Amelia Earhart (2 page)

Amy was twenty-three when she came to Atchison for the birth of her first child, Amelia, a healthy, nine-pound girl born on July 24, 1897. The young mother’s first pregnancy had been terminated by a cable-car accident in Kansas City where she lived with her husband, Edwin Stanton Earhart. Pregnant again a few months later, Amy returned to her parents’ home in Atchison for her “confinement” and remained until the child was baptized on October 10. The baby was named Amelia for her maternal grandmother and Mary for her paternal grandmother, Mary Wells Earhart. A few days after the baptism, mother and child returned to Kansas City, twenty-two miles south of Atchison.

At seven and a half months, Amelia was
photographed in the arms of her Aunt Margaret. Wide-eyed and
plump, the child looked much like any other healthy infant of that age with one exception. Her hand, resting on Margaret’s sleeve, was neither chubby nor grasping, but fully extended, the fingers unusually long and slim.

The picture was taken at the Otis home where Amelia was to spend much of her childhood. The house stood on a bluff four hundred feet above the muddy, turgid waters of the Missouri River. In the summer, tall shade trees shielded it from the blazing sun, their leaves casting a pale green glow over sparkling white clapboard siding. Leading to the long front porch with its four pairs of tall wooden pillars was a paved walk guarded by two stone dogs. The fence Amelia loved to jump enclosed house, trees, walk, dogs, neatly trimmed shrubbery, and a green lawn at the south side of the house where a wrought iron stag-at-bay stared off into the distance.

Long before she entered school Amelia was familiar with all eleven rooms of the house on the bluff. She explored the drawing room where frock-coated men sat in oversized chairs discussing politics and business. She watched tightly corseted women in long gowns with bustles and leg-o’-mutton sleeves drink tea in the living room with its Tiffany lamps and horsehair sofa. At Thanksgiving and Christmas the table in the stately dining room was set with fine china and silver that glistened in the light cast by a crystal chandelier and the flames from the open fireplace were reflected in the curved, stained-glass windows. After grace was said, Grandmother Otis would orchestrate the serving of the food dispatched by the cook through a serving window to waiting maids.

The house mirrored the values and achievements of Alfred Otis, chief warden of the Trinity Episcopal Church, lawyer, retired U.S. District Court Judge, and president of the Atchison Savings Bank. Of his six children, Amelia’s mother, Amy, was his favorite. He had been bitterly disappointed when she married Edwin Earhart. Son of an impoverished Evangelical Lutheran minister who taught school, farmed, and carried out his ministry whenever and wherever he could, handsome, charming Edwin was raised in grinding poverty. He had worked for his education, shining shoes and building furnace fires and, later, tutoring less diligent students at the University of Kansas Law School. One of his pupils was Mark Otis, Amy’s brother, who invited Edwin to Atchison for Amy’s sixteenth birthday party, also the occasion of her formal presentation to society.
For Amy and Edwin, love occurred at first sight, but marriage did not. Five years passed before Edwin could meet the Judge’s minimal requirement—a monthly salary of fifty dollars in the claims department of the Rock Island Railroad’s office in Kansas City. The Judge provided a house in that city, furnished.

When Amelia reached school age, she was enrolled in the school her mother had attended, the College Preparatory School in Atchison; she lived with her grandparents while her parents remained in Kansas City. The headmistress, Sarah Walton, reported that Amelia “deduces the correct answer to complex arithmetic problems but hates to put down the steps by which she arrived at the results.”

Amelia was seldom intentionally disobedient but her impatience led to frequent clashes with authority. A gifted speaker, she annoyed the headmistress by arriving too late for an annual school contest in which she was to share with a classmate the complete recitation of an Horatian ode. When the headmistress demanded an explanation, Amelia said that she had promised to exercise a horse every day for some friends of her grandparents and thought she could ride first and get back in time to take over the second half of the ode. Too late to compete for the prize that would have been hers, Amelia said she was glad she knew all of the poem anyway.

On another occasion Amelia displayed that same reluctance to consult her elders before taking action. She was playing with her friend, Kathy Dolan, when she noticed a horse tied in front of a delivery cart parked down Second Street. The animal, Amelia told Kathy, was uncomfortable, its check rein tied much too high. She immediately crossed the street and lowered the rein just as the angry driver appeared. His scolding was accepted in stony silence.

Although often impatient, Amelia could be very tenacious. One afternoon she took a .22-caliber rifle her father had given her for Christmas and went to hunt rats in her grandfather’s barn. When she wounded one, she spent hours searching for it to deliver the
coup de grâce
. It was long after dinner before she succeeded and returned to the house. Her grandfather confiscated the gun, a penalty she accepted without protest. Charley, the Otis’s
handyman, observed that once “Meelie” decided to do something she would do it, regardless of the punishment.

Amelia was the undisputed leader of the neighborhood children. She decided who would be pitcher, catcher, or batter in any baseball
game. She taught a younger neighbor, Mary Elizabeth Campbell, to ride a bike and lent her her roller skates. She invited Mary Elizabeth and Kathy to lunch on a
private railroad car that Edwin Earhart was allowed to use even though he was merely an employee of the company’s claims department. The two girls were awed by the luxury of the appointments and the service by a white-jacketed Filipino.

Amelia’s favorite games were played with Muriel and
their two cousins, Lucy and Kathryn Challis, known as “Tootie” and “Katch,” who lived next door. Amelia wrote the scripts and they played out these adventures in an old carriage stored in the barn. In one, “The Pursuit of the Hairy Men,” the girls were pioneers traveling to an imaginary place. When attacked, the carriage became mired in mud or a wheel came off and the horses stampeded. While pursued, the girls would lash the horses and bang away with make-believe guns. Amelia sometimes chose actual places, all of them exotic. Africa was her favorite, the rivers Nile and Niger sufficiently mysterious, the Taureg and Swahili peoples satisfactorily ferocious.

Every summer Amelia went to Kansas City, a twenty-two-mile journey into a different world. She left the house directed by her wealthy, generous, but somewhat reserved grandfather for a second household headed by her idol—her tall, handsome, witty, loving father. Edwin Earhart was all of these, but he lacked the self-confidence and drive of his father-in-law. Bored and unhappy in his ill-paid job at the railroad, he was certain he had found a faster, easier road to fame and fortune by means of an invention, a holder for signal flags at the rear of railroad cars. In May of 1903, when Amelia was almost six, he left for Washington to secure a patent, financing the trip with money needed for property taxes on the Kansas City house. While he was in Washington, Amy received two messages in the mail. The first was the bill for delinquent taxes. The second, a letter from Edwin, revealed that a man from Colorado had filed a patent on an identical holder two years before. Assuring her he would be home soon, Edwin added, “
I must recount a feeling which I experienced as I walked past the glorious buildings which house our lawmakers and the great legal minds of the Supreme Court. I felt that I shall some day mount those marble steps in an official capacity or never again. Who knows?”

For Edwin, already forty-seven years old, it would be “never again.” Amy was both angry and frightened. To marry him she had defied the
father she loved, endured a delay of five years before the marriage, and after a few idyllic months, suffered a miscarriage. The house in Kansas City was a gift from her father. Money was a constant worry to her and the social status she had taken for granted was diminished by Edwin’s failure to earn a living. This latest defeat threatened to leave them bankrupt. To pay the taxes Edwin sold several valuable law books given him by his father-in-law, a sale inadvertently revealed to Otis by the buyer. The Judge was convinced that Edwin Earhart was a hopeless failure as a businessman, a husband, and a father.

Unaware of her father’s difficulties, Amelia spent a happy summer. In the late afternoons she waited for him to come home and play cowboys and Indians, which he did with gusto. During the day she explored unknown territory, cutting across the neighbors’ backyards. She planted a flower garden and, when a neighbor’s chickens invaded it, she designed a chicken trap from an empty orange crate with a hinged lid. When it worked she felt “
like a big game hunter.”

The following summer, when Amelia was seven, Edwin made one hundred dollars from legal work done outside the office. He promptly spent it all on a family excursion to the World’s Fair in St. Louis. The roller coaster with its serpentine track climbing and plunging, its cars filled with screaming, laughing passengers, fascinated Amelia. As soon as they returned to Kansas City, she began to build one of her own, aided by Muriel, neighborhood playmate Ralphie Morton, and her Uncle Carl, Amy’s brother.

They hauled lumber from a tool shed behind the house and nailed wooden tracks from the ridge pole of the shed down to the lawn below. A cart was constructed with buggy wheels to fit the tracks, which were greased with lard, and the cart was dragged up to the roof where Amelia lay on it, her feet held by Muriel until she gave the signal to let go. The first run ended in a crash landing, cart and rider hitting the ground well off the tracks. Amelia called for additional track for a more gradual descent. With this in place, the second run was a success. It was, Amelia said, “
just like flying.”

Amelia was ten in the summer of 1907 when Edwin was transferred by the railroad company to Des Moines, Iowa. He took Amy with him and the girls went back to their grandparents in Atchison, to remain until living quarters could be found. They stayed until September of 1909,
when they joined their parents in Des Moines. Without enough money to pay day school tuition for her daughters and worried by reports that pupils in the public school had lice, Amy hired a young widow, Florence Gardiner, to move in as governess. After Amelia and Muriel had endured a few months of French, poetry, music, and sampler stitching, their mother realized that the public school had to be accepted and Mrs. Gardiner was dismissed.

Amelia entered the seventh grade and Muriel the fourth, untroubled by fears of lice or the company of classmates less privileged than those of Atchison’s College Preparatory School. That summer they spent a month in Worthington, Minnesota, where Amelia had her first automobile ride and went fishing, boating, and swimming. She also attended the Iowa State Fair, where she saw her first airplane, six years after the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk. She was not impressed. “
It was a thing of rusty wire and wood. I was much more interested in an absurd hat made of an inverted peach basket which I purchased for fifteen cents,” she said.

A year later, when Edwin became head of the claims department, the family moved to another, larger house and Amy hired a maid. She also supplemented the public school education of her daughters with informal lessons of her own. While preparing a chicken, she taught anatomy and she encouraged both girls to bring home garden toads, spiders, stones, and wood, all to be used in informal lessons.

Although Edwin had been promoted and the Earharts seemed to enjoy a very comfortable standard of living, there was never enough money to meet expenses. Amy had never learned to economize and Edwin did no better. He bought a set of Kipling’s works for Amy on the installment plan, but after making the initial payment he had to ask Amy to meet the remaining ones out of her household funds. Past fifty, and ashamed that he could not provide a better living for his wife and children, Edwin began to drink.

In the fall of 1910 Amelia returned to school in Atchison, where she helped care for her ailing grandmother. Grandmother Otis died in February of 1912, leaving an inheritance of a half million dollars to her four living children, to be divided equally. Amy’s share was left in trust for twenty years or until the death of Edwin Earhart. Humiliated by the Otises’ obvious lack of trust in him, the handsome father whom Amelia
adored became a surly, drunken stranger to her, a man who released his fury in repetitive, caustic criticism of the Otises, the railroad, and Amy’s handling of household funds. Amy withdrew in silence, barely acknowledging his presence. Amelia and Muriel followed suit. The railroad fired him.

It was a year before Edwin found another job, this time as a clerk in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the freight office of the Great Northern Railway. The family moved in the spring of 1913 into a large but shabby rented house on Fairmont Street. A few days later a wealthy uncle of Amy’s paid them a formal call, an opening, Amy assumed, for familial introductions to St. Paul society. Always aware of her social position as an Otis, she expected him to propose Amelia for membership in the skating club or arrange for her attendance at the sub-debutante cotillion. However, after he had made polite inquiries about the Otises of Atchison and sipped his tea, he took his hat, cane, and gloves and departed. The snub was yet another step in Amy’s descent into unhappiness. It never occurred to her that if
the man had offered what she wanted for Amelia, she still would not have had the money to pay for club fees or a wardrobe for her daughter.

Edwin continued to make sporadic efforts to overcome alcoholism but lapsed again and again. On one occasion he rushed home with news that he was to leave immediately for the site of a railroad accident and to act as legal representative for the company if any passengers chose to file suit. When Amelia went to his room to pack his suitcase, she found a bottle of whiskey hidden among his socks. Edwin found her angrily emptying the bottle into the kitchen sink. He raised his arm to hit her when Amy stopped him. Pale and shaken, he begged Amelia to forgive him and promised he would stay sober. He did for a while, until he realized that the company was not going to promote him from clerking to a place in the legal department.