East to the Dawn (8 page)

Amelia usually did get her way, one way or another. When she was seven, Edwin took the family to the St. Louis World's Fair. For Amelia a high point of the trip was riding with her father on the Ferris wheel; the lowest point was having her mother forbid a ride on the roller coaster. Even at that age Amelia liked heights.

She also liked working with her hands and building things. So, once home, she decided to build her own roller coaster and capture the sensation—the rushing dropping-down-out-of-control speed trip she had been denied. She found some wooden two-by-fours, propped them at an angle against the toolshed roof to make the track, and made a cab out of a wooden packing box, to which she attached roller-skate wheels. Various willing hands, including her school friend Balie Waggener joined in the project. Giving her advice was her mother's youngest brother, Uncle Carl. The first ride, naturally, was hers. She started from the ridge pole, slid down the steep incline—and somersaulted head over heels as the cab hit ground. Undaunted, she added more track to make the incline less steep and the ending less abrupt. Amelia tried again, and this time the roller coaster worked. Balie Waggener, fifty years later, recalled that “a ride down that thing was a thrill.”

Amelia Otis's views on proper ladylike behavior for young girls was by no means unusual—she was merely reflecting the existing mores of the day. Amelia wasn't the only little girl in Atchison who felt the unfairness of the limitations of being born female; Lucy and Katch Challiss also chafed at the restrictions imposed upon them. Fretting over things they were not allowed to do, envying the freedom they didn't have, they would vent their frustration by pretending they were boys, for therein, they were certain,
lay freedom. “We thought being a boy was much better than being a girl,” recalled Katch. And when the opportunity presented itself, they jumped at the chance to rough-house with their boy friends—including Balie Waggener and his friends Jared and Ed Jackson. The girls gave as good as they got, according to Balie; they were tough for girls, but of the three, Amelia was the toughest: “She could get as rough as we did.” A bit later, grown out of their tomboy phase, they would discuss how when they were grown, they would be different from their mothers, how they would control their own lives, not let the men do it.

She used her conciliatory skills to get along with her remote grandfather, who provided so little company for her grandmother. Amelia's response to her unresponsive grandfather was to relegate him to oblivion—in her eyes, he was nowhere near as important as her grandmother. If she knew of his accomplishments, and she must have, she never mentioned it. He impinged on her consciousness so little, in fact, that she would write, describing her childhood, “Until the eighth grade I stayed the school year with my grandmother in Atchison, Kansas”; she would even describe the Atchison barn as “my grandmother's barn.” Muriel, younger by three years and only a visitor in the house, didn't notice her grandfather's moods. She would associate the creaking of his heavy black square-toed shoes as he walked about, or as he stood rocking in front of the fire, with a sense of well-being, speaking of the Atchison home as “our home, creaking with plenty.” She would also remember him sawing wood for exercise. But the only time Amelia ever referred to her grandfather in her writings, it was merely to describe what he did—a very different treatment from what she accorded the other members of her family, all of whom she described in some detail and with obvious affection. Nevertheless in Amelia's genes was the grit that had carried him through.

Often when Amelia was alone she would while away the time reading tales she knew by heart, then after a time she would put her book down and dream. She wrote a poem about one dream.

 

I watch the birds flying all day long

And I want to fly too.

Don't they look down sometimes, I wonder,

And wish they were me

When I'm going to the circus with my daddy?

 

Often she constructed her own tale. One path her imagination took her on—preoccupied as she would be for hours with fantasies of traveling into the past, into the future, and always out of Atchison—eventually turned into a game called Bogie. Present in the game is Amelia's
sense of adventure, the thrill of embarking on a long dangerous voyage; demonstrated is her inherent personal magnetism.

Bogie was played in the barn on the bluff above the river which—once full of horses and carriages—now contained just one carriage, complete with carriage lamps. Amelia, with her vivid imagination, turned this vehicle into a magic chariot in which she, accompanied most often by Katch and Lucy and Muriel, traveled the world. They placed sawhorses in front of the carriage in place of real horses, equipped themselves with wooden pistols, and then settled down in the carriage and went on an adventure. Katch's favorite voyage was a trip to a town called Pearyville, so full of exciting and dangerous happenings, so encrusted with tradition, that Katch drew a detailed map of the journey, complete with distances. In this make-believe world they all (naturally) took the roles of boys. According to Katch, it was Amelia who saved them when, along the way to Pearyville, the carriage was attacked by hairy men. They shouted, “Oh hairy men hairy men,” at the same time pointing the pistols and yelling “bangbang,” but if Amelia hadn't remembered that the hairy men “were afraid of red” and produced a red gumdrop, they would have been carried away forever, according to Katch. There were all sorts of other dangers, too, along the way to Pearyville—night riders, giant spiders, and snakes, as well as witches, a Man of the Woods, ghosts, and corpses. There was a Bridge of Skeletons to pass over, the Old Gallows to pass, the Cave of Sighs, the Witches Cave, the Red Lion, the Robber Bridge—so many things, in fact, that although it was clearly drawn on the map, they never ever reached Pearyville. And that was part of the game, too.

In the more sophisticated version of the game, it becomes apparent that Amelia's later fascination with long-distance flying is just the adult, real-life version of Bogie. In youthful Bogie they would be in a carriage “dashing wildly across country to London, Paris, and Berlin” or careening down the post road to Vienna. “A knight in armor came galloping swiftly toward us. ‘Dispatches, Sir Knight!' I shouted.” Amelia, with maps “that fell into our clutches,” embarked on “imaginary journeys full of fabulous perils.... The map of Africa was a favorite.” The carriage became an elephant or a camel, as the need arose. “We weighed the advantage of the River Niger and the Nile, the comparative ferociousness of the Tauregs and Swahili. No Livingstone, Stanley or Rhodes explored with more enthusiasm than we,” Amelia would write as she waited for her Lockheed Electra to be repaired in 1937 on her round-the-world flight.

She loved poetry, but that didn't stop her from appreciating the comics. They were words, too, and she was above all a wordsmith, as virtually all the letters she wrote to friends throughout her life demonstrate.
Her favorite comic was “The Katzenjammer Kids.” This strip, featuring words phonetically spelled to capture the German accent (“I tell der kink uf Sveden! ... I got a liddle bizness vot iss important! ... Lets take a ride in der airyplaner!” are representative sentences) amused Amelia so much that she appropriated the idea of phonetic spelling and for the rest of her life would weave deliberate phonetic bloopers into her letters. In 1932, when she gave Katch a copy of her book
The Fun of It,
she wrote on the flyleaf, “To mine angel cousin Katch from her darlink cousin Mill.” And Amelia, who had written her first poem when she was four (dedicating it “especially” to her mother), opened that world also to her playmates. She recited from memory passages from
Alice in Wonderland,
or Lear's “Owl and the Pussycat,” or “Horatius at the Bridge,” and a bit later verses from Browning.

But her favorite poem was “Atalanta in Calydon” by the popular English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and so, inevitably, Swinburne became Katch's favorite poet and that poem became her favorite, too. Amelia always memorized great chunks of her favorites, so before long Katch, too, memorized the poem. It made such a deep impression upon Katch that seventy years later, she could still recite passages from it.

It is a fascinating tale. The poem is a rarity in English literature—an epic poem about a warrior maiden. Its images are beautiful, but its message had a special appeal to Amelia. Atalanta was a role model Amelia could relate to. She had no patience with the passive princesses of mythology; Those heroines she read about in the fairy tales who could have had everything but managed only to get themselves into distress bored her. Like Ariadne marking her way in the labyrinth, Atalanta found a path to Amelia's soul.

Atalanta is a virgin huntress—ueet of foot, deadly with bow and arrow, and very courageous. She joins the Greek warriors hunting a boar that the gods have sent down to menace the kingdom. Meleager, leader of the hunt, adores Atalanta; he is “beyond measure enamoured of her” and calls her to his side:

All the great warriors of Greece are hunting the boar, but it is Atalanta whose arrow first finds the beast, and Meleager who deals it a mortal blow. When Meleager awards her the slain boar as spoils, the warriors become furious. Meleager slays his uncles, who are in the forefront of those who would destroy Atalanta. In the ensuing struggle, Meleager dies.

The poem is both a celebration of Atalanta and a warning of the dangers to such females who compete in the male world. Swinburne makes
plain that men and women feel equally threatened by her. Thus Meleager's mother:

Atalanta tries to blunt the censorious attitude, telling of her sacrifice, that she has given up so much. That too is an integral message of the poem—that she shall have

In the end Atalanta is shunned by all except the dying Meleager. No literary work could more eloquently or plainly spell out the dangers that exist for the woman who competes in male pursuits.

From first grade on Amelia attended the private College Preparatory School along with Ginger and Ann Parks; the Fox sisters, Marjorie and Virginia; Mary Campbell, a neighbor whose mother had been a friend of Amelia's mother; and Balie Waggener, whom she had known forever—her grandfather had given Balie's father his first job. The coeducational school was just a short walk for all of them. It had been founded by Helen Schofield in 1896, in what had been a stable. Sarah Walton, the headmistress, a gifted educator and an active member of Trinity Church, assisted by Yale graduate Charlie Gaylord prepared “her” children so well that most went on to top colleges.

The College Preparatory School was tiny, having between thirty and forty students spread out in the twelve grades. The stable had become two large rooms, one upstairs and one down. The lower forms—through the eighth grade—studied upstairs, grades nine through twelve studied downstairs. Classes in the various subjects for the diverse grades were taught in one corner of each floor, while the children studied in the other part. It worked because the grades were so small—Annie Park remembers days when she was the only one in her class.

It was comfortable and intimate and friendly. The desks were the kind with chairs attached, so that as the children slid in and out, there was a minimum of disruption. When their class was over, students would take their belongings off to a corner to read and study, and the next class would slide into place. At the end of the day Amelia and Ginger and the others packed their belongings into their string bags and walked or biked home.

Amelia was a good student, but bright as she was, her strong streak of independence did not go unremarked. In seventh grade she missed the arithmetic honors that were hers for the taking because, according to Headmistress Sarah Walton, “Amelia's mind is brilliant, but she refuses to do the plodding necessary to win honor prizes. She deduces the correct answers to complex arithmetic problems, but hates to put down the steps by which she arrived at the results.” Sarah Walton also noted that prizes were not of great interest to Amelia—not the carrot they were for many children : that she listened to a different drummer. She did manage to receive one prize from the headmistress, though—a beautiful copy of Macaulay's
Lays of Ancient Rome.