Amelia Earhart (24 page)

Amelia and George Palmer Putnam shortly after their marriage in February 1931. (
Source:
Marcia-Marie Canavello)

Amelia greeting film star Mary Pickford, the honored guest, at a Fourth of July celebration during the 1933 National Air Races in Los Angeles. (
Source:
Trans World Airlines)

The avid amateur airplane mechanic was fascinated by all mechanical devices not just airplanes. (
Source:
Office of Public Information, Lockheed-California Company)

The power, speed, and beauty she loved, in the air or on the ground, are all here in her new, twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E and elegant 1936 Cord Phaeton. (
Source:
Office of Public Information, Lockheed-California Company)

The original plan for the ’round-the-world flight, from Oakland westward. In her second attempt she reversed directions, flying east from Oakland to Miami, leaving the Pacific stretch last. (
Source:
Office of Public Information, Lockheed- California Company)

With Amelia, in one of the last informal photographs taken of her, is Lily MacIntosh, whose husband W. Bruce MacIntosh took Amelia and navigator Fred Noonan fishing off the Miami coast. (
Source:
Clinton and Marian Morrison)

At the Karachi airport with navigator Fred Noonan. (
Source:
Margaret Haviland Lewis)

Front page of the Chicago
Herald and Examiner
, Monday, July 5, 1937.

Amelia not only needed and wanted work for herself, she looked for jobs and wrote letters of recommendation for her colleagues. Before networking among women began, she was trying to make the
Ninety-Nines a central exchange of information on the qualifications of its members and job opportunities. During the National Air Races in August of 1932, when she was re-elected president of the organization, she spent hours in her hotel room writing proposals and letters to enlarge and strengthen it.

She also helped individual members in any way she could. When
Nancy Hopkins Tier, who had competed in the 1930 races, had neither a plane nor even a pass to the field in 1932, Amelia gave Tier her pass, remarking with a grin that she thought she could get in without it.

Amelia proposed that the Ninety-Nines have a magazine with Clara Trenckman Studer, a newspaper reporter who had lost her job at Curtiss Wright in a depression cutback, as editor. Amelia would pay her salary until the magazine could raise it through advertisements.

She also found work for
Helen Weber, another woman fired by Curtiss Wright, first at Ludington Airlines as her temporary assistant and later as co-author, with G. P., of a boy’s book. In 1932, when Weber was recuperating from surgery, she was the Putnams’ houseguest and in November of that year Amelia hired her as her secretary.

Amelia certainly needed one. In a letter to Clara Studer on November 11, Weber gave a vivid picture of Amelia’s work while she was based at Rye:

On Friday she was in Portland, Maine, and on Saturday, in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Life was even more hectic when she left Rye for the lecture circuit. She flew when the weather permitted, drove at other times, often alone and at night, and took trains under protest. In the last half of October she was based in Chicago and ranged as far west as Lawrence, Kansas, and Des Moines, Iowa, as far north as Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Marquette, Michigan. After a week at home she spent most of November and December on the road again, often with two
lectures booked for the same day. Along with the lectures, there were autographing sessions in book stores to promote sales of
The Fun of It
.

When she drove she took her favorite car, the big, powerful, black Franklin sedan that G. P. claimed handled like a truck. After taking it to Chicago for a lecture to more than one thousand 4-H Club members, she became so ill with either influenza or food poisoning that she had to leave it in Cleveland a day later. The next day she was flown from Cleveland to Erie, Pennsylvania, where a Ninety-Nine friend, Helen Richey, met her and took her to Williamsburg for her next lecture. A day later she gave two in Detroit before moving on to Cincinnati. Richey again met her and drove her, in the Franklin, to Johnstown, where Amelia had to insist to an eager arrangements committee that she could not join them for coffee but had to have a rest before giving both afternoon and evening lectures. On December 6 she was in Ithaca, on the eighth, in Springfield, Massachusetts, to speak at a luncheon along with Dr. Mary Woolley, president of Mt. Holyoke College. That night she made a network broadcast. On the ninth she was back in Cleveland and on the tenth, in Detroit.

Returning to Cleveland to pick up her car, Amelia drove to Greenville, Pennsylvania, to receive an honorary degree from her father’s alma mater, Thiel College. She left early the following day in a blinding sleet storm for Toronto. After returning to Rye for forty-eight hours, on December 17, she gave another National Geographic Society lecture in
Washington. Although she still needed at least fifteen minutes alone before each appearance to prepare for the ordeal, once on stage she spoke with the assurance and grace of a professional actress.

The same assurance was reflected in changing personal relationships. At thirty-five, with no children of her own and no desire to have any, Amelia displayed genuine affection for her nineteen-year-old stepson. She kept open house for his friends and pleaded his cause when he aroused G. P.’s fearsome temper, a fairly frequent occurrence. A handsome, intelligent youth, David was cheerfully impetuous, breaking enough rules to warrant several changes of boarding schools. While he was in California with his father and Amelia, she arranged a job for him with
Paul Mantz, stunt man, master pilot, owner of an aviation garage at Burbank, and choreographer of the dog fights in Howard Hughes’s great war film,
Hell’s Angels
.

Mantz also gave young Putnam flying lessons. After only a few weeks of instruction, David soloed “in a Kinner Fleet, a hot stunt plane in those days.” Practical joker Mantz did not make it easy for the young explorer and author. To a crowd waiting to see a Mexican Olympic team arrive at the field, Mantz announced over the public address system, “You will now see a young American make his first flight.” Mantz rattled the novice for a moment, but David pulled himself together, took off and soloed successfully, receiving his license not long after.