Amelia Earhart (34 page)

From the West Coast Amelia wrote to
Amy that they had rented a house in Hollywood for one year and she would stay there but did not know when G. P. would return from New York where book and picture negotiations were keeping him. “
We are still hoping,” she wrote, “to get to Wyoming for July and August.”

They did not. Exhausted by three long-distance flights and three lecture tours in six months Amelia was hospitalized with a severe sinus infection. On June 25, the day after her last lecture, she entered Cedars of Lebanon Hospital for
surgery. She told her mother she was “tired of being beaten up with washings out” (in which a syringe was used to pump a solution into the atrium to flush out the debris of suppurating tissue which then drained from the patient’s mouth. The alternative was surgery to enlarge or correct blocked nasal passages for normal drainage).

From the hospital she went to the Oceanside ranch of G. P.’s friends, the Louis Lightons, to recuperate. She was bedridden there when a backache she assumed was caused by a strained muscle was actually
pleurisy. When G. P. arrived on the Fourth of July she was still in bed with her ribs strapped, but her nose was healing.

Illness did not prevent her from giving more advice than her mother wanted about where Amy should spend her vacation. Amelia had already sent $250 for a three-week stay at a resort—“not a cheap hotel,” and Amy was not to go any place where she had to do housework. Amy went where she pleased, to an inexpensive place in Rockport, Massachusetts, taking Muriel and the children with her. Amelia gave up and sent more money for another week after Amy said they planned to leave on July 15.

While they were at the Lightons, G. P. persuaded the editor of the
Oceanside paper to print extra copies with an article he had written on the front page:

G. P. was in high spirits. Amelia was on the mend and he had just received news of the
birth of his first grandchild on July 6, a daughter born to his son David and wife Nilla. However Putnam’s announcement to the press said more about Amelia than it did about Baby Binney, starting with “Amelia Earhart is now a grandmother.” He noted that the twenty-one-year-old father was a dispatcher for the Boston and Maine Airways of which Amelia was a vice-president, and that Amelia would soon begin work on her third book.

Three weeks after her operation, Amelia was
photographed with three other Lockheed owners at the Lockheed plant. Her Vega was being remodeled nearby at the Union Air Terminal into a pleasure craft by Paul Mantz.
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A reporter who saw her go to a corner of the hangar between photo sessions took a picture of her “sitting on a pile of rags … permitting her tired eyes a few minutes rest.”

She looked terrible but nothing could keep her away from the Union Air Terminal after she decided to lease the Vega to Mantz. She would receive 50 percent of the profits from it until the first two thousand dollars for its repairs was paid. After that, revenue from it would go into a corporation that would include Mantz’s maintenance and movie stunt services, his fleet of planes for charter and a new Earhart-Mantz Flying
School. They also wanted to stage an air circus in September. The restless Putnam was soon drawn into their plans and bought a house in the Lake Toluca district on July 28, minutes before he boarded a plane for New York.
^f
There he prepared news releases and advertising copy for the most recent Earhart franchise, Amelia Earhart
luggage.
^g

G. P. also sent a contract to Mantz for the incorporation of
United Air Services, Ltd., which gave Mantz a controlling interest of 51 percent of the stock to be issued, but made Amelia the other principal shareholder and a member of the board of directors. Along with a payment of ninety-five hundred dollars Amelia’s chief contribution was the use of her name. The agreement required that both Amelia and Mantz put part of their stock in escrow along with written instructions so that in case either died the deposited stock would go to the survivor or survivor’s heirs.

The assumption that a partner might die was not unusual for pilots at the time. A few days later in Washington where Amelia was in the Capitol building with Sam Solomon they heard that Wiley
Post and Will
Rogers had just been killed in a
crash at Point Barrow, Alaska.
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Amelia was visibly shaken. “There was something in her reaction,” Solomon said, “that made me feel she had a
premonition of her own end.”

Just eleven days before his death Rogers had written a column for his 40 million readers in which he said, “
This Amelia, she would be great in any business.… The thing I like about her is that she always has a fine word to say about all other aviators.”
ⁱ

Amelia liked Ro
gers but her feelings for
Post were much deeper. Although she had always avoided discussing the death of colleagues in accidents, she wrote an obituary for Post in the
Forum and Century
that was both sensitive and sentimental. In it she said:

Back in California by the end of August Amelia decided to fly the Bendix air race before her nine-month lecture tour. She wired G. P. in New York, “Paul and I in Bendix entered for fun since ship only stock model.”

Mantz thought she could place fifth in her aging plane for a prize of five hundred dollars, which would pay expenses. Amelia flew most of the way while mechanic Al
Menasco and Mantz sat in the back playing gin rummy and sharing a pint of whiskey. “Amelia couldn’t smell it back there,” said Mantz. They
came in fifth, as Mantz had predicted. The next day police had to be summoned to protect her from autograph hunters who stormed the grandstand where she sat.

On the return trip G. P. joined her, Mantz, and Menasco. While Paul flew the Vega, Amelia noted in her private log that men liked to have a male confederate fly. “
It is my ship, …” she wrote, “but when principal is not at stake, I let them have their way.”

The
fall lecture tour began a month later. In 1935 Amelia was on stage 135 times, before audiences totaling more than eighty thousand. At three hundred dollars a performance, the lectures not only provided her principal income but also gave her the chance to air her convictions about commercial aviation, equal rights for women, and pacifism. On stage she entertained with stories of her own flights, then closed with a pitch for commercial air travel.

Her insistence that it was safe and convenient was justified. But air travel was far from comfortable. Planes flew at less than two hundred miles an hour in altitudes under ten thousand feet, their closed cabins occupied by passengers who were frequently airsick. However, Amelia predicted a great
future for aviation, with stratospheric flights “bringing nations to the physical status of neighbors.” At one time she criticized the lack of coordination of transportation in the United States, saying that
Russia—“the new, young Russia—is already ahead of us in some ways as far as aviation is concerned.” But Amelia changed her tune at Senate hearings in August on a bill putting airlines under the control of the Interstate Commerce Commission, giving the
ICC power to require certificates of convenience and necessity for scheduled airlines. This was going too far. She recommended competition, “and let the best survive.” The admirer of “the new Russia” was not ready for state control.

Offstage, through newspaper and magazine interviews she aired her other views. She continued to advocate the military draft for women, combining pacifism with feminism as she declared, “To kill, to suffer, to be maimed, wasted, paralyzed, impoverished … to die ‘gloriously.’ There is no logic in disqualifying women from such privileges.” If women were strong enough to scrub offices, stand at washtubs, and work fields, she said, then they were strong enough to fight.
She
planned to go to jail along with traitors, cowards, and other conscientious objectors.

At
Chatauqua she told an audience of five thousand that a woman was flying a regular airmail schedule. The pilot was her friend,
Helen Richey, who flew for Central Airlines, the only woman of 72 with transport licenses piloting for a scheduled airline carrying mail. That was in August. Three months later Richey resigned. Although she said she left in “a very friendly spirit,” Amelia claimed otherwise, accusing the all-male airline pilots’ union of ignoring Richey’s application for membership, which she needed to keep her job. The Department of Commerce did not permit a nonunion member to fly passengers in bad weather. Richey confirmed Amelia’s statements.

Amelia once said that she
never took a man along on a recordbreaking flight because even if he slept all the way, when he crawled out of the plane he would be credited for the flight. But she soon reverted to less militant speech regarding Richey. In thanking Clarence Chamberlin for
defending Richey, she said that her initial statement was “premature” and she had intended to wait for a ruling from the Air Line Pilots Association as to admission of woman pilots before commenting. Convinced that the carrot was more effective than the stick, she advised Mabel Britton, president of the Ninety-Nines, to include stories in the newsletter about individuals and companies giving opportunities to women. There was no need to be “
terribly feministic,” only to “show a little character.”

As a career counselor at Purdue, Amelia distributed a questionnaire that anticipated present-day
problems of career women. If the woman
student intended to work and her husband agreed to become the home-maker, would she consider his work the financial equivalent of hers? Amelia favored shared housework for working couples but had doubts about careers for mothers of young children. When she told Muriel “
there was never enough time” to have a child, she did not mean the pregnancy itself but the need of the child for full-time mothering. With this exception she assured her students they could be physicians instead of nurses, business executives instead of secretaries. At the same time she warned them that they would have to face
discrimination, legal and traditional.

She also warned them that sexual attraction was often mistaken for love and was not enough to preserve an incompatible marriage. “
Surely we must have something more to contribute to marriage than our bodies,” she said. “We must earn true respect and
equal rights from men by accepting responsibility.”

At
Purdue she lived in a women’s dormitory, where she often sat after dinner, elbows on the table, chin resting in cupped hands, listening intently to the students. When they began to imitate her, the dean of women, Dorothy C. Stratton, told them to sit up and get their elbows off the table. “If Miss Earhart can do it,” one asked, “why can’t we?”

“You can,” Stratton answered, “as soon as you fly the Atlantic.”

The townspeople of Lafayette were not as impressed as students with this woman who was the first to wear slacks “downtown.”
^j
Her defenders replied that she was glamorous, chic, and very feminine.

One of the students, nineteen-year-old
Frances Merrit, said she was afraid of the tall, slim women in impeccably tailored slacks and mink coat until Amelia spoke to her. “She talks right into your eyes and you forget who she is,” Merrit said, “… and when she goes by in that car of hers and waves I feel like somebody.”

Another student,
Marian Frazier, whose room was next to Amelia’s, thought their mentor did not get enough sleep. “I hear her typewriter clear up to midnight.” Frazier was right. By April of 1936 Amelia had worked and traveled at a frantic pace for eighteen months. Amy, who was living in the new Hollywood house, said that after each lecture and
question-and-answer period “thoughtless” people would hold a reception for her. “
She came home dead tired, saying to me, ‘No talkee, Mother. My cocoa and good night’ … One look at her face was enough.”

Amy understood Amelia’s need for rest and privacy but Muriel did not. She wanted to give a
dinner in a restaurant for friends in Boston while Amelia was in the area. Amelia wrote that she and G. P. would be glad to eat at Muriel’s house “with
just the family
,” and if Muriel would let her pay, to hire a maid to help. G. P. told Amy that “for self-protection she simply has to be hard-boiled about getting away … this is a problem repeated two and three times every day for the last few months.”

Amelia seldom showed her fatigue to the public or press. After a lecture in
Zanesville where the high school auditorium was so noisy she had to shout until the audience settled down, she was uncharacteristically short with a reporter who asked a question when she had left the stage. “Why didn’t you ask me that during the lecture?” Amelia snapped. When the reporter reminded her of her promise to give an interview, Amelia apologized and talked with her interviewer until after midnight, then left at four o’clock to drive to Buffalo for a lecture there that night.

At private parties Amelia showed no interest in purely social conversation. One hostess who thought her a disappointing guest was
Dorothy Fleet, whose husband, Reuben, was the founder of Consolidated Aircraft. Mrs. Fleet described Amelia as “a tall, thin-faced woman whose obsession for aviation dominated the conversation.… she spoke of engines and fuel mixtures and flight patterns until I knew I was under no obligation to lighten the dinner-table chatter with any feminine observations.”