Amelia Earhart (8 page)

However, the surrogate big sister was also a serious and dedicated social worker. Forty years before Operation Headstart, she decided that “social service should be preventative rather than curative” and defined the ultimate goal of social work with children as giving them “
a sound education.” Only with education could they “make adjustments to poverty, illness, illiteracy or any other morbid condition.”

At Denison House she was certain she had discovered a vocation and a career. The work was a practical expression of her basic beliefs, learned and accepted as a child. It was not enough to talk about social justice and charity. One must act. The children in her care needed help and she had the experience to give it. The former nurse could teach basic hygiene. The former office clerk could type. The scholar could write up reports and the teacher of English to foreign adults could teach it to their children. The Ogontz student had enough social poise to gain the approval of a board of directors. The aviator had already raised funds for the house by flying over Boston one spring day dropping leaflets for a benefit carnival to be held in Waltham. Already a friend and protégée of the director, Marion Perkins, in October Amelia became a fulltime staff member, moved into living quarters at the settlement house, and was elected secretary of the board.

Although Amelia worked five days a week at Denison House, she spent her weekends pursuing her “hobby” of flying. She had joined the local chapter of the National Aeronautic Association soon after her arrival in Boston. When her old friend and mentor, Bert Kinner, was looking for a sales outlet for his planes, one of the people he met in California was Harold T. Dennison of Quincy, Massachusetts, who was developing a commercial airport on land near the present-day Naval Reserve Air Base at Squantum. At Kinner’s suggestion, Dennison asked Amelia to become both Kinner’s sales representative at
Dennison Airport and one of its stockholders. She accepted both offers and somehow scraped up the money for a few shares of stock.

In a newspaper report on the airport’s official opening, July 2, 1927, Amelia is described as a director of Dennison Corporation, the only woman on the flying staff, as well as a social worker at Denison House
and professor of English in the State Extension Service (she continued to teach until her full-time employment at Denison House). A few days before the opening Amelia wrote to Marian Stabler: “
Though I haven’t a real job for the summer [Marion Perkins did not hire her on a full-time basis until October] I am kept pretty busy doing things for Denison House and Dennison Airport. I am having a great time selecting hangings and furniture for the main hangar.”

The quiet, reserved woman Bert Kinner had picked to demonstrate his plane became an articulate, persuasive salesperson at the airport. Kinner flew there from Los Angeles the first week in September in a new plane he had just built, one with five cylinders.
^*
He left the plane at Dennison with Amelia as his demonstrator-sales representative.

Bert was still having trouble with cylinders, one of which broke down during Amelia’s first demonstration. She wrote to him suggesting that he send some heavier ones for replacements and told him that a Boston man wanted to take the plane to New York to someone who could develop a
good
motor for it. She added: “
May I report that you will make fittings that can’t be criticized aerodynamically on the next ship? If you do I think the game is almost won.”

On the same day Amelia wrote a second
letter to
Ruth Nichols, a woman flyer she had never met. A Wellesley graduate, Nichols was a member of the Junior League who played golf, tennis, hockey, and polo, and had driven automobiles, speed boats, and motorcycles. She had received her FAI license a year after Amelia and was later referred to by polar explorer Richard E. Byrd, along with Amelia, as one of the two who stood out among “a handful of women who shared in the hardships and perils of aviation pioneering.”

After introducing herself as a fellow FAI licensee, Amelia wrote, “What do you think of the advisability of forming an organization composed of women who fly?” There followed a list of questions as to who might be eligible before she closed: “Personally, I am a social worker who flies for sport, and am on the board of directors of an aeronautical concern. I cannot claim to be a feminist, but do rather enjoy seeing women tackling all kinds of new problems—new for them, that is.”

Amelia undoubtedly refused to “claim to be a feminist” because the
term was perjorative to the majority of Americans who thought of feminists as marching, shouting eccentrics who were frequently chained to fences or jailed by police. Perhaps the word suggested to Amelia an unattractive woman who did not like men. Although male aviators often regarded their female counterparts as lightweights in the profession, the women were aviators nonetheless, partners in a camaraderie that Muriel thought remarkable at
Kinner Field. Without the men who built airplanes, Amelia could not pursue the “sport” of flying.

Pursue it she did, signing a contract for more lessons at twenty dollars an hour with Dennison Aviation Corporation on October 15, 1927. Notations on the contract show that she paid one hundred seventy-five dollars and logged four and two-thirds hours at unspecified dates. The remaining three hours due her are not accounted for. She had already written Kinner, asking him to estimate her total flying time in California, but seemed to do no better at keeping records of it in Boston.

In November she wrote Kinner again. There were potential buyers for his plane but she could not sell it until the motor had passed government tests. Meanwhile she worried about unscrupulous competitors: “What is to prevent anyone’s taking the dimensions of the Airster and constructing a ship from them and marketing that ship?… I wonder if you are safe in letting your product out here in the east unless you have a very strong organization to protect it?”

Amelia had planned to go to California that summer to learn more about Kinner’s new motor but her work with him was cut short by a telephone call in April. The caller was Capt. Hilton H. Railey, ex-Army pilot and public relations man. He wanted to know if she would fly the Atlantic. She suspected a publicity stunt, a followup on the solo flight of
Charles A. Lindbergh less than a year before, but she agreed to an
interview with Railey in his Boston office. She had to. If his offer was legitimate she—Amelia Earhart—would be the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane.

Lindbergh’s flight on May 20, 1927, had made him the most famous man in the world. There were four other crossings later that summer—Clarence Chamberlin and passenger Charles Levine from New York to Berlin; Commander Byrd, Bert Acosta, Bernt Balchen, and George Noville from New York to France; Edward Schlee and William Brock from Newfoundland to London; F. de Pinedo with del Prete and Zachetti from New Foundland to Portugal. None could challenge Lindbergh as
America’s favorite hero who had just performed “the greatest feat of a solitary man in the records of the human race.” The handsome, modest, twenty-five-year-old, ex-airmail pilot was the personification of an American dream. “Romance, chivalry, and self-dedication—here they were,” author Frederick Lewis Allen wrote, “with the machinery of ballyhoo … ready and waiting to lift him up where everyone could see him.”

A master of that machinery of ballyhoo was George Palmer Putnam, grandson of the founder of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, publishers. It was Putnam who urged the new hero to write a postflight book,
We
, published by Putnam’s Sons. It was Putnam who instigated Railey’s call to Amelia Earhart. Putnam, who had also published Richard Byrd’s polar story,
Skyward
, heard that Byrd had sold his Fokker trimotor plane to an Englishwoman who wanted to cross the
Atlantic in it. The person who knew her identity was said to be a lawyer, David T. Layman.

Putnam went to Layman, who told him the buyer was a client,
Amy Phipps Guest, heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune and wife of the former British Air Minister, Frederick E. Guest. Putnam then asked Railey to check on the plane, which was at the East Boston Airport. If the story was true, he told Railey, they might “crash the gate” and manage the flight of the first woman to cross the Atlantic by plane.

Both men soon learned that Mrs. Guest’s family had refused to let her make the flight and that she had decided she wanted another woman to try, provided her substitute were “the right sort of girl.” Layman entrusted Putnam and Railey to find him one, a woman who was a flier (which Mrs. Guest was not), well educated, with a pleasing appearance and manners acceptable to the English as well as to the less demanding American public.

Railey asked a friend, Rear Adm. Reginald K. Belknap, if he knew of anyone who might qualify. Belknap did. “
A thoroughly fine person,” he said, whom he had seen at lectures sponsored by the Boston NAA. “I noticed her,” he told Railey, “because she was always there and seemed so much in earnest.… She said she had been flying about four years then and was still doing a little at Dennison Airport.” Her name, he said, was Amelia Earhart.

From the moment Amelia walked into his office Railey knew she was “the right sort of girl.” “
Her resemblance to Colonel Lindbergh was
extraordinary. Most of all I was impressed by the poise of her boyish figure. Mrs. Guest had stipulated the person to whom she would yield must be ‘representative’ of American women. In Amelia Earhart I saw not only their norm but their sublimation.”

Although Railey was certain she would be perfect, he explained that the decision would be made by others at a second
interview in New York. When he asked her to keep the plan a secret, Amelia said she would have to ask her supervisor, Marion Perkins, for time off from Denison House but assured him that Miss Perkins could be trusted.

Miss Perkins gave her a two-week leave and a promise of confidentiality. To her family Amelia said nothing except that she was going to New York and would be staying with Marian Stabler. Nor did she confide in her hostess during the brief visit. Her thank you note written six weeks later said, “
You may grant me pardon when you hear, in a little while, what all this mysterious business is.… Yes, my performance in New York was successful—at least, it gives me a chance at success of a kind.”

For the interview Amelia went to the office of
Putnam, who told his secretary to have her wait in the outer office. She made no effort to disguise her irritation when the handsome, forty-one-year-old, publisher-promoter came out to greet her. Nor was she overly impressed by the electric tension and instant charm directed at her by this tall, broad-shouldered man in the well-cut suit. There were four persons at the interview—Mrs. Guest’s brother, John S. Phipps, Layman, Railey, and Putnam, who was already in charge of the project. After explaining that the trimotored Fokker was to be named
Friendship
as a symbol of goodwill between Mrs. Guest’s native and adopted countries, the committee asked a battery of questions, Amelia said in her account of the meeting:

Amelia was told that Wilmer Stultz, test pilot for one of Byrd’s planes, would be paid twenty thousand dollars to fly the Atlantic flight and the
mechanic, Louis Gordon, five thousand. There would be no reward for her except for opportunities in aviation that she might be offered after a successful crossing. Fees for newspaper stories she wrote would be put back in the operating fund. Accepting those terms, Amelia made some requests of her own. She wanted to check the equipment and to meet the pilot. She also wanted to do some of the flying on the trip. Returning to Boston, she reported to Marion Perkins, “
I found myself in a curious situation. If they did not like me at all or found me wanting in many respects, I would be deprived of the trip. If they liked me too well, they might be loath to drown me. It was, therefore, necessary for me to maintain an attitude of impenetrable mediocrity.”

After the interview she said Putnam had escorted her to the
train station. He talked all the way, telling her about his young son, David Binney Putnam, who had accompanied him on a trip to Greenland and written a book about it for juvenile readers. Amelia thought him an interesting man but was amused by how quickly he hustled her aboard the train without offering to pay for her return ticket.

Two days later she received a note and formal agreement from Mrs. Guest. Amelia was to be captain of the flight; her decisions, once aboard, to be final. Any
money from royalties or advertising would be turned over to the operating fund.

Amelia signed the agreement and returned it promptly. She knew how dangerous the flight would be. Since Lindbergh’s crossing the previous May, fourteen persons attempting the flight had been lost at sea, three of them women. The last, the Honorable Elsie Mackay, an Englishwoman accompanied by Capt. Walter Hinchcliffe, disappeared somewhere over the Atlantic within days of Amelia’s interview in New York. A fourth woman, American Ruth Elder, accompanied by George W. Haldeman, had survived an unsuccessful attempt when they were plucked from the sea by the crew of a Dutch freighter three hundred miles northeast of the Azores.

Amelia’s decision did not surprise Marion Perkins. Not long after she came to work for Perkins at Denison House Amelia gave Perkins a poem she had written, entitled “
Courage.”