East to the Dawn (29 page)

Among the more unusual jobs Amelia took on at the airfield was decorating the public rooms. She sent off a hastily typed letter to Marian Stabler, vacationing at Lake George. “The field opens on Tuesday next for flying in full force,” she wrote. “I am having a great time selecting hangings and furniture for the main hangar. I certainly wish I had you here to consult as the thing will approach the bizazz (Heavens, I am trying to write bizarre) as the colors are orange black and blue, with a few spots of lavender and green thrown in.”

The opening on July 2 drew twenty-five hundred spectators. Airplanes—army, navy, national guard planes flying in formation—as well as private planes from the greater Boston area flew overhead throughout the day. The mayor of Quincy ran a flag up the flagpole to signal the official opening of the airport; the ubiquitous Bernard Wiesman gave a speech on behalf of the mayor of Boston. A reporter from
The Boston Herald
sought out Amelia. The language in the interview, obviously one of her first, is stilted, awkward, self-conscious: “New England has some of the best yachtswomen and sportswomen in the world. I am surprised that more New England women have not gone into flying as a sport.... when one thinks of all the splendid sportswomen New England has produced ... I think any normal woman should be able to learn to fly, with planes perfected as they are today, in a very short space of time and with but little application.”

That summer, on July 24, Amelia turned thirty. A decade-marker birthday, a jolt to anyone, a really serious birthday for someone who regularly took years off her age, as Amelia did. It was at that time that she moved out of the house at 76 Brooks Street, where she had been living with Amy and Muriel, and into Denison House—which must have seemed an act of desertion to Amy and caused her to move with Muriel into a small apartment at 27 Princeton Street in South Medford, near the Lincoln Junior High School, where Muriel taught.

Amelia and Sam Chapman were still engaged. He was working as an engineer for Boston Edison, still patiently waiting for Amelia to settle down and marry him. As far as he was concerned, his courtship, and their relationship continued as before and nothing had changed, even though she had moved into Denison House. He was hopeful because he had before him the example of Amelia's friend from Columbia days, Louise de Schweinitz, and Daniel Darrow. Louise, a doctor, had spent her residency in Boston at the New England Hospital for Women and Children (staffed exclusively by women—not her first choice, but three Boston hospitals
turned down her application), while her fiancé, Dr. Daniel Darrow, spent his residency at Boston City. Sam and Amelia had whiled away many hours with them prowling around Boston, listening to Amelia's “enormous” collection of phonograph records, driving out to Marblehead, Sam's territory, in Amelia's Kissell, to swim and picnic on the beach. Clearly Louise's devotion to her work hadn't interfered with their relationship—Louise and Daniel had just gotten married. So there was every reason for Sam to be supportive of Amelia's desire for a career, even if it involved living at Denison House. But still, Sam was a little dismayed by Amelia's move. To him it might have seemed a desertion, even if he wouldn't admit it—and a threat as well—for as it was only too easy for him to see, Amelia's activities were taking more and more of her time. Of course he also knew that if and when they married, he too could move into the House—married couples often did, and there was a married couple living at the House now. But particularly for someone like Sam, trained as an engineer and not, except for Amelia, interested in social problems, it couldn't have held much allure. In any case, he couldn't press her, for the more he did, the more she shied away.

His dismay would have deepened if he had known that Amelia was laying the groundwork for a trip to California the following summer that did not include him. Bert Kinner had delivered a new Airster to Dennison airport, flying it solo across the country to demonstrate the plane's dependability. Maybe, Amelia proposed after he left, she should head west “and spend next summer learning the Kinner motor. It seems such a shame that no one here really knows it.”

But then, she was always doing things on her own, so Sam was used to it. It wasn't just the flying and the social work that Sam had to contend with. Her Sunday mornings were taken up horseback riding in Middlesex Fells with Vernis Shuttleworth, her Denison House co-worker. Half in love with her himself, full of admiration for her riding prowess, Vernis would recall she was invariably on time, boots and all, and ready to go no matter what the weather. Her preference was for a tall, prancy horse, and the colder it got, the more the wind blew, the wilder the horses, the more she liked it. “That was
good,”
he remembered her saying, as she grinned and blew on her freezing fingers after one brisk winter ride. Sometimes Amelia even brought Vernis back to Brook Street, and Amy would lay on a breakfast of fruit, oatmeal and cream, wheatcakes, and sausages—“the works.”

In fact, now that she was finally on her own and financially independent—not by any means rich, but independent—now that she had at last broken out of the track followed by ninety-nine percent of the women of
her day, the track that led straight from parental home to husband's home, just about anything and everything seemed possible. If she had never gotten in a plane again, still she would have made her mark in social work, she would have had as high a profile, as influential a position in Boston as any professional woman of her day.

She was, after all the lean years, fairly bursting with plans. That summer a photo of Ruth Nichols, of Rye, New York, ran in The Boston Herald. The famous aviatrix was identified as a member of the Federation Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) and “the only one of twenty seven commercial pilots in New York state to be licensed by the Commerce Department.” In mid-September Amelia wrote to her, “May I introduce myself as a fellow EA.I.... Because your picture has been appearing lately in Boston papers, I make you the victim of an idea which has been simmering for some time. What do you think of the advisability of forming an organization composed of women who fly? ... If you think the idea worth pursuing, won't you let me know your ideas.” It was the first of many letters the two women would exchange.

It was, naturally, the Boston papers that gave Amelia her first notoriety. The perceived moment of change was precipitated by a German girl.

There was a sensational young German aviatrix by the name of Thea Rasche in the United States, touring the Northeast, giving exhibitions of stunt flying. She was good copy—pretty, twenty-three years old, the sister of two German fliers killed in the war, the leading female stunt flier in Europe. On one of her flights earlier that summer in New York, when the engine of her Flamingo suddenly went dead, she skillfully nosedived her plane into the Hudson River. She was such a good pilot neither she nor the plane, which briefly sank before being towed to shore, was much the worse for wear for the experience.

By the time she was scheduled to appear at Dennison Airport the end of September, Thea was such a sensation that more than two thousand people showed up to see her fly. On the appointed day her demonstration was going well until, over Neponset, the Flamingo engine once again went dead. Thea briefly went into a nosedive trying to start the engine (like pushing a car with a dead battery), then banked. Then, having no choice, she put the plane into a glide. She was over the airport, had just cleared the hangar by fifteen or twenty feet, and was in the process of making a dead stick landing—when she saw she was heading straight into the waiting crowd. She veered away and, with no alternative site in view, crashed into the swamp abutting the landing field. But she did it so skillfully that again neither she nor her plane was seriously damaged. The spectators undoubtedly were more shaken up than she.

Thea's dunking in the Hudson had brought forth a spate of articles about women daring to fly and being unprepared. Immediately following Thea's crash landing this time, Amelia climbed into one of the field's Waco 10's and proceeded to entertain the onlookers with what the papers called “an excellent demonstration of flying” to prevent the same negative reaction. Harold Dennison undoubtedly thought the point of her going up was to distract the waiting, worried crowd. That was only his idea, it turned out; Amelia had another goal—to negate any resurgence of antifeminist feeling. Upon landing, she stated her mission to the waiting reporter. “Miss Earhart wanted to prove that Miss Rasche's mishap was unavoidable and no fault of her own; that women are quite as capable pilots as men, and quite as daring” dutifully reported the newsman on the scene. She had finally found her public voice. Soon, the whole world would be listening.

In the first months of 1928 Amelia had the clever idea of writing an article about flying for The Bostonian, the fashionable magazine that all Boston read, and she had the nerve and self-confidence to charm its editor, Katherine Crosby, into publishing it.

Undoubtedly Katherine gazed approvingly at Amelia's casual style and lack of makeup, so in keeping was her look with that of the proper women of Boston, who were brought up to regard the cultivation of external glamour as cheap artifice, as Cleveland Amory would write. The Bostonian was the magazine that kept tabs on the “knowns” of Boston—those whose families had been there for generations. If it reported on the “unknowns,” it was likely to be aristocratic unknowns—usually English. The magazine studiously recorded the summer comings and goings of the English diplomatic community, which in those days before air conditioning regularly fled Washington for houses on the North Shore. For an “outsider” like Amelia to be accepted with such alacrity into the sacrosanct inner circle was highly unusual. But Amelia was perfect in looks, unaffected in manner, and modest in demeanor—the ultimate hallmarks of Boston breeding.

Katherine Crosby was effusive—in print; having been charmed, she wanted the rest of Boston to be charmed too. She wrote of Amelia as a “real thoroughbred,” her highest accolade, and recounted how it all came about: “a curly headed girl ... curled up on the couch in
The Bostonian's
sitting room and wondered if she could write us an article about flying.... All she wanted was to make flying interesting to women.... Amelia Earhart impressed us all at the time as having the least vanity of any girl we had met in a month of Mondays.... I had to persuade her to allow her name to
be signed to the article.” And again her face was before the public—this time a remarkably faithful line drawing of Amelia in the flying outfit in which she had been photographed the previous spring. The article, titled “When Women Go Aloft,” appeared in the May issue. In it Amelia gently stated her case.

“While women are hopelessly adventurous, they seem content to take their thrills vicariously, and watch men do things a long time before they attempt to do them. I have hope that this year will see many more women flying. Will it help my bright little hope to blossom into a bouncing reality if I give some aspects of flying from a feminine point of view? In the first place, I shall repeat what I said about beauty. There is the beauty of adventure, as in all sports; and a beauty of the earth, impossible to get in any other way.”

She went on to describe the thrills of flying, some common misconceptions of its danger, and closed with a neat encapsulation of her beliefs: “There is no door closed to ability, so when women are ready there will be opportunity for them in aviation.”