Amelia Earhart (19 page)

Amy redeemed herself momentarily by her public statements regarding Amelia’s marriage. Amelia wrote, thanking her for the interview she had given in Philadelphia and invited her to come and stay in the Putnams’ new apartment at 42 West 58th Street [the Wyndham Hotel] where she had “two canaries,” just as she had always wanted. She also told her mother that she had sent Muriel twenty-five hundred dollars so
that she could “move into a decent house,” and had asked Muriel to come to New York “before she becomes too tied down.”

Muriel was about to be “tied down” by a pregnancy of which Amelia disapproved because Muriel’s husband failed to give her an adequate household allowance. Amelia, who had given Muriel a book on birth control,
The Doctor’s Manual of Marriage
, when she married Albert had hoped Muriel might make use of it.

In April Amelia was still annoyed with her sister, complaining to Amy that Muriel had not sent her a properly drawn second mortgage: “I am not Scrooge to ask that some acknowledgement of a twenty-five hundred loan be given me. I work hard for my money. Whether or not I shall exact repayment is my business.”

While differences over money contributed to a growing gulf between Amelia and her mother and sister, her marriage brought a new and pleasant family relationship as stepmother to seventeen-year-old David Binney Putnam. The woman who had said she had always put off having a child, “
for the air races or something else,” proved an interested, understanding friend to David. Young Putnam, who visited his father more frequently than his nine-year-old brother did, had known Amelia since the summer of 1928 when she lived in Rye while writing
Twenty Hours Forty Minutes
. Her handsome, tall (six feet, three inches) stepson, an aviation enthusiast, admired Amelia’s courage and was fascinated by her boundless curiosity. “She was interested in everything and wanted to know about everything,” he said. He also thought her very attractive, “long-legged and graceful,” with “a lovely head, like a beautiful choirboy’s,” yet very feminine. “
She looked like a bag of bones in a bathing suit, she was so thin,” he said, “but she had beautiful clothes and she knew how to wear them. When she was all dressed up, she didn’t look like she had
tried
to be all dressed up.”

When Amelia wrote to Amy that she worked hard for her money she did not exaggerate. She was back at her desk the Monday morning after her marriage. G. P. thought skipping a honeymoon might reassure her that marriage would not
interfere with her career, and she reported to her mother, “
I am much happier than I expected I would ever be in this state.… Of course, I go on in the same way as before as far as business is concerned. I haven’t changed at all and will only be busier I suppose.”

One of her projects, the new Ludington airline, which was launched three months before her marriage as the nation sank into a deepening
financial depression, continued to demand time and effort. Bedridden the previous October with a severe throat infection, Amelia was on the road again for the airline by the first of November and at Thanksgiving reported to the
newspapers that
seats had been sold out for all stops for the two previous days. By January, business was not that good and manager Eugene Vidal, who had appointed her
vice-president in charge of traffic, switched her back to public relations, asking her to meet with the publicity staff once a week in Philadelphia and to handle all complaints and general contacts with the public. She did so and whatever else she could to generate free newspaper publicity for the airline. She took an eye test at the top of the
Empire State Building and commented on the impracticality of
parachutes for airline passengers after Will Rogers suggested it in his newspaper column. With little or nothing coming in from the airline she gave lectures to earn money, continued to write her column for
Cosmopolitan
, and was paid to endorse the
Franklin automobile, along with Lindbergh, Frank Hawks, and Donald Douglas.

In April she was elected vice-president of the
NAA, the first woman to become a national officer. However, there were by then 453 licensed women pilots, 39 of them with
transport licenses, and at least a half dozen better pilots than Amelia. In January, Bobbi Trout and Edna May Cooper set a new women’s
endurance-refueling record of 122 hours, 50 minutes. Already holder of two previous solo records, Trout had asked Amelia after the 1929 derby if she would like to partner an attempt at an endurance record that fall. Amelia said she would like to but was “just too busy.” Trout, who was certain she could fly any plane made, credited Putnam for keeping Amelia busy. “
If I had a promoter like Putnam,” she declared, “I could have done the things Amelia did.”

Amelia had other rivals.
Laura Ingalls, a licensed transport pilot and record-holding aerial acrobat, set a transcontinental speed record of 25 hours, 35 minutes in 1930. Twenty-year-old
Elinor Smith had set a women’s altitude record of 24,418 feet at Valley Stream, Long Island, in March of 1930 and narrowly escaped death (but not headlines) a year later when she tried again, losing consciousness and diving five miles before recovering in time to land.

Amelia’s most formidable rival was her friend and neighbor in Rye, handsome socialite Ruth Nichols. After Nichols bettered Smith’s altitude record on March 6, 1931, ascending to 28,743 feet, she broke Amelia’s speed record a month later in Detroit, flying 210.683 miles per hour. That
spring both Nichols and Ingalls were planning
solo transatlantic flights. Amelia needed something to keep herself in the news. She found it in an odd new aircraft—the autogiro.

Amelia was eager to fly this new ship, which could take off and land without a runway. Its Spanish inventor, Juan de la Cierva, claimed that if it were mass-produced it would bring flying safely to the suburbanite at a
price no higher than that of an average car. When his American partner, Harold F. Pitcairn, needed to create a market for this predecessor of the helicopter, it was G. P. who saw the opportunity for Amelia to demonstrate this spectacular oddity. The autogiro differed from the modern helicopter in that the four rotor blades over the pilot’s head were not motor-powered but turned when the aircraft moved forward, powered by a conventional motor-driven propeller at the front of the fuselage.

James G. Ray, Pitcairn’s chief test pilot, gave Amelia her first and only lesson at Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, at the company field in December, 1930. He flew her around the field for fifteen or twenty minutes, made two landings, and then climbed out. “Now,” he said, “you take it up.” She did, but she said later, “
I began to feel exactly as I had when I made my first solo in any airplane eleven years ago.” She was not certain “whether I flew it or it flew me.”

A week after their marriage, G. P. ordered one for her. There was a waiting line of
corporate buyers who saw the publicity value of the plane, among them the
Detroit News
, Coca-Cola, four oil companies, and the Beech-Nut Packing Company, producers of tinned foods and chewing gum.

While Amelia waited for her own plane, she flew for a few hours in the fourth aircraft made by the Pitcairn-Cierva Autogiro Company of America, Model PCA-2. By April she was ready to try for an
altitude record, which she insisted was only an attempt to “determine the aircraft’s ceiling.” Nevertheless, she arranged for NAA official Luke Christopher to bring a
sealed barograph from Washington and G. P. invited Movietone News, the wire services, and New York newsmen to cover it.

Watched by five hundred spectators on April 8 she ascended to 18,000 feet but she was not satisfied. “I’m going to try again,” she said. After most of the crowd had gone home she made a second, three-hour attempt, returning at dusk. The NAA barograph showed 18,415 feet, an autogiro record for men and women. Actually, no one had tried it before. For Pitcairn’s benefit she told reporters that the plane was a “standard
job,” with a regulation three hundred-horsepower Wright Whirlwind
engine, an aircraft identical to the one she had ordered.

Soon after, she cancelled her order when Beech-Nut offered her theirs (serial number B-12) for a
transcontinental flight. Although she was hospitalized for a tonsillectomy in late April and wrote to Amy that she was “almost inarticulate,” with “
knees a bit wobbly,” she started the flight on May 29 from Newark. She was accompanied by a mechanic, Eddie de Vaught. At the helm of this giant and fragile grasshopper leaping its way across the country, she needed to take off and land as often as ten times a day. Every time she did she reinforced her identity as America’s “Lady Lindy” by the best means possible—the personal appearance.

At that time none of the media could match a personal appearance.
Radio coverage was still poor and newsreels so primitive that even the president of the United States had to be asked to repeat his lines for retakes. At every stop Amelia acquired more admirers, as she lifted up children to see the cockpit, shook hands with spectators, and gave interviews to local reporters.

When she stopped in Zanesville, Ohio, for fuel the interview was given beside the bright green plane. Sitting on the grass she fashioned a ring from a daisy for a little girl while she answered the questions of a reporter who asked if she had always been so thin. She said she had, that she weighed 119 pounds and was trying to gain after a tonsillectomy. Although her face was raw from sunburn and her nose peeling, she was described as small-boned, delicate, and very feminine. Her voice, the reporter wrote, was musical, her manners, “quiet and refined.” About her marriage she said, “I have stopped off once in marriage and I intend to live always with him for I think one husband is enough. I will never leave him.”

Since writing her prenuptial views for G. P., she had either tempered them or knew what Zanesville’s citizens wanted to hear. When she landed there again on her return flight she reinforced local opinion that she was a genuine American heroine—brave, intelligent, well-mannered, modest, cheerful, and interested in Zanesville. Ralph Lane and his wife and three children who lived near the field offered her and mechanic de Vaught lunch while they waited for a fuel delivery. In a house without a bathroom Amelia washed her hands in a basin and, after the meal, helped with the dirty dishes. She also gave the children a carton of gum.

Not all of the stops were in small towns. On June 3 thousands of
admirers jammed the streets of Denver to see her fly over the city. She arrived at eight in the morning from Cheyenne, where she had left de Vaught with tools and luggage, so that the passenger seat would be available for guest rides. Her schedule, arranged by the Women’s Aero Association, included a quick breakfast at the Brown Palace Hotel before returning to the airport where she took off and landed four times, “
a sandy-haired goddess” whose ship “jumped from the ground like a scared rabbit … over the heads of the awe-stricken crowd.”

She knew how to “work a crowd.” A year later her mother received a letter from Denverite Fannie Kaley who wrote: “
One of the happiest moments of my life was when I met your wonderful daughter in Denver and shook hands with her, the time she came in her autogiro.”

Amelia crossed the continent in nine days, arriving on June 6 in
Oakland, where fans broke through the barriers to see her. She had not set a record. Professional pilot
John Miller had been first to cross the country two weeks before her. For a record she would have to make a round trip, which she did, returning by a southern route.

On the way back Amelia had her first
accident in the autogiro, at Abilene, Texas, on June 12. When she failed to rise quickly enough on takeoff the plane dropped thirty feet, hitting two cars and damaging its rotor and propeller. “The air just went out from in under me,” she said. “Spectators say a whirlwind hit me. I made for the only open space available.” Ever mindful of the plane’s builder, who dispatched a second giro to her immediately, she added, “With any other type of plane the accident would have been more serious.”

That was probably true but the autogiro was neither a safe nor easy-to-fly plane. Amelia’s friend, Blanche Noyes, who was hired to fly one for an oil company, scoffed at Pitcairn’s claim that “a ten-year-old boy” could fly it. Blanche said that the trial ship was called the
Black Maria
by pilots because almost all of them cracked up in it. “
I think ten hours was the longest any pilot flew it without cracking it up,” she said.

In Abilene Amelia stayed with Mr. and Mrs. D. H. Oldham, Jr., who received a belated thank you note in which she referred to the accident as “nothing, really,” and added, “
You might be interested to know that
five or six hours
[her emphasis] after I turned the second giro over to the regular pilot he cracked it on landing.” The second giro had been rushed to Oklahoma City where Amelia told members of the Lions Club that the
accident was not a “crash.” “
I came down where I could do as little damage as possible,” she said.

The Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce
^‡
did not agree with her. It issued a formal
reprimand for “carelessness and poor judgment.” R. W. Delaney, their inspector at Abilene, made the report.
Amelia, who was in Tulsa when the story broke, insisted that she had to land where she did to avoid hitting spectators and claimed the inspector had never flown an autogiro or even seen one in flight.

She did not mention the accident in a magazine article published in mid-July but did admit the trip was tiring. The
crowds, she wrote, came to see the plane, not the pilot, but the autogiro could not talk, eat chicken, make radio speeches, or be interviewed. She had flown nineteen days out of twenty-one, was airborne an average of five hours each day, and gave exhibition flights along the way.

She was tired but she needed the money, so when Beech-Nut offered it, G. P. booked her for two more tours, the first of them to begin on August 12. “
Here I am,” she wrote to a friend, “jumping through hoops just like the little white horse in the circus!”

Young
Jim Weissenberger, who was attending a school picnic in Toledo, watched the autogiro descend in a nearby field. He was wide-eyed when Amelia climbed out, her white silk scarf blowing in the wind. Pointing to the interurban tracks she asked, “Young man, do these tracks go to Cleveland?” He assured her they did, then watched the plane until it disappeared over the horizon before he ran back to tell his classmates he had actually seen Amelia Earhart.