East to the Dawn (21 page)

Will Rogers's definition of an airfield was “a tract of land completely surrounded by high tension wires and high chimneys, adjacent to a cemetery.” The Kinner field almost qualified; it had two sets of high-tension wires on its eastern perimeter. Since the landing field had to be approached from the east because of the prevailing winds, the wires inevitably had to be crossed. Amelia liked to come in high in the little Airster, then drop down and fly between the two sets of wires; she did it quite often. The two wires were close—to Neta's mind's eye there was about eight feet between them. It drove Neta crazy with fear. Amelia gave her some soothing explanation about daydreaming and said she wouldn't do it anymore; Neta accepted the explanation at face value.

Neta was unable to comprehend Amelia's attitude toward what she considered a very dangerous pastime, and she didn't realize that Amelia was dealing in mental gymnastics to keep her as a friend. All she saw was that Amelia
seemed
to exhibit a callous disregard for danger (flying the Airster at all, much less buying it, and flying between high-tension wires), yet in the one major area, soloing, Amelia was obdurate: under Neta's supervision
she wouldn't do it. It drove Neta to the edge of distraction. Amelia simply would not agree to solo. “By this time she had had four hours and 45 minutes in the Canuck and four hours in the Airster, and I told her I felt she was capable of flying alone.... She'd look at me with her winsome half smile, but she never committed herself.”

From the beginning Neta felt threatened by Amelia's intellect and probing mind. Neta was a Seventh Day Adventist and a fundamentalist who believed in the imminent end of the world; Amelia was an inquiring agnostic and an insatiable searcher for knowledge. Between them was a gulf that grew wider as they got to know each other better.

Before the first summer was upon them, Amelia had changed instructors. What undoubtedly strengthened Amelia's resolve to drop Neta were the two crashes they had. Once as they were taking off from nearby Goodyear field, a malfunctioning cylinder made the Airster's rate of climb too slow to clear the grove of eucalyptus trees at the far end of the runway. Amelia, in the rear seat, instinctively put the nose up and went into a stall—the only thing to do. “I would have done the same,” Neta admitted. The result was a mild crash; as they hit the ground, the propeller broke and the landing gear gave way. Before Neta had a chance to say anything, indeed before she had thought to turn off the engine—necessary to prevent a fire—novice Amelia, with great presence of mind, cut the switch. By the time Neta had pulled herself together and turned around, Amelia was collectedly powdering her nose because, as she said, “We have to look nice when the reporters come.” The other crash came about because the plane ran out of gas. Amelia did not, at the time, accuse Neta of negligence, but later she did, publicly, for all the world to read about, in her first book,
20 Hrs. 40 Min.
writing, “Crashes were frequent enough in these earlier days. I had one myself, during my instruction period. Owing to carelessness in not refuelling, the motor cut out on the take-off, when the plane was about 40 or 50 feet in the air. Neta Snook was with me, but she couldn't help depositing us in a cabbage patch nearby. The propeller and landing gear suffered and I bit my tongue.”

Neta undoubtedly brooded over this enigmatic passage, because in her book fifty-two years later, she tried to get even; she wrote about a time when the two of them were setting out, at Amelia's instigation, on a longer trip than usual. Soon Neta made Amelia abort the trip because she hadn't personally checked the gas tank. She found out upon landing back at Kinner field that they had only half a tank of gas. “I was almost angry at her. Perhaps I had misjudged her abilities,” Neta primly wrote.

Amelia, whose loyalty to friends was legendary, who made it a point to stay close to all the people she cared for from childhood, would never lay eyes on Neta again after she left California in 1924. The significance of that fact, in terms of Amelia's personality, is enormous. Amelia would stay rooted in Neta's memory, looming ever larger, but the closest Neta ever got to Amelia after 1924 would be corresponding with her sister. When, fifty years later, Neta wrote her autobiography, she called it
I Taught Amelia How to Fly.
In it she goes on for pages about her beloved old friend. She deals in her own way with the fact that she was merely Amelia's first instructor, that Amelia abandoned her, and that Amelia wouldn't solo with her because she didn't believe Neta knew enough to teach her competently.

The friendship, so important to Neta, actually would wither on the vine; she was too intrinsically different from Amelia for the relationship to continue. Even in their attitudes toward men they were at opposite ends of the pole. Neta loved going out on dates with any reasonable young man, it seemed, but Amelia didn't. As Neta could not help but observe, the boys were certainly interested in Amelia. Tall at five foot eight but not too tall, and willowy, with her new short blond bobbed hair, nose freckled from the California sun, she was quick to smile at the boys that hung around her at the field, and just as quick to turn them down. Unless she was really interested, Amelia thought dating a waste of time; her preference was to spend her evenings at the library, reading up on something she considered interesting, such as California history. Amelia's mindset at the time can be seen from the following, which she copied down in her small notebook: “Sowing wild oats is putting cracks in the vase of our souls—which can never be obliterated or sealed—even by love. As G. B. S. [George Bernard Shaw] says, ‘Virtue does not consist in abstaining from vice but in not desiring it.' ”

The gulf grew wider as they got to know each other better. Amelia must have been amused by Neta, although she would not have shown it. Neta was remarkable in that she was one of the first fliers in the world and had an enormous amount of courage, but the singleness of purpose that had enabled her to achieve goals against outstanding odds carried with it a penalty: once set on a path, she never swerved. Just as for her the only book was the Bible, the Canuck for her was the only plane—and one did not experiment with either. If Neta had not been as closed-minded about planes as she was about the Bible, the relationship between the two might have continued, but as it was, Amelia gently disengaged from her friend.

For Amelia, the flying that Neta taught was merely phase one; phase two—learning to get into trouble and learning to get out of it, in the next-generation plane—was the next step. Just as walking a school horse
in a ring will not teach a person how to control a spirited horse at a gallop, so taking off, flying level, and then landing would not teach mastery of the Airster. If Amelia were going to fly the Airster, she wanted to learn how to take it through
all
its paces. And that meant what was called stunting. Amelia never explained any of it to Neta; later, from a distance, she explained it to the world.

I refused to fly alone until I knew some stunting. It seemed foolhardy to try to go up alone without the ability to recognize and recover quickly from any position the plane might assume, a reaction only possible through practice. In short, to become thoroughly at home in the air, stunting is as necessary as, and comparable to, the ability to drive an automobile in traffic.

It was natural that Amelia chose an ex-army pilot to teach her stunting—they were the best. Her choice was John Montijo who, like many ex-army pilots, had been knocking about the country trying to make a living out of flying and was another recent arrival on the Los Angeles scene. He was a superb pilot and liked and had full confidence in the Airster. As Neta faded out of the picture, he faded in. Within a short time he knew the Airster like the back of his hand and had taken over demonstrating and racing it. Before many months elapsed, he had as well become financially involved in Bert Kinner's enterprise.

Short and stocky, always well dressed to the point of wearing a shirt and tie with his jodhpurs, he exuded competence. Monte, as everyone called him, and his wife Alta became Amelia's friends.

Amelia learned stunting under his watchful eye, to become competent in the air no matter what the conditions. Under John's instruction, she learned how to sideslip the Airster, do forty-five-degree banked turns, vertical banked turns, dives, tailspins, loops, and barrel rolls, “and their relatives and friends”—not so useful, she had to admit, but she learned them “mostly for fun.” She practiced until it became second nature, likening stunting to the necessity of learning how to drive a car in traffic when the right reactions are vital.

Within a few months she would solo, in a flight that was a bit of an anticlimax. As she was taking off, one of the Airster's shock absorbers broke, causing the left wing to sag, and she had to abort the flight. After the damage was repaired, she took off again, climbed to about five thousand feet, fooled around, and returned to the field. The flight ended with a “thoroughly rotten landing.”

Before the year was out, it was not Neta Snook but Amelia with the
calm gray eyes and freckled nose who was the celebrity aviatrix at Kinner field, whose exploits were being written about in The Ace.

On November 3, Miss Earhart with a 175 pound passenger and a full tank of gas climbed to 10,200 feet in one hour and twenty eight minutes and during the course of the flight was 3000 feet directly over Mt. Wilson.

She was not only participating in air meets but was featured as a drawing card to boost attendance: “The Pacific Coast Ladies Derby will bring out two of our best lady pilots Miss Amelia Earhart and... Miss Aloysia McLintic.”

On November 12, at Daugherty field, Bert entered the Airster in the first air rodeo. The air rodeos, dreamed up by the Commercial Aircraft Association of Southern California and run by the Aero Club of Southern California, were designed to attract people and money into the aviation world while simultaneously offering the pilots fun and exposure. Those behind the rodeos were emphatically of the camp that approved of stunting for a very pragmatic reason—for most people, the novelty of just seeing an airplane fly by had worn thin. To draw crowds now, there had to be more of everything—more thrills, and more and new stunts.

It was at this first rodeo that the first aerial refueling was carried out. Wing-walker genius Wesley May strapped a five-gallon can of gasoline onto his back, walked out onto the wing of the Jenny that Earl Daugherty was maneuvering through the air as Frank Hawks flew perilously close, jumped onto the wing of Frank's Standard, walked to his gas tank, poured in the gasoline, and finally walked back into the Standard's cockpit. The Airster performed in three events—stunt flying, landing over an obstacle, and a tug-of-war that was dramatically advertised as a test between the plane and a one-ton truck but in fact ended up as a contest between the plane and a large seven-passenger automobile loaded to capacity; it ended in a draw. Undoubtedly the Airster used was Amelia's, for her name is included in the list of those whom the Commercial Aircraft Association thanked for their assistance in making the Long Beach Air Rodeo a success, putting her name on a short list with such luminaries of the air world as Earl Daugherty, Frank Clarke, Frank Hawks, Wesley May, and Waldo Waterman.