East to the Dawn (22 page)

On Sunday, November 27, Emery Rogers, racing against a French Nieuport in his C1 Monoplane, banked on a turn above his field from
which he never came out. In reporting the fatal accident, the press made sure, as they always did in those days, to point out that it wasn't because flying was inherently dangerous that the plane had crashed but because the pilot had made an incredible error. In this case, the error was not only that Rogers had not yet recovered from a “severe” case of the flu but that he “had been given strict orders by his doctor not to fly as he was subject to dizzy spells.... There can be but one answer. Emery Rogers became dizzy from the speed and strain of the race, perhaps only for a fraction of a second, but the ship was but forty-five feet from the ground and the speed was 140 miles per hour.”

Overlooked was that Emery Rogers had been a pilot of such talent that he had graduated two weeks ahead of all the others in his army training class at Souther Field, that he was a man of such leadership qualities that the army shortly thereafter put him in charge of Souther field, and a man of such judgment that while he ran Souther field not one officer, not one cadet, had ever been seriously hurt.

His death didn't change Amelia's plans, or those of anyone else in the flying fraternity. On December 17, Amelia and silent screen star Aloysia McLintic were a featured attraction of the second air rodeo at the Sierra airdrome in Pasadena, a by-invitation-only air show. The rodeo consisted of twelve events—everything from the usual tug-of-war between a plane and a truck, to aerial tumbling, landing contests, aerial transfers, wing-walking, a mail-bag-dropping accuracy contest, a three-lap relay race, a parachute jump (which did not take place), and a radio hookup from a plane to a waiting General Pershing in Washington, D.C., which also failed to come off. Amelia and Aloysia's event was number ten on the program: “Pacific Coast Ladies Derby,” consisting of Amelia in her Kinner Airster and Alyosia in her Laird Swallow. The two women doing stunts flew similar planes—light sport model biplanes, although the Swallow, at close to six thousand dollars was much more expensive.

During the afternoon before and between events, many of the seven thousand spectators who had paid to attend were free to wander about the field and examine the planes up close—a necessary inducement to lure nonpaying customers, parked on the perimeter of the field, out of their cars and through the gates onto the field. The curious, who circled, questioned, or merely gawked at her elegant little Airster, gave the twenty-four-year-old Amelia her first taste of dealing with crowds.

Amelia had turned up even though something was the matter with the Lawrance engine—actually, it was out of the Airster, being repaired.

At that stage in the development of planes, parts were constantly
being interchanged: land planes would have their wheels taken off, replaced with pontoons and become seaplanes; wings would be replaced with other wings; engines would be exchanged with other engines. Nor was it unusual for engines to be put to use in vehicles other than the kind they had been designed for. Motorcycle engines, being small and light were pressed into service to power planes; amateur automobile builders put powerful but inexpensive plane engines into cars.

Reflecting this practice, aviation magazines ran as many ads for pieces of planes as for whole ones. Jenny wings “new and covered” went for $20; an OX-5 motor somewhere between $150 to $275; a new Lawrance engine “complete,” probably a two-cylinder, could be bought for $85.

Replacing one engine that was temporarily down with another was done all the time. If it hadn't been, pilots would have been grounded for unsuitably long stretches. It was just another one of the risks one had to accept. So Amelia didn't let the fact that her Lawrance engine was on the bench stop her—she simply hunted up another to put in its place. Her substitute came from a somewhat unusual source, however: the Goodyear pony blimp, a midget dirigible that usually ran at a speed of only thirty-nine miles per hour and carried three people. Such usage made far lower demands on the engine than the Airster, and as a result, as Amelia was flying, one of the three spark plugs blew out and the engine quit, luckily just as she arrived over the Pasadena airdrome. She made a dead stick landing over the field, which must have been excellent because it went totally unnoticed: “the chatterers never knew they came near having something actually to talk about.” After a new extralong spark plug was inserted, Amelia decided to participate anyway.

As 1921 drew to a close everything was falling into place for Amelia. She had won her wings, had her own plane, had earned the respect of her fellow pilots for her flying prowess, and had been accepted as an equal by the California flying fraternity. She was full of plans and high hopes—looking forward to buying the newest model Kinner Airster that Bert was designing, turning over in her mind the possibilities of flying it to New York in the spring to compete in the 1922 flying season there and, once there, re-enrolling at Columbia.

Amelia had a wonderful time piloting her pet. Sometime that winter she (momentarily) established a new altitude record, which found its way into the papers. In an unusual departure from her usual modesty, she included the clipping in her first book. The newsclip reported that “Miss Amelia Earhart, local aviatrix, established a new altitude record for women yesterday under the auspices of the Aero Club of Southern California. Flying her own Kinner Airster, containing a 60 horse power motor, she
ascended more than 14,000 feet.” She was becoming so well known that beginning in April, Bert Kinner used her in the full-page ads he regularly took out in
The Ace
to advertise his plane—and of course the exposure made her even better known. “A Lady's Plane as well as a Man's,” ran the headline of his advertisements.

On August 8, 1922, the
Los Angeles Examiner
ran a story on the probable departure of the famous local aviatrix Amelia Earhart. It was a puff piece (“Vassar College is primed for its thrill of thrills. Some sunny day next fall a large and dusty airplane is due to pull a near-tailspin over its exclusive campus and, descending, to disgorge Miss Amelia Earhart, Los Angeles society girl-student aviatrix.”) and it featured a half-page photo of Amelia in flying togs in front of an Airster. But she didn't go. “I lingered on in California, another sunkist victim of inertia—or was it the siren song of the realtors,” she wrote, glossing as usual over problems.

Amy and Edwin were still struggling with their lives. That first summer when Edwin had moved out to Los Angeles alone, he had been taken in hand by members of the Christian Science Church, and it was as a result of the efforts of the Church that he no longer drank and had returned to his old self. By the time Amelia and Amy moved out, he was part of a law firm, Earhart and Maine, located in the Fay Building in Los Angeles, was full of plans for the future, and was exploring the possibility of running for the state legislature. To support his political plans, he had old friends write references. A former mayor of Kansas City obligingly wrote, “I am sure that he would make a safe, active and intelligent member of the Legislature, and one in whom the District he represents can place absolute confidence.”

In 1921 they had moved from the modest home on West Twenty-third Street, where they had been living, into a larger, more comfortable house on West Fourth. The move, however, was based more on optimism about Edwin's prospects than anything else. They were, as usual, just getting by.

Having, by reason of their history, scant faith in their own business judgment, Amy and Edwin had begun to rely on Amelia's. On her suggestion, they decided to make an investment in a gypsum mine in Nevada that Peter Barnes, a friend of Amelia's, had purchased the fall of 1921. In spite of the fact that it was Amy's money, her role appears to have been totally passive. Amelia and Edwin went out to Moapa, Nevada, to see Peter and the mine. They arrived on site after a heavy rain, were almost engulfed in a flash flood, and watched Peter die as the rushing water caught and overturned his truck loaded with gypsum. Amelia wrote to her sister back east at Smith, “Peter is drowned, the mine seems irreparably
flooded, and all of mother's investment is gone. We are still reeling from the blow.”

They had to resort to extreme measures just to get by. Amy decided to do what she had set out to do in St. Paul—take in boarders—and this time she followed through. One of them was Sam Chapman, twenty-nine years old, from Marblehead, Massachusetts, who had recently graduated from Tufts. Tall and thin, with dark brown hair, and blue eyes, he was an engineer. He appeared to share Amelia's appetite for knowledge and her admiration for whatever was new. There is no record of his flying with Amelia, but they played tennis and discussed books and philosophy. They discovered they were both idealists and shared a common concern for the inequalities of society; they went to at least one Industrial Workers of the World meeting together.

Sam loved Amelia's spirit, her daring, her independence. For her part, Amelia found herself seriously interested in him. He was kind and considerate, and there was something else that appealed to her—theirs was a relationship of two equal people. Sam would never dominate her the way Edwin did Amy. Amelia began dropping his name into the letters she wrote Muriel at Smith. She began thinking about marriage, not right away, but sometime in the future.

That June, following the mine disaster, Amelia sold her plane to a former flying instructor named Maynard Morley and began casting about for a fulfilling career that paid well.

Becoming a flying instructor herself would apparently have solved all Amelia's money problems, but teaching, in spite of the example of Neta, was a chancy occupation in those years. The particular risk in teaching was due to the fact that all the training planes of the period were, without exception, locked into dual control mode—so that if a student sitting alone in his cockpit froze at the stick, he could send the craft crashing to earth. The number of students who had killed themselves and their instructors was a constant source of anxiety. It had been brought forcefully to Amelia's attention almost the first moment she arrived in Los Angeles and fell in love with flying: Clifford Prodger, an internationally known test pilot with an awesome six thousand flying hours to his credit, had been killed on an August day that summer of 1920 up at Redwood City when one of his students had lost his head, frozen at the stick, and sent the plane diving into the earth. When the wreckage was examined, it was found that Clifford had bent his steel stick with his hands in a desperate and futile effort to break the student's hold over the plane. The only way to deal with the
problem, according to Amelia, was for the instructor to keep a belaying pin of sorts about, with which to knock the student unconscious. Teaching was therefore never an option for her, averse as she was to ceding control of her life in
any
circumstance to someone else.

In her search for a paying occupation that would leave her time for flying, Amelia had been investigating photography studios and had actually been offered a part-time job in one studio. Although she had not taken it, she decided it was a promising way to make money and decided to study photography. Thorough as usual, she worked to become good at her new trade, photographing ordinary objects to get unusual effects. For a while her favorite subject was garbage cans. She photographed the garbage can on the cellar steps, the empty garbage can alone on the curb—“I can't name all the moods of which a garbage can is capable.” She went into business with a fellow student, Jean Brandreth, making “home portraits,” but their subjects demanded so many sittings, they didn't make any money. She became adept at filming with a motion picture camera as well as still camera. Once she had the great good fortune to be driving by just as an oil well started gushing, and she sold the resultant film to a local real estate promoter. In June 1923 she went to work for an established commercial photographer and there learned how to develop color film. But the studio ran into financial problems and “nearly became bankrupt.” She left in October, disillusioned with the moneymaking potential of the profession.

Amelia's next foray was so unusual, in the 1920s for an educated young woman, as to be almost strange. She began driving a sand and gravel truck. Noting that a building boom was turning outlying airfields into housing subdivisions, she decided money could be made hauling paving and building materials for the burgeoning market. Lloyd Royer, a young midwesterner, a top-notch mechanic looking to get into his own business, was her partner in the enterprise. They bought a truck and proceeded to drum up business. The truck, a Moreland, was, since Amelia always bought the latest thing, state of the art. The Moreland Company, located in Burbank, was famous for producing the first trucks that ran on low-grade fuel and used more than a three-speed transmission; it gave a one-year guarantee. Amelia's friends were less than impressed. Several, in fact, dropped her. Whether or not she was “ostracized by the more right-thinking girls,” as she claimed years later, there is no doubt that she was made to feel distinctly uncomfortable.