East to the Dawn (18 page)

She spent her convalescence in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Amy had taken an apartment in order to be with Muriel, who was now studying at Miss Capen's School so she would do well on the College Board examinations required for entrance to Smith College. There Amelia rested. As she regained her strength, the sisters “walked over the lovely country roads... climbed Mt. Tom... explored the byways of Northampton.” Muriel thought it idyllic, but Amelia was bored. As she had instinctively, from childhood on, masked her feelings, she put on a good face for her sister and mother; but the better she felt, the more restless she became, exploding in a letter to one of her boyfriends, still abroad, “If only I were over there instead of gravitating in enforced idleness in the confines of this bally little New England Village.”

She bought a banjo; she also enrolled in a class for ambulance drivers that Smith College was sponsoring, run by John Charlesbois, owner of the Auto Infirmary, a local garage. The ten-week course was designed to teach female ambulance drivers serving abroad how to repair their own vehicles in the field. Charlesbois taught the girls how to overhaul engines, change piston rings, work on ignition systems, and understand carburetors and camshafts. Amelia began to feel better—the essay she wrote on car mechanics, a course requirement, won first prize. The class would later
serve Amelia in good stead, giving her her first practical knowledge of how engines worked.

In the spring Amy informed her daughters that Edwin, cured of drinking, wanted to move from Kansas City to Los Angeles, and wanted them to join him in the fall after he was settled. The Otis family house in Atchison had finally been sold that February, so Amy could afford to splurge a little. She, Amelia, and Muriel would summer in New England. Amelia did some investigating and settled on Lake George, one of the most beautiful lakes in New York, as a pleasant place for them to spend the summer. She found a cottage to rent in the Hamlet, a collection of vacation cottages near Hulett's Landing, at the waist of the lake. Once they were settled in, Amelia read poetry, played, swam, boated, and thought about what to do with her life.

Margaret Balis had arrived for a visit—and Margaret, whose desire to become a doctor had been thwarted when she had been Amelia's age, apparently now reinforced Amelia's desire to study medicine. “The life of the mind, combined with a life of purpose and action” was how Amelia, at about this time, described the kind of life she wanted to fashion for herself. She'd been a nurse; she'd learned a lot; she felt she had an aptitude for medicine. Her next logical step would be to begin studying when the summer was over.

And Margaret brought her twins Nancy and Jane, eight; Clarence, thirteen; Mark, fourteen; and Otis, eighteen. Amelia had come to the conclusion that she would be like a doctor. Undoubtedly Margaret helped strengthen her resolve.

In the meantime, it was Amelia who ruled the family roost. Marian Stabler, vacationing in the same community, was amused to watch Amelia installing her sister and various combinations of her young cousins—Margaret's five children—in a canoe, putting the cousins in the bow and the stern to do all the paddling and allowing Muriel to lounge with her at ease amidships.

Marian, tall, slender, well spoken, and bright, a graduate of Vassar the previous year, was spending the summer studying to become an artist at the New York School of Fine Arts (later the Parsons School of Design). Before she arrived at Lake George, Marian had been the recipient of endless letters from her parents, Walter and Clara Stabler and her brother Frank, about life there. She especially kept hearing about the interesting new family that was renting the cottage just across the road, and especially about one member.

When Marian finally arrived in August, she too was drawn to Amelia, whom she found “very poetic,” with “serious, aesthetic ideas.” Frank, who
had served in the navy during the war, and was about to be a senior at Williams College in Massachusetts, was equally taken. Playing a game of Truth with her brother, Marian realized that he had a crush on Amelia. The four of them—Amelia, Marian, Frank, and Muriel—spent a lot of time together reading, canoeing, playing hide and seek, dancing to phonograph records on the porch, and toasting marshmallows around a campfire—usually trying to evade the young male Balis cousins who loved spying on Amelia.

All the Stablers were impressed with Amelia's looks and temperament. Marian was amazed at her limber body. She could, according to Marian, balance on her hands with her knees drawn up close to her chest. She could also curl within the area of one cushion on a three-cushion couch “with nothing hanging over,” and take a nap of indefinite length, in no apparent discomfort. Another favorite position of Amelia's was sitting on one foot.

Unlike Margaret, whose desire to be a doctor had been thwarted all those years before, no one who could block Amelia's plan to become one now. Indeed, Margaret had undoubtedly urged her on. And so, the summer over, Amelia registered at Columbia University in the University Extension Program, which was designed for men and women like her, with practical as well as educational backgrounds. The Columbia program was enjoying enormous popularity because it offered the widest possible latitude both in studies and in its entrance requirements.

It was an exciting time to be at Columbia. The Extension had been founded in 1915 “to afford extraordinary educational opportunities ... and to serve the University by introducing and testing new educational schemes and plans.” Out of the Extension would grow the university's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Business School, the School of Journalism, and the School of General Studies.

In the fall of 1919, swelled by the great postwar rush, the Extension was in a state of flux—its 12,873 students were by far the largest student unit at the university, completely dwarfing the undergraduate Columbia College enrollment of 1,001, the Barnard enrollment of 755 girls, and the 6,548 students enrolled in the existing graduate and professional schools.

The Extension teaching staff ranged from the pedestrian to the extraordinary. Among the famous professors in the program were Rexford Tugwell, who was teaching economics; Raymond Moley, government; Franz Boas, anthropology; and Thomas Merton, author (in 1948) of
The Seven Storey Mountain,
English. The science department boasted a Nobel
Prize winner; the philosopher John Dewey and the journalist Heywood Broun were also on the staff.

Female students under twenty-one were required to live in dormitories or approved residences. Amelia, twenty-two (admitting to twenty-one), was therefore free to live where she pleased. After checking out Whittier Hall (“some dump,” she thought it) she rented “a fairly well furnished room” in a large apartment at 106 Morningside Drive, a nine-story stone-and-brick structure on the south corner of 121st Street and Morningside Park. She then signed up for the maximum allowable course load of sixteen points, taking EA, an elementary biology and zoology course, and EB, Vertebrate zoology and evolution, both taught by Dr. James McGregor and H. J. Muller; French 3, Psychology 1, and Chemistry 3, all in the Extension Program. For spring term she got special permission to add Chemistry 42a at Barnard to her schedule, which meant she was carrying an unusually heavy course load of twenty-two points.

There were only two blond coeds in the elementary biology and zoology classes, Amelia and Louise de Schweinitz, and they were assigned desks next to each other. Louise, three weeks younger than Amelia, a graduate of Smith College, tall and blondish, was taking courses at Columbia to fulfill the requirements necessary for entrance to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, from which she would take a degree in 1924. The two of them immediately became fast friends. They were great favorites of Professor McGregor, managing to get two of the four A's he gave out among the sixty-four students in that elementary biology and zoology class. McGregor thought Amelia was particularly suited by temperament for scientific work because she had such a lively interest. This interest, he recalled, was especially noticeable during the ten-minute breather he allowed his students during the course of the long Saturday-afternoon lab session. During those breaks tea was brewed over Bunsen burners, and he sat back and answered questions. Louise and Amelia were also both enrolled in an inorganic chemistry course at Columbia and an organic chemistry course at Barnard.

When they were together, according to Louise—who thought Amelia “so capable she could have done anything”—Amelia was always the leader and she the follower; Amelia was the “keen, electric one,” while she herself was “the steady plodding worker.” Amelia, who “wanted everyone to be treated fairly,” involved Louise in an effort to get a promotion for a professor whom she believed had been wrongfully passed over.

From the time she was a little girl, Amelia had been a climber—climbing up and out and into things. She was geographically curious, one might say. Above the earth, below the earth, on the earth,
like Alice, curiouser and curiouser. Now she did a very curious thing: she explored all the subterranean passages connecting the Columbia buildings. Louise came with her. Another time, on a mild May afternoon, Amelia was taken with the idea of sitting in the lap of the Alma Mater, the famous gilded statue by Daniel Chester French that guards the front steps of Low Library. It was not a difficult climb, but was certainly an unusual thing to do. Louise recalled that they sat on the statue's lap eating cherries out of a paper bag and taking turns reading Browning's “Pippa Passes,” which Amelia had in her pocket—at the same time trying to look nonchalant as people walked by staring.

Low Library was also the scene of Amelia's most famous Columbia exploit—climbing to the top of the dome, the highest point on the campus. No one else would have even considered it. The route to the dome is an interior spiral stairway behind a locked metal door—but Amelia appears to have had no problem securing the key. The dome is paved with what look like descending overlapping fish scales, designed to make snow and ice and everything else slip downward. Amelia talked Louise into accompanying her on this escapade too, and they took photos of each other, with Louise's Brownie, lying and standing on the dome. The photo shows plainly their hats and long skirts; it doesn't show their shoes—low-heeled, with slippery leather soles. Some students saw them that spring afternoon and clapped. Then they had to slither their way down—no mean feat. But all their exploits and explorations suddenly came to an abrupt end.

At the end of spring term, having maintained a B+ average for the year and earned thirty-eight course credits, of which eighteen were in chemistry, Amelia quit. It was very sudden. She had changed her goals, she later maintained; she was now leaning more to a life of laboratory research rather than pure medicine. She gave a number of reasons for her change of plans: “after a year of study I convinced myself that some of my abilities did not measure up to the requirements which I felt a physician should have.” She also wrote: “It took me only a few months to discover that I probably should not make the ideal physician” because she was bothered, “among other possibilities of sitting at the bedside of a hypochondriac and handing out innocuous sugar pellets to a patient with an imaginary illness.”

None of these explanations ring true—particularly after the heroic courseload she had just so creditably shouldered. In fact it was her parents who suddenly derailed her. Amelia was on the receiving end of what she described as “pleadings” from her mother and father to come live with them in Los Angeles. It was not a free choice. In the 1920s young unmarried
women still did what their parents wanted. Amelia felt obligated and went, albeit unwillingly.

She still intended to pursue a career in medical research and planned to enroll in college in the fall, but Los Angeles during summer vacation was a whole new world. Came September, she never signed up, because “aviation caught me.”

6

California

•••• For early fliers, belonging to the Caterpillar Club was the ultimate badge of honor—proof that they were brave and seasoned, serious and lucky at the same time, for only fliers who had parachuted out of their planes and lived to tell about it were eligible for membership. As one of the founders explained, the club took the name Caterpillar because it seemed so appropriate “for several reasons: The parachute main sail and lines were woven from the finest silk. The lowly worm spins a cocoon [out of silk,] crawls out and flies away from certain death.”

Lieutenant Harold R. Harris of the U.S. Signal Corps was the first person to parachute out of a crippled plane and live to tell about it—and the first member of the club. His jump, on October 20, 1922, made front-page headlines across the nation because it seemed unbelievable that someone could leap free from a doomed plane and live.