Amelia Earhart (24 page)

If the woman going by the name Irene Craigmile Bolam was not Amelia Earhart, it would have been a simple and uncomplicated matter to meet briefly with Major Gervais and provide him with the pertinent documentation. Instead, Mrs. Bolam remained evasive, inconsistent, and contradictory, thus providing reasons for suspicion. She went to great lengths to avoid meeting with the researcher. Gervais's research appeared in the book
Amelia Earhart Lives
, authored by Joe Klaas. Published by McGraw-Hill, it was released in 1970. In it, Klaas provided for the possibility that Irene Craigmile Bolam and Amelia Earhart were the same person.

Robert Myers was the young boy befriended by Amelia Earhart at Oakland Airport as she was preparing for her around-the-world flight. Myers had no connection to or association with Joe Gervais whatsoever. Independent of Gervais's contention that he discovered Amelia Earhart in the form of Irene Craigmile Bolam, Robert Myers also made a startling discovery. As an adult, Myers went to see a film in a downtown Oakland, California, movie theater. As he watched and was only half-listening to the Movietone newsreel, he was shocked to see a woman he was convinced was Amelia Earhart. Her looks, her voice, her mannerisms, and even her comments were similar. The news clip showed Irene Craigmile Bolam standing at a podium during a press conference and denying that she was the famous aviatrix. In spite of that, Myers said, “I knew it was Amelia. She looked like Amelia. She even sounded like Amelia. I knew it was [her].”

Curious about a number of aspects relative to the so-called disappearance of Amelia Earhart and the appearance of Irene Craigmile Bolam, Myers decided to seek some answers. He wrote a letter to Mrs. Bolam but never received a reply. He decided he would call her and obtained her phone number from directory assistance. According to Myers, the moment Bolam answered the telephone, he was convinced she was Amelia Earhart. Myers taped all of his subsequent calls to Bolam.

“I thought she sounded like Amelia,” wrote Myers. “Her voice mannerisms were the same. In these phone calls, and there were several, she listened to me, she cried, expressed recognition of what I told her, and generally spoke to me in such a way as to convince me that I was really talking to Amelia.”

At one point during one of the conversations, Bolam told Myers, “I have said openly that I am not Amelia. I was just wondering what you know. . . . Today you wonder whether there's anything else someone wants you to do.”

When Myers discussed the disappearance of Earhart with Bolam, she stated, “It's very difficult to imagine what I went through . . . because you have to live through the damn thing!” When the subject of George Palmer Putnam came up, Bolam, her ire rising, said, “He got his! He paid for what he did to me!” According to Myers, he and Irene Craigmile Bolam communicated by telephone off and on for almost four years.

Myers was determined to meet with Irene Craigmile Bolam face to face. An arrangement was made to rendezvous on a public street corner in New Jersey. Bolam arrived in a chauffer-driven automobile that parked near where Myers was standing. After instructing the driver to leave the vehicle for a time, she lowered her window and invited Myers to come closer.

Myers wrote, “When I saw her, there was no doubt in my mind that I was looking at Amelia Earhart. She had changed. She seemed much older and hardened . . . [but she] still had mannerisms of her younger years. Her patterns of speech had not changed and many of her words convinced me.”

When Myers related to Bolam the incident where George Palmer Putnam attempted to hit him with his car, she replied, “Why didn't you tell me? I could have done something about it then.”

Before they parted, Bolam said to Myers, “You know I cannot help you. I cannot tell you that I am Amelia Earhart, but I want you to know the things you say are all true.”

Even without the connections to Amelia Earhart established by Gervais and Myers, the life of Irene Craigmile Bolam itself invites suspicion and a number of questions. For example, Bolam moved throughout aviation circles and received what could only be described as deferential treatment by all. During the late 1960s, Bolam was presented an award by NASA. Given her rather unimpressive flying record—less than one year of lessons and flying time—this seems odd. Though she claimed to be an ordinary housewife, Bolam, in truth, associated with a number of influential people and was close to many in the higher echelons of government and flying. Author Gervais, however, on researching the early days of women flyers in the United States, found no references to Irene Craigmile Bolam at all.

Irene Craigmile Bolam passed away on July 7, 1982. Her age was listed as seventy-eight. According to a 1982 article in the Woodbridge, New Jersey,
News Tribune
, Bolam's personal physician, Dr. Man Wah Cheung, “remained puzzled about [her], even after her death, and wasn't so sure she was not Amelia Earhart.”

The same article also points out that several members of the Wings Club, described as “an exclusive aviators' organization in New York City,” were quoted as having suspicions that Bolam was indeed Amelia Earhart, based on her uncanny resemblance to the aviatrix and the occasional strange remarks she made.”

Diana Dawes was a longtime friend of Irene Bolam. Dawes described Bolam as “a very mysterious lady.” Dawes was quoted as saying that there were a number of odd things that Bolam said “that indicated she was Amelia Earhart.”

In another Woodbridge
News Tribune
article, a man named John Malloy related the substance of a conversation he once had with Bolam. She told him, “In all the years I flew, I never wore a parachute.” Irene Bolam's entire flight record covers only six months from late 1932 to early 1933. It is not possible that she had flown for years.

During one of Bolam's conversations with author Joe Gervais, she stated, “I once had a public life. I once had a career in flying, but I've retired. I've given all that up now.” Such a comment could not have possibly come from a person with Irene Bolam's aviation background, for she had no career in flying whatsoever, nor did she ever have much of a public life. Such a comment, however, could have legitimately come from someone such as Amelia Earhart.

Both Bolam's brother-in-law and sister-in-law were quoted as stating that she was not the person she presented herself to be. The brother-in-law was quoted as saying that he was not convinced that she was who she claimed to be. Even the purported son of the original Irene Craigmile, Larry Heller, along with his wife, Joan, questioned his mother's true identity. Heller even attempted to obtain the fingerprints of Irene Craigmile Bolam after she died but was denied.

Irene Craigmile Bolam was, for the most part, a reclusive woman who appeared in public on rare occasions, most of them being associated with aviation organizations.

Evidence of an interesting coincidence has surfaced. During a time period from 1932 to 1933, Earhart, Irene Craigmile, Jackie Cochran, and Viola Gentry, all female flyers, flew in and out of Roosevelt Field, New York, as well as nearby Bennett Field. It is difficult to believe that these four women did not know each other.

In another interesting account provided by Myers, a friend of Irene Craigmile Bolam took a photograph of her to a psychic for a response. The event took place several weeks after Bolam had passed way. Myers provided the psychic no information on the identity of the person in the photograph or any of the circumstances pertaining to his relationship with Earhart. After considering the image for several minutes, the psychic said, “This woman did not die of natural causes; it will appear as though she did. The woman is terrified and has been living in fear for years. She knows a lot of people, and I see dirty politics around this woman.”

During the time Robert Myers was active in researching Amelia Earhart and discussing the Earhart-Bolam connection, he received telephone calls from an unknown person or persons threatening him with death if he did not “keep your mouth shut about Earhart.” The exact source of the calls remains a mystery, but in the end, the only people who could have been hurt or embarrassed by Myers's revelations would have been politicians and other elected and appointed government officials, past and present.

And there is this: If Irene Craigmile Bolam was not Amelia Earhart, one must wonder why she agreed to telephone conversations with Myers over a period of four years.

Irene Rutherford O'Crowley, the aunt of a woman identified as Irene Craigmile Bolam, served as Earhart's attorney during the early 1930s. She claimed she was introduced to Earhart in Europe following the aviatrix's first solo flight across the Atlantic. A coincidence?

And there is this mystery. Author Rollin Reineck discovered that Irene Craigmile Bolam's brother and sister-in-law donated an engraved brick to the Amelia Earhart Museum in Atchison, Kansas. The brick was placed in the walkway that led to the front door of Earhart's childhood home and bore the somewhat cryptic engraving: “Irene E. Bolam in memory of Irene C. Bolam.”

A
s Amelia Earhart, a.k.a. Irene Craigmile Bolam, reentered the world and society following her repatriation and rehabilitation, she skirted the edges of previous levels of celebrity and recognition she once enjoyed, all of which stopped short of allowing for her to become a public figure again. She counted among her friends Senator Barry Goldwater, Justice Anthony Kennedy, and others. She was often seen in the company of well-known aviators, including a number of individuals known to have been close to Earhart during the 1930s. With the passage of time, it became clear to a body of Earhart researchers that there were several people who were well aware that Irene Craigmile Bolam was, in fact, the famous aviatrix but kept the knowledge of her identity to themselves. Author Joe Klaas writes, “The closer you get to friends and family of Amelia Earhart, the more you feel a conspiracy of silence.”

During conversations with acquaintances, Irene Craigmile Bolam stated she knew Wiley Post and other famous aviators of the time. She was quite intimate with topics related to aircraft and flying, with instruments, and with airports around the world. Given Irene Craigmile Bolam's actual flying record, such information would have been difficult to impossible to come by.

Earhart married Guy Bolam in 1958 and settled into a home in Bedford Hills, New York. Both were in their fifties. Bolam was born in England, and at the time of their marriage he worked for Radio Luxembourg. How they met has never been clarified. It has always been a matter of curiosity to a number of Earhart researchers how and why Irene Craigmile Bolam, along with her husband, were regarded so highly at gatherings of famous pilots when, in fact, the real Irene Bolam had few, if any, credentials. Amelia Earhart, on the other hand, had them in abundance.

Here is another curious truth. By the time Joe Gervais advanced the possibility of Irene Craigmile Bolam being Amelia Earhart and undertook a spate of research and investigation in an attempt to prove such, it was discovered that no family photographs of the original Irene O'Crowley, as well as documents relating to personal history, existed prior to 1940. School attendance records “existed in sketchy form.” Allegedly, she graduated from Barringer High School in New Jersey, but there is no record of her graduation, nor does a photograph of her appear in the school annual. In addition, her birth certificate was never found.

There is more. It was discovered that Irene O'Crowley had been engaged to a physician for a short time, but the relationship eventually dissolved. She subsequently became engaged to Charles Craigmile, a civil engineer. Prior to their courtship, however, Irene became pregnant by another man. She gave birth to the child, who was then adopted by her childless uncle, Clarence, and his wife, Violet. The child was named Clarence Rutherford O'Crowley Jr. His illegitimate birth was a well-kept family secret for years but was finally acknowledged by relatives.

In 1924, another child, a girl, arrived on the scene. Initially, she was taken in by the attorney Irene O'Crowley. Attorney Irene, as well as Earhart publicist Nina Price, were close friends with Amelia as well as being business partners. Attorney Irene advised on business matters, and Price assisted Amelia in launching her clothing and luggage products. The girl, as with the earlier boy, eventually went to live with Clarence O'Crowley. No living O'Crowley descendant is certain of the origin of the child, and the relationship remains controversial. A story surfaced a short time after her arrival, however, that the baby girl had been born out of wedlock to Amelia Earhart. The birth was kept secret from the public, but a rumor persisted that the aviatrix bore an illegitimate child at the age of thirty. The child grew up known as “Irene Jr.” Photographs of Irene Jr. reveal that she looks remarkably like Amelia Earhart.

Irene Jr. was eventually relocated in Scotland. In time, she had a child herself. Irene Craigmile Bolam, a.k.a. Amelia Earhart, who was living in Rumson, New Jersey, made a number of trips to Scotland in her later years. During the mid-1960s, a woman named Grace McGuire moved from Scotland to Rumson, New Jersey. Grace, who stated she was born and raised in Scotland, claimed she was adopted. Shortly after arriving in Rumson, the twenty-one-year-old Grace became close friends with the original Irene Craigmile's son, Larry Heller, who was born in 1934. She also spent several years as a friend and traveling companion of Muriel Morrissey, Amelia Earhart's sister. Grace McGuire has been described as “a reincarnated version” of Amelia Earhart.

In an interesting aside, Grace McGuire visited Howland Island, where she was photographed waving two flags. One was the flag of Scotland, and the other was the state flag of Kansas, where Earhart was born. Sometime during the 2000s, Grace obtained a Lockheed Electra Model 10.

Charles O'Crowley passed away in 1931, succumbing to appendicitis. Two years later the original Irene O'Crowley Craigmile married Alvin Victor Heller, who had been giving her flying lessons. Evidence exists that this had been arranged by Amelia Earhart and good friend Viola Gentry.