—each out for themselves—another game the boys played.

Her activist nature is perfectly caught in two photos in Lucy's 1911 photograph album. In one picture Amelia and three friends—Katherine Dolan (referred to as Dolan), Lucy (Toot), Virginia Park (Ging) are lying on their stomachs, their chins cupped in their hands, staring at the camera either before or after a basketball game; it is Amelia who is holding the ball. In another photo Amelia is standing with her Challiss cousins—but the photo is being taken from too far away, she notices: Amelia's arm is stretched out toward the camera; she is beckoning the photographer to come closer.

On cold winter days, when ice floes ten inches thick bubbled on the river and the land was covered with snow, the children—cousins, school friends—would meet at the top of the North Second Street hill with their sleds and coast down to the bottom in waves, the boys lying face-down on their models, the girl sitting upright on theirs. Amelia had a boys' sled, one of her prize possessions, a gift from her father, and she was the only girl who could lie down while coasting down the hill. She credited it with saving her life, recounting that once, zipping down an icy hill, she found herself heading straight for a junkman's cart and horse. The junkman didn't hear her yells so, unable to stop, she aimed for the space between the horse's front and back legs. Head down, she made it. Other winter days, they all went ice skating on the pond at Jackson Park.

When Muriel was in Atchison, she played with Ann and Katch. She had a bit of a difficult time, not only because she was only an occasional participant but also because Amelia was so dramatic, so clever, and so inventive that both Katch and Annie infinitely preferred her over “Moonie,” as they called her. “I didn't care for her as much as Millie,” Ann would recall. Katch would say, “I always seemed to get stuck with Muriel.”

Clearly Amelia was a hard act to follow. She was the glamorous, daring one—Muriel was the younger, timid, plump, solemn younger sister. Amelia was always dreaming up new activities and yet, a natural teacher,
always managed to be kind and patient to the younger girls. Naturally they all wanted to be with her—so did Muriel. So deep an impression did Amelia make on Ann Park, one of the younger sisters, that seventy years later Ann, over eighty years old, still remembered clearly that “Millie was always the instigator.... She would dare anything; we would all follow along.” Katch said, “I just adored her.... She was not only fun ... she could do
everything.”

Amelia had a passionate interest in animals, which manifested itself, more often than not, in those preautomobile times, on that most ubiquitous animal in North America-the horse. Anna Sewall's Black Beauty had made a great impression on her, and the result was that Amelia believed she had a personal mission to intercede on behalf of any horse she saw being mistreated. This inevitably led to confrontations with delivery men, when they found she had loosened the taut check reins of their horses, which kept them from being able to relax their necks, and once to a fight with her mother, when she refused to be polite to a neighbor in Kansas City who was cruel to his horse Nellie. Nor did she change as she grew older; her love for animals never left her. She never forgot Nellie, who died as a result of mistreatment. In the 1930s she would read Vachel Lindsay's poem “The Broncho That Would Not Be Broken of Dancing” to her husband, and he would know she was thinking of Nellie. Blanche Noyes, friend and fellow pilot, driving out west with Amelia many years later, remembered, “If there was an animal hit along the road, no matter whether she had an appointment or not, she'd stop and either take the animal to the next town, or we'd find someone to take care of the animal ... or we'd check to see if it was dead.”

Amelia remained close to her parents and her sister through the summers spent in Kansas City. Amy seems to have done a superb job of making each of her children content with their disparate lives, for both sisters seemed perfectly happy with the arrangement. Amelia in Atchison had Virginia Park, Toot, and Katch, a school she “loved,” her own very special room, and her grandmother Millie, whom she could wind around her finger; Muriel had her mother and father and her own room in Kansas City. Amy would make frequent short visits to her family on North Terrace, always bringing Muriel.

Muriel enjoyed Atchison, but she wasn't as comfortable there as she was at home. For her there was “no comparison” between Atchison and Kansas City. “My family was in Kansas City; I liked Kansas City better,” she would recall. One reason Muriel felt strange in Atchison was that she had to be on her best behavior for her grandparents. But another more important reason was her status as a visitor, which was underscored by
the sleeping arrangements: Muriel slept with her mother in her mother's old bedroom. Muriel, recalling that sleeping arrangement, seventy years after the fact, still had a tinge of resentment in her voice as she continued, “Amelia had her
own
room.” The special room—Maria's.

Summertime life in Kansas City was simpler, less structured than it was in Atchison. Because Amelia had no network of school friends and cousins as in Atchison, she was thrown back on the company of her family—her sister, her mother, and particularly her father, who rarely, if ever, visited Atchison. There was more freedom in the Earhart house; Edwin particularly believed in letting young girls do what they wanted, whether it was proper or not. Amelia seems to have adjusted and benefited from the change. In particular, it gave her a chance to be with her father, whom she adored. Amy read Amelia and Muriel to sleep at night with selections from Dickens and Sir Walter Scott, but it was Edwin's knowledge that impressed Amelia. “I thought that my father must have read everything and, of course, therefore, knew everything. He could define the hardest words as well as the dictionary, and we used to try to trip him and he to bewilder us. I still have a letter he wrote me beginning, ‘Dear parallelepipedon,' which sent me scurrying for a definition,” she wrote.

Both in Atchison and in Kansas City from the time they were tots, Amelia and Muriel were taught by example and by lesson that it was the obligation of the rich to help out the poor. Well into the 1900s there were black shantytowns outside of Leavenworth, Atchison, and Kansas City. The blacks had come in huge numbers in the 1870s because the railroads, in an effort to encourage travel by rail, had distributed circulars promising good land and plenty of work in the state. It was a cruel joke, one that had left many impoverished blacks stranded. By the first decade of the 1900s the names of the white families whom they could turn to were being passed along among the desperately poor. Amy's name was on that list. “We watched, wide-eyed, the pathetic procession of decrepit Negroes, often crippled and scarred from their days of slavery, who stopped to beg.... Mother always gave them a few pennies or some bread and bacon, and this sent them on their way blessing her and perhaps a little strengthened in hope and faith.”

On the outskirts of Atchison was the large red brick Soldiers' Orphans' Home that had been built after the Civil War for the indigent and orphaned offspring of Kansas veterans. The Home, by Amelia's day, was open to all dependent children in Kansas, including those who were physically disabled; it was one of the causes that civic-minded Atchison took
to its heart, providing free tickets when the circus came to town, presents at Christmas, and various other contributions to make the orphans' lives happier. The Home was special to the Harres family; the library had been named the John A. Martin Memorial Library in honor of Ida Challiss Martin's husband, and Ida maintained a particular interest in its well-being. As a matter of course, Amy invited children from the Home over to play. The favorite of these visitors was a girl named Lily who had a badly scarred hand. Amelia befriended her, treating her as she did her other friends, introducing her to all her friends—imaginary as well as real—involving her in whatever endeavor she was pursuing, with such effect that Lily lost all trace of self-consciousness about her status or her hand. In Kansas City, too, poor children were invited over to play with Amelia and Muriel and to dine with the family Amy took particular care to set her table with nice china and glass at such times, to expose them to an environment they would not ordinarily see. Occasionally she gave each child a small purse containing a few coins and sent them off with Amelia and Muriel to shop at Emery, Bird & Thayer, the big Kansas department store. Once one of the little boys became totally unreasonable and demanded that he be allowed to buy one of the elevators. Amelia told him that it was almost impossible to buy an elevator. The little boy jumped up and down with rage, saying that he had been told he could buy what he wanted, and what he wanted was the elevator.

Amelia's cleverness and her imagination and her sure touch with people enabled her to come up with a solution.

“This particular elevator isn't for sale,” she said. “But,” she continued, looking secretive and mysterious, “I know how we can rent it for the afternoon.”

“You do? Sure?” the little boy asked.

“I do. Dead sure. Shall we rent?”

“Sure. Let‘s,” said the boy.

They spent the afternoon in the elevator, and except that the elevator operator was a little stunned, everything went off very well.

Amelia suffered through the self-conscious phase as most preadolescents do. Bloomers were much easier to move in than the ruffled pinafores over long full-skirted dresses that they usually wore, as Amy's sister Margaret had proved as a young girl, when she had secretly had a pair of bloomers made and gone bike riding. Amy had not joined Margaret's bloomer escapade, but it had made a deep impression on her; now she had dark blue flannel bloomers made for Amelia and Muriel to wear while pursuing their more strenuous activities. But the dress code in Atchison was still rigid—so rigid, a girl at school a few years older than Amelia was branded as “fast” because three or four inches of calf above her ankle
became exposed when she crossed her legs. So Amelia's bloomers, being unusual, even though a generation later than her aunt‘s, still drew comment. Amelia observed that “though we felt terribly 'free and athletic,‘we also felt somewhat as outcasts among the little girls who fluttered about us in their skirts.”

Edwin gave the girls baseballs and bats and, in response to Amelia's request one Christmas, a football. Another of his Christmas presents was a .22 rifle. The girls already possessed a BB gun, with which they popped bottles off the back fence; the .22 was to shoot rats in the barn. There were a lot of rats, for according to the faithful Charlie Parks, the grain bins and side walls of the harness room got to look “pretty much like a sieve” by the time they were through.

Amelia was a collector. She had a special trunk in which she kept a collection of bones, including a cow's skull that Amy wanted her to throw out, and spiders. A particular species of spiders—trap spiders—were the ones she particularly cherished, for they had hinged backs. “That,” Amelia pointed out to her mother, referring to the hinged backs, “is efficiency.” She collected various moths, including a luna, a regal, and a cecropia, as well as katydids, toads, and a praying mantis. Sometimes with Muriel's aid she held worm races. For this novel activity Amelia would make a harness of a blade of grass, a sulky out of a small leaf, and mark out a course that she tried to make the worms follow.

Another occupation to which Amelia applied her penchant for the unusual and the inventive was cooking. Because there was no outdoor cooking facility at her grandparents' house, on nice days she and Katch and Lucy made their Saturday lunches outdoors “on a brick oven of our own construction.” Most of what they cooked was basic: “Fried eggs were the principal dish, as I remember,” Amelia admitted. But she also tried to make manna, after hearing in the Trinity Church Sunday school how it dropped down from Heaven on the children of Israel. She decided it “should be small, white, round muffins, a cross between a popover and angel food cake,” and she “expended a good deal of energy and flour and sugar in trying to reproduce it,” but it never did come out anything close to what she wanted.