PART ONE — A BRIDE-TO-BE SPEAKS HER MIND
On our wedding day — at that every moment we were awaiting in my mother's house in Noank, Connecticut, the judge who was to marry us — she handed me the letter she had written. A strange time for a letter! But one glance at her quiet serious face told me that the letter was important to her. I opened it and read:
Dear GP:
"There are some things which should be writ before we are married. Things we have talked over before — most of them."
In penciled longhand — written with a visible and terrible kind of care for each word that it be fair and honest (a slip or two meticulously corrected; a few words crossed out, replaced with others) — it continued:
"You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work which means so much to me. I feel the move just now as foolish as anything I could do. I know there may be compensations, but have no heart to look ahead.
"In our life together I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. If we can be honest I think the difficulties which arise may best be avoided.
"Please let us not interfere with the other's work or play, nor let the world see our private joys or disagreements. In this connection I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinements of even an attractive cage.
"I must exact a cruel promise, and that is you will let me go in a year if we find no happiness together.
"I will try to do my best in every way ..."
The letter was signed simply, "A. E."
I wonder if any man, before or since, has received at such a moment such a letter as Amelia Earhart gave to me. A sad little letter, brutal in its frankness; brave and beautiful in its honesty.
Deeply personal as it is, I considered carefully before making it public here. Finally, I decided it has a place. This is her story. And in that remarkable letter is documented her character, her striking integrity and independence, her important feminine viewpoint — in short, the structure of a gallant inward spirit.
At least twice she had refused marriage. To her, in a sense, marriage meant sheer sacrifice. In her heart she knew that she must keep freedom in a measure not always possible in marriage.
In her high-school days AE had been known as "the girl in brown who walked alone."
In 1928, the year that she first flew the Atlantic, the year that her public career first began, I had become closely associated with her as a counselor.
As late as 1930 she had written to a dear friend:
"I am still unsold on marriage. I don't want anything all of the time ... I think I may not ever be able to see marriage, except as a cage, until I am unfit to work or fly or be active — and of course I wouldn't be desirable then."
On that morning when she handed me the letter, she was dressed in brown. Brown suit. Beneath it, as I recall, a casual crepe blouse with a turndown collar. Brown lizard shoes. No hat, of course. Her thought was for none of the externals of the wedding ceremony; her clothes were as simple and forthright as herself.
For three years I had been counselor to "the girl in brown who walked alone."
For the next seven — until that grim day when she vanished — I was to be both helper and husband to a girl in brown who had agreed — even I can only guess how heroic had been her ultimate decision — no longer to walk alone.
We were married on February 7, 1931.
In 1856 a Lutheran minister moved his brood of children from western Pennsylvania to Kansas, where, at Midland College, a small Lutheran institution just outside Atchison, he held the chair of Hebrew and Greek. Here was born the youngest of his twelve children — a boy who was named Edwin.
Young Edwin S. Earhart, by shining shoes, building furnace fires, holding horses, and tutoring, managed to earn his Kansas University degree in 1894. He entered law practice. Handsome, brilliant, irresponsible, and spectacularly poor, he promptly fell in love with Amy, favorite daughter of Judge and Mrs. Alfred Otis.
Judge Otis was one of Atchison's pioneer founders and leading citizens. He looked quite without enthusiasm upon the love of Edwin for Amy. "When you can prove to me," he said, "that your law practice has netted you not less than fifty dollars a month for six consecutive months, then you can marry my daughter. And not until then."
To his dismay, the young man returned in six months with such proof. On October 18, 1895, Edwin S. Earhart and Amy Otis were married.
Of that union were born Muriel and Amelia Earhart.
Much of their childhood was spent in the stately home of their maternal grandparents, where in 1898 Amelia had been born. She grew to lanky, towheaded girlhood. Early she showed a bent for adventure. With the help of her sister and of Lucy and Katherine Challis, her cousins, she constructed a roller coaster. Pilfered clapboards and fence rails made its "track." The car was made of a piece of board and roller-skate wheels. The ridgepole of a shed became the official starting place and AE the initial tester.
"I spun until I saw clear weather above the world I knew."
She shot down the steep incline; came to disaster at track's end in a nasty spill. She picked herself up, dusted off her clothes, turned gray and rather scornful eyes on frightened playmates.
Was she hurt? "Of course not," she said. "We need more track, that's all."
The others wanted to abandon the project. But not Amelia. The track was lengthened. She climbed up on the shed again, shoved off, shot down — and finished right side up. She shouted triumphantly to the other girls:
"You must try it! Why, it's flying! I flew!"
To her elders, it was far too much like flying. A few nights later the roller coaster was dismantled.
On the whole, however, AE and her sister, in an environment extremely conservative, enjoyed a singular freedom from convention. Their mother felt that anything unusual was educational. She let them wear gymnasium suits with full-pleated bloomers that, in those days, were downright revolutionary. She encouraged them to bring into the house anything that interested them, from shiny pebbles to toads.
Their father, too, was exceptionally broad-minded. He had never been permitted, as a boy, to fish on the Sabbath. He now thought fish always bit better on Sundays, and often took his daughters along to test the theory with him.
The Earhart girls lived perpetually in a world of healthy make-believe. In imaginative games Amelia was always the leader. She and Muriel had two imaginary children of undetermined parentage. These children, very real to them, were named Laura and Ringa. Each day, Amelia and Muriel held long earnest conversations with the two. Years later, when Amelia was being interviewed by some one whom she believed to be prying unduly into the personal side of her life, she would startle and mystify her questioner by a quick allusion to "my little girl, Ringa."
She early filled her schoolbooks with drawings of creatures which, for some forgotten reason, were known as "deejays." They had something of a Krazy Kat flavor, and in a copy of Ivanhoe they are to be found jousting and blowing trumpets.
From First Reader days on, books were a joy to the Earhart youngsters. Each night the two, dressed in nightgowns and bathrobes, sat before the fireplace sipping milk while their mother read to them from Miss Mulock's fairy stories or Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales. Later, there were the adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, of David Copperfield, and of Oliver Twist.
On Sunday evenings the readings consisted always of Bible stories or of chapters from Pilgrim's Progress.
When they learned to read for themselves, there were exciting raids upon Grandfather Otis' well stocked library, which harbored the thrillers of such authors as Oliver Optic and Jules Verne.
Both children had a taste for poetry, and enlivened household chores by chanting dramatic stanzas from Horatius at the Bridge.
Because they loved animals, they loved stories about them. After reading Black Beauty they became so incensed at persons in the neighborhood who drove their horses with tight checkreins that they began to patrol Atchison's streets on their bicycles, searching out evildoers. They lectured delivery boys, who sneered at them and refused to uncheck their horses. Undaunted, they would wait until the boy left his wagon, then uncheck the horse themselves.
A milkman spotted Amelia one day as she unchecked his horse. She ran home and hid in the washtubs on the back porch. He followed, pounded on the door, and stormed that he "had a mind to take that brat down to jail."
A neighbor owned a beautiful high-spirited mare named Nellie which he housed in a makeshift shed. Unprotected from the hot sun, she nearly went wild. One day, as Muriel and Amelia sat watching on a rail fence, her master led her out and put a sharp and vicious curb on her.
She reared and bucked, while he cursed her and beat her with his riding crop. Trembling, plunging, she threw him and galloped wild-eyed down the road as far as a railing along the brink of a stream.
Amelia used to say that, just there, the Angel of Wild Things must have whispered to the little mare that it would be better to die.
Whatever the facts, Nellie jumped the railing and plunged into the rocky stream ten feet below. They found her broken body, the next day, by the mill dam a mile downstream. Amelia and Muriel learned with unashamed satisfaction that Nellie's master's leg was broken. Mrs. Earhart prepared a neighborly offering of food for him. Both little girls — white of face, but firm — refused to carry it over to his house.
Long years afterward, Amelia came upon a poem that she read to me. It was called The Broncho that Would Not Be Broken of Dancing, by Vachel Lindsay. When she finished reading, we both smiled and said: "Nellie!"
When she was a gangling pig-tailed kid of six, she and Muriel pridefully possessed a great shaggy dog of uncertain antecedents and temper. They called him, aptly enough, James Ferocious. Toward the world at large he was homicidally antisocial. With the little Earhart girls he was meek.
One day some big colored boys came and teased Ferocious, tethered by a chain in the back yard. A boy would step within range and, as the dog leaped at him, would jump back to safety. The fun was in seeing Ferocious jerked off his feet by the chain.
They tried to play the joke once too often. The chain broke. The boys, terrified by the snarling black fury, hoisted themselves quickly to the roof of a shed. At that moment AE came around the corner of the house.
"Look out!" they yelled. "He's mad! Mad dog!"
Ferocious, at war with the world, glared without recognition at this new person come to torment him. A low growl, and he charged the six-year-old child.
In later years many persons have singled out one quality in AE and called it courage. It was strong in her childish heart that day. She stood perfectly still where she had halted. "James Ferocious!" she chided mildly. "You've broken your chain and tipped over your water dish! You come right here."
The big dog recognized the voice. Still growling a little in his throat, he looked at her questioningly, then fell in beside her. If he was surprised, so were his tormentors; for AE turned a shrill reproof upon them for having teased the animal. They dropped from the shed silently, squeezed themselves through a slit in the fence, and never came back.
It was shortly after this incident that the Earharts moved to Des Moines. They were there seven years before, in 1911, circumstances brought about a complete upheaval of AE's life.
Her father's work as lawyer and railway claim agent kept him moving over the entire Rock Island system, and frequently his private car became the Earhart home. He had little respect for the then hard and fast rule that children must, at all costs, be kept in school. He took them out and gave them travel instead.
His irregular hours, his exacting work, and nights of broken sleep on trains finally caused him a nervous breakdown. Reluctantly he resigned his position, and for the first time in fifteen years tried to take a vacation.
From then on, life for the two girls was one change after another. In four years Amelia attended six different high schools; she was finally graduated from Hyde Park High School in Chicago. Perhaps it was just this frequent uprooting that developed in her the ease of manner and facility for making acquaintances which stood her in such good stead in later years.
Summer vacations were spent at Worthington, Minnesota, on the shores of a lake. The girls fished, rowed, swam, played tennis, and learned to ride Western style, with or without saddles.
AE, exhibiting even then an essential aloneness which was ever characteristic, often got up at five o'clock in the morning to practice diving by herself.
Characteristic of her, too, was her indifference to tangible honors. During her student days the Junior School arithmetic honors were within her grasp for two years. They were bestowed elsewhere.
"I don't care especially about the prize," she told a friend. "I know that I know how to get the answers just as well as the winner; so does the teacher know I knew. So what's the difference who has the medal?"
When later years brought fame she never bothered to read newspaper publicity about her deeds, and this seemed incomprehensible to many persons. Her attitude was:
"Why should I? I know I did it, and you know I did it. So what difference does it make?"
After Hyde Park, Amelia was sent to Ogontz School for Girls at Rydal, Pennsylvania, while Muriel went up to Toronto to attend St. Margaret's. Those who knew Amelia as a girl of eighteen at Ogontz recall her straightforward eager eyes, her poise, her reserve, and an insatiable curiosity that once made her protest because Ibsen's Doll's House was recommended reading while his stronger Ghosts was proscribed.
Both her purse and taste in those days urged her to dress simply. Though quiet and sensitive, she quickly assumed leadership when the faculty decided to disband secret societies; she sought to champion their existence. At the same time, she was enthusiastically recommending a book on America's needs as to labor's rights, and exhibiting marked sympathies for the underdog. One friend of her Ogontz days told me: "She was near-Socialist — or some adventuring new brand."
The world was at war and Amelia busily knitting her share of sweaters when she paid a visit to Muriel at Toronto during her vacation.
One day, walking down King Street, she saw four wounded soldiers hobbling toward her on crutches. A sharper picture of war burned into her consciousness, and she knew in that moment that she would not return to Ogontz. She joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps detachment at Toronto, and began a combination of duties at Spadina Military Hospital that included work as a volunteer nurse, driving the light hospital-supply lorries, and acting as assistant in the hospital's laboratory — work that helped whet her scientific curiosity.
At the end of this interlude she went to California, where her family had moved. She went one Sunday with her father to Long Beach, where an air meet was being held. The thought of flying intrigued her instantly. A pilot was idling near by. AE said to her father:
"Please ask him how long it takes to learn to fly."
Her father came back with the information that it took, as a rule, from five to ten hours.
"Did you ask him how much the lessons cost?"
"No, but I will." Another conference. "He says a thousand dollars. But why do you want to know?"
AE didn't have the answer to that question just then. But one day, from a field that was nothing more than an open space surrounded by oil wells, just off Wilshire Boulevard, Amelia Earhart took her first hop.
The pilot of that plane was the late Frank Hawks.
"As soon as we left the ground," AE later said, "I knew I had to fly by myself. Miles away, I saw the ocean ... the Hollywood hills smiled at me.... We were friends — the ocean, the hills, I."
She came home with gray eyes that sparkled. At supper she said casually, "I think I'll learn to fly."
Her father permitted himself a bit of gentle sarcasm.
"Good!" he exclaimed. "When do you start?"
With AE, to arrive at a decision was to start. The next day found her at Rogers Airport — the same one among the oil wells. There were a few pilots around who, returned from the war, were giving lessons. She promptly found some one to teach her, signed up, and returned home to see about the money. Her father assured her that he could not possibly afford it.
Determined, she got a clerical job with the telephone company. From then on, the family hardly saw her. She worked all week and spent the week-ends at the airport. She found a teacher called "Snooky" who was willing to give her instruction on credit.
Old-timers at the flying field were not quite sure whether Snooky was a man or a woman, for they seldom saw her dressed in anything but soiled coveralls, her red hair clipped short and her freckled face grimed. She was Neta Snook — the first woman to be graduated from the Curtiss School of Aviation. She had come to Rogers Airport bringing with her a couple of crates containing her yellow Canadian Curtiss (Canuck), and Frank Clark and some of the other boys then around the field had helped her assemble it, finding to their amazement that she had covered the plane's wings herself and had installed no drift wires inside. She never did bother to put them in — but somehow the plane held together.
Aviation in that era was a catch-as-catch-can business. America's first air meets had been held in 1910 at Dominguez Field, between Los Angeles and Long Beach, where the pick of the old-timers, many of whom AE came to know, had performed: pioneers like Glenn Curtiss, Louis Paulhan, Charlie Willard, Charlie Hamilton, Diddie Mason; Lincoln Beachey and Roy Knabenshue, flying dirigibles; Omar Locklear and Skeets Elliott, who spun to flaming death.
There was Dick Grace, too. He still recalls the look on AE's face the time she came out to Ebrites Field to watch him work on a Ruth Roland thriller.
Other old-timers, still flying today, were Ace Braguiner, G. G. Budwig, Eddie Bellandie, Frank Tomick, Doc Whitney, E. L. Remlin, and Waldo Waterman, who knew AE quite well.
Still others, their wings now folded in death, were Fred Hoyt, Ken Monte, Howard Patterson, Swede Meyerhoffer, B. H. DeLay, Al Wilson, and Bud Cruth.
Amelia took her first lessons — on credit — from Neta Snook. Neta turned her over for advanced instruction to John Montijo, an ex-army flyer. She paid for everything as she was able — and learning became a long-drawn-out process governed by jobs.
No job, no pay, no fly.
The day finally came when she was ready to solo. She took her plane up to 5,000 feet, played around a little, and landed. Now she must have a plane of her own.
Her mother helped her buy a secondhand plane. It was the only model the builder, a young man named W. G. Kinner, had. He was working, with almost no cash, to manufacture a small plane. In return for the use of her plane to demonstrate, he let her have hangar space.
Publication Date: March 11, 1939 – April 22, 1939