Amelia Earhart (20 page)

The third time she stopped at Zanesville she took reporter Clair Stebbins for a ride. Before they took off, he was asked to sign away his rights to sue in the event of an accident. “
If any death warrants are to be signed,” Stebbins wrote, “they couldn’t be issued under more desireable circumstances.”

Amelia cracked up the autogiro a second time at the Michigan State Fair in Detroit on September 12. She was attempting a slow landing near the grandstand when she failed to level off soon enough and dropped twenty feet to the ground, not unlike the slammer she made in a glider at the 1929 air races, also in front of the grandstand. The aircraft went into a
ground-loop before coming to rest in a cloud of dust. Amelia emerged smiling, but G. P., who had accompanied her on this second tour and who sprinted toward the scene, tripped over a guy wire, crushing his ribs and spraining his ankle. While he was hospitalized in Detroit she went on to another county fair in Saginaw.

Amelia wrote to Amy that the second crash was a freak accident in which the landing gear gave way from a defect: “
G. P. fell over a wire running to pick me up and as he limped up I said, ‘It was all my fault,’ meaning he was hurt. The papers got it that I said the crack was mine which isn’t accurate.” With the exception of her crash in the Vega at Norfolk Amelia had yet to admit that any crackup was her fault.

On a
third tour through the South, in November, she spent two to four days in each of almost a dozen cities. Between these tours Amelia worked on other projects—lectures (from which she derived most of her income), magazine articles, and her job with Ludington which was now only part-time after the airline failed to win an airmail contract. After her re-election as vice-president of the NAA on July 23, she dashed to New York to meet aviation enthusiast
King Prajadhipok of Siam (now Thailand) at Yankee Stadium, a typical Putnam arrangement. Back in Washington the next day, she was photographed with President Hoover and NAA president Hiram Bingham, who had pleaded her cause to the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce after officials threatened to ground her for ninety days for the Abilene crash. He won the lesser
penalty, a formal reprimand.

Amelia was never too busy to help her colleagues find work in aviation. In September of 1931 she was elected president of the Ninety-Nines, which continued to lack both structure and enough members. She recruited new members, wrote to old members, started work on a constitution, bargained for optional coverall uniforms and membership pins, and contributed to the newsletter.

Never a joiner, she accepted membership in only two other women’s organizations, Zonta International, and the Society of Woman Geographers, an adventurous, learned group whose members were called “my gang” by anthropologist Margaret Mead. Society president Harriet Chalmers Adams, welcoming Amelia in a letter wrote: “
Tell Mr. Putnam that the book I was writing … was sidetracked when I broke my back in 1926. As soon as I got up, after two and a half years, I went to Arabia and Libia [sic] for the National Geographic; and to Ethiopia last year … [A]s
soon as I ‘get over’ being President … I hope to get to work on the belated record of my adventures.”

In a year during which Amelia succeeded with most of her projects, she still could not resolve Amy and Muriel’s financial problems. She strongly disapproved of Muriel’s having a second child in a marriage she considered to be miserable. After her advice on birth control was ignored, she referred to Muriel’s pregnancy as the “second coming,” and hoped, she told Amy, that Muriel would have learned enough about anatomy to prevent “further trials for a while.” She wrote to Amy: “Why don’t you suggest to her that Albert go to Dr. Rock and get a little information? Surely if Pidge can’t manage things it is important for him to do so.… I think he should share the mechanics of being a husband.”

Amelia was also annoyed with her mother, who continued to give most of her allowance to Muriel. “I am not working to help Albert, nor Pidge, much as I care for her. If they had not had that money [given them by Amy] perhaps they would have found means to economize before.” Amelia’s solution was to send Amy half of her allowance of one hundred dollars a month (the equivalent of fifteen hundred dollars today). She banked the other half in Amy’s name. Amy countered with the suggestion that she pay the Morrisseys for her room and board, but Amelia said this was “unthinkable” when Amy did all the housekeeping.

Amelia was not heartless. Theodore, or “Theo,” Amy’s brother who was retarded, had been bilked twice—once by his brother, Mark, who had also lost some of Amy’s inheritance, and again by Margaret Balis who borrowed Theo’s life savings of two thousand dollars and died leaving nothing in her estate to repay him. Amelia was disgusted. “No enemies could have treated him worse than his own
family,” she wrote. She would send him a check every month until Margaret’s son, Mark Ed Balis, “a good boy,” sorted out matters.

The grim caretaker of family finances was a different person in the company of colleagues, an uninhibited, often exuberant companion. Early in 1931 she met with two of her closest friends and rivals, Ruth Nichols and Louise Thaden, at Nichols’s house in Rye to draw up a constitution for the Ninety-Nines. All three women were in their thirties. Thaden, married to aeronautical designer Herbert von Thaden, was her husband’s business partner. Nichols, ex-banker, airplane salesperson, and organizer of the Long Island Aviation Country Club, was already planning a solo transatlantic flight. But when they finished their work on the
constitution they had a wrestling match, described by Nichols: “Probably as the result of the strain of our labors, we three had a grand rough house in my room and on the beds to see who was the strongest physically. As I recall, Louise was able to pin both Amelia and myself down. It certainly was a circus.”

Sir Harry Brittain, English balloonist and visiting representative of the British Chamber of Commerce on Air Transport, met with Amelia in 1931. She invited him to tea at the Putnam apartment in the Wyndham Hotel, where the telephone rang constantly while she was trying to make the tea. Seeing she had to take the calls in the adjoining room, Sir Harry offered to do it for her:

For the “great lass” 1931 had been a good year, the best part of it still a secret. She was planning the most important project of her life—a solo transatlantic flight.

O
n a January morning in 1932 Amelia Earhart lowered the morning paper she had been reading at the breakfast table and asked G. P., “
Would you mind if I flew the Atlantic?” She knew he would not. No one knew better than he that aviation celebrities were as well known as their last record and Amelia’s last was her round trip in the autogiro. Soloing the Atlantic had been done by only one person—Lindbergh. Amelia could achieve two “firsts.” She could be the first woman to fly it alone and the first person to cross it twice in a heavier-than-air craft.

Even more than records Amelia wanted collegial respect. For four years she had faced repeated insinuations that she was not a
competent professional. Eight pilots had crossed since the
Friendship
’s flight, none of them alone. Two who had tried it solo were lost. Four with partners had also died. But, Amelia said, failure and death could be avoided by meticulous planning and total
concentration. And the Atlantic solo would silence her critics.

Only four persons knew of the project. G. P. was the first. The next to be told was Bernt
Balchen, Arctic flier and transatlantic pilot for Byrd, who agreed to refit and test the Vega for her. Repaired in September 1930 after her accident in Norfolk, the plane was rebuilt a year later into a Vega 5B by the Detroit Aircraft Corporation. The fuselage was scrapped and
replaced with one from another Vega, serial number 68, but the original serial number, 22, was retained. Painted a deep red with trim striping in gold and black, the plane was then chartered to Ludington Airlines. It was released by Ludington on March 5, 1932, registered as NR7952 by Amelia and turned over to Balchen. Just as the curious had supposed the
Friendship
was intended for Byrd’s Antarctic expedition in 1928, they now assumed that Amelia’s Vega was to be used by Balchen in a transarctic flight with Lincoln Ellsworth.

The third person to know Amelia’s plan was Balchen’s assistant, Edward “Eddie” Gorski, formerly master mechanic for Anthony H. G. Fokker before Fokker moved his plant from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, six miles from New York on the other side of the Hudson. Stocky, blond, blue-eyed Balchen and the slim, wiry, twenty-six-year old Gorski worked on the Vega in an empty hangar at Teterboro. They strengthened the fuselage to hold a large auxiliary fuel tank and added more tanks to the wings, increasing the fuel capacity to 420 gallons and the flying range to thirty-two hundred miles. They installed a new Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine, Number 3812, and shortened the
exhaust stacks. Maj. Edwin Aldrin, father of astronaut “Buzz” Aldrin, was asked to supervise the
fuel supply.

To test the Vega, the two men flew it for hours loaded with sandbags to simulate the weight of the fuel. “
We couldn’t land with all that weight,” Gorski said, “so I pushed the sandbags out while Bernt flew back and forth over the Jersey meadowlands.… People thought we were dropping bombs.”

Additional instruments were added, a drift indicator and three compasses—an aperiodic, a magnetic, and a directional gyro. Amelia spent hours with Balchen learning all she could about flying solely on instruments, for she and Balchen both knew that the weather over the Atlantic, which was always treacherous, might require more “
blind flying” than she had ever done.

On an April Sunday when Balchen had come over from his home in Hasbrough Heights to Rye for lunch and a game of croquet, Amelia put down her mallet and asked him, “Am I ready to do it? Is the ship ready?”

Balchen said she was and it was.

That night Amelia told the fourth and last person, her cousin,
Lucy Challis, who had come to stay at the house in Rye in January. Lucy was
in the kitchen with G. P. and
Amelia, stirring cocoa for their Sunday night supper while G. P. and Amelia fixed eggs and toast.

“Can you keep a secret?” Amelia asked her.

“Of course.”

Amelia continued to slice bread while she spoke. “I’m—I’m going to fly the Atlantic again. Alone.”

Amelia guarded her secret with a hand that proved quicker than the public’s eye—or those of her colleagues. She appeared to be as busy as ever, constantly on the move, giving lectures, being interviewed, maintaining a voluminous correspondence even after her secretary, Norah Alstrulund, left for a trip to South America in April. As late as May 6 she wrote to the regional governors of the Ninety-Nines, suggesting that the
annual meeting be held on August 30 and listing room rates for three different hotels in Cleveland.

Amelia was busy but waiting, waiting for the go-ahead from Doc Kimball, the New York
weatherman regarded by transatlantic fliers as their most reliable adviser. All during April and the first half of May he had nothing but bad news. One veteran pilot,
Louis T. Reichers, who ignored Kimball’s advice was forced down seventeen miles off the coast of Ireland. He survived, plucked from the stormy sea by Amelia’s old friend, Harry Manning from the
Roosevelt
. Reichers’s plane was a Lockheed Altair, holding one hundred more gallons of gasoline than Amelia’s Vega with an engine rated at fifty more horsepower. One editorial writer commented that if an aviator as experienced as Reichers failed, his experience should impress others. It did not impress Amelia.
^*

Every day she drove the thirty miles from Rye to Teterboro in the hopes the weather would turn and every night she came back. G. P. told his friend Walter Trumbull that he could no longer sleep nights, but Amelia did. On May 17 she told her neighbor Ruth Nichols, who was also planning a transatlantic flight, that one had to take chances on long-distance flights, “
so I don’t bother to go into all the possible accidents that might happen. I just don’t think about crackups.”

The next day Amelia was at Holmes Airport in New York City, christening the new Goodyear
dirigible,
Resolute
, while newsreel cameramen
photographed her and a group of women pilots. Twenty-four hours later, she was on her way.

On May 19, after driving to Teterboro, Amelia called G. P. who was with Doc Kimball in New York. G. P. told her that at 11:30 that morning the weather was good as far as Harbor Grace. She drove home and picked up her flying suit, two scarves, a comb, a toothbrush, a thermos of soup, and a tin of tomato juice. Wearing jodhpurs, a white silk shirt, and a leather jacket, she raced back to Teterboro, arriving at 3:30. G. P. was waiting at the field with his friend, Dr. Lawrence Gould, the Byrd Antarctic explorer whose work he had published, and Mrs. Gould. Gould noticed that when Balchen taxied the plane for takeoff and Amelia waved from the cockpit window, no one at the field seemed to take any notice of her
departure.