East to the Dawn (32 page)

By midnight that same night, Hilton Railey had tracked down the
plane at the East Boston airport, found out that the pilot was Wilmer Stultz and the mechanic Louis Gordon, and that they were lodged at the Copley Plaza Hotel. Pressing on with his sleuthing, he went to the hotel in search of Wilmer Stultz, whom he found still up and drinking. Stultz admitted that he was embarking on a transatlantic adventure, admitted that he was going to have a female with him, but he maintained he didn't know the identity of the woman. He did, however, give out the name of her attorney, with whom he had been dealing : David T. Layman. Hilton turned the information over to George Putnam.

In the meantime, cool, conservative David T. Layman, used to providing legal advice and investment possibilities to the Phipps family, out of his depth in his new assignment, had gotten as far as apprising Byrd of the change in plans—but no further. So when, early one morning, he received a call from George Palmer Putnam, whom he knew slightly, asking him for a conference that the publisher assured him would be “mutually interesting,” he was still mulling over his task and had interviewed no one. George's timing (for George) was perfect. “Pretty much at the moment I dropped from the clouds and introduced myself, Layman was wondering what to do next” was George's assessment of the situation. When they met, George filled Layman in on his background in aviation projects and exploration and his unmatched record of publishing triumphs (the latest being the just-released
Skyward
by Richard E. Byrd) and offered his services. David Layman looked “visibly relieved,” according to Putnam, at his offer of help in finding a substitute for Amy Guest. The girl who would make the flight, David Layman told him, had to be pleasing in appearance, of a type that would meet with critical English approval, have gone to college, and be a flier.

But if Layman looked “visibly relieved,” he was also guarded, for Putnam wanted the exclusive commission to find the girl; this Layman refused to give. Putnam, a brash type, pushed his case—a bit too hard. Layman later recollected that he told Putnam, “All I have to say is that if you should happen to hear of anyone you think might fit such plans we may be willing to consider her. We put ourselves under no obligation or agreement whatsoever to accept her.”

Undeterred, Putnam pressed on. Since Hilton Railey had done such a good job of sleuthing, George turned to him again to find a candidate. And since Railey lived in Boston and his contacts were Boston contacts, the first thing he did when he returned was to contact his friend who was involved in the Boston air world, retired Rear Admiral Reginald R. Belknap, who was of course a member of the Boston NAA, and ask him if he knew of a candidate.

“Why, yes,” Admiral Belknap said now to Railey. “I know a young social worker who flies. I'm not sure how many hours she's had, but I do know that she's deeply interested in aviation—and a thoroughly fine person. Call Denison House and ask for Amelia Earhart.”

When Ruth Nichols found out later that it had all been in the hands of her Rye neighbor George and that he had never even thought of her although she was a well-known pilot, she was furious. Observed Janet Mabie, “She never forgot the slight.”

At Denison House early one afternoon in April, just as the neighborhood was piling in for games and classes, Amelia was called to the phone and asked by a man if she wanted to do something “aeronautic” that might possibly be hazardous; if so, would she come in for an interview. Since those were the days of Prohibition, Amelia's first thought was that she might be talking to a bootlegger who wanted her to fly some illegal alcohol into the country. She pressed him with questions. It was, of course, Hilton Railey, who later admitted that he had had absolutely no intention of telling her what he was calling about without seeing her first, but he found she gave him no choice. “I had to come out with it because she declined an interview until I stated the nature of my business.” Not only that, but after a pause, to Railey's astonishment, Amelia asked him for references—“personal references.” Within hours Amelia had checked them out, and later that afternoon she appeared at Hilton Railey's office, taking the precaution of bringing Marion Perkins with her. She was wearing a brown wool suit and hat, under which could be seen the ends of her curly bobbed hair. Kathleen Knight, an associate of Hilton Railey and a director of his company, the Fiscal Service Corporation, didn't see past Amelia's outfit, which she didn't like, noting that her skirt came down to her ankles.

Railey, on the other hand, didn't notice her clothes. He saw her quick flashing smile, her level gray eyes, and her frank, direct way of looking at people, heard her low-pitched, pleasant voice, and took in her five-foot-eight, 118-pound frame. He thought her marvelous—her laugh “infectious,” her poise, warmth, and dignity “impressive.” He was so bowled over, in fact, that he instantly felt that he had met not just the perfect representative of the American woman that Amy Guest had stipulated but much more: “I felt that I had discovered not their norm but their sublimation.” So impressed was he that “I asked forthwith ‘How would you like to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic?' ” She answered in the affirmative. He told her about the woman (no names mentioned) who, having been talked out of making the flight herself, was looking for someone to take her place, and that George Palmer Putnam had asked him to help in the search.

Amelia understood that she would hear further, she assumed right away, but days went by; she heard nothing. The only development was that Putnam ran her by the Byrds, who had her to dinner at their Brimmer Street house and pronounced her suitable. While she waited, the world went on—the famous flier Floyd Bennett died in a hospital in Canada on April 20; a new experimental giant French seaplane with five motors crashed and sank on a test flight just off the French coast, killing one of the crew; Eleanor Sears, forty-six years old, hiked the seventy-four miles from Newport to her home on Beacon Street, her car and driver crawling behind, in exactly seventeen hours in the rain, the fastest time she had ever achieved; Harvard and Yale began a much-heralded intercollegiate “braintest,” each fielding their ten best students for a three-hour examination in English composition and literature. (Harvard would win, mainly thanks to the brilliance of Nathan Pusey, who subsequently became its president.) There was a conference at Radcliffe on the opportunities for part-time work for women.

On April 24 Amelia wrote to Ruth Nichols, with whom she had been corresponding since the previous fall, with some new thoughts on her pet subject: how to set up a women's flying organization. The letter, remarkably detailed, is graphic evidence both of Amelia's enormous capacity for self control and her ability to stay focused:

Amelia went through her days at Denison House; more people read her article in
The Bostonian.
Still no word came.

May 1 was a Tuesday; she was undoubtedly at the monthly luncheon meeting of the National Aviation Association at Department of Commerce headquarters at 80 Federal Street.

On May 2 she wrote to Hilton Railey:

What made it harder on her was that not only did she not know if she would be chosen, she had been told that there was a possibility that the flight might not come off at all. Not that she let her suspense apparently disturb her life or slow her pace. Quite possibly she slipped off by herself to sit “quietly drinking in the beauty of the sea and shore,” which she found restored her equilibrium. But she had a remarkable number of balls in the air in addition to Denison House—and her response to the pressure was to throw up new ones.

She wrote a letter to the Boston Chamber of Commerce, taking them to task for doing what she considered to be an abysmal job of publicizing aviation.

There is a reckless quality in the letter, dated four days after the one to Hilton—the strain was getting to her:

She addressed the letter to Bernard Wiesman, whom she knew from the NAA luncheon meetings; it was perhaps the combination of both letters that so electrified the gentlemen of the NAA that they would in a very short time vote Amelia into office. (The NAA would announce on election day, June 5, “Today the Boston Chapter of the NAA finds that its nominee for Vice-President has flown away.”)

Amelia was also busily trying to become a member of Zonta, a service organization for businesswomen with branches in most of the major
cities in the country. Zonta, the first organization for businesswomen in the United States, was founded in 1919 in Buffalo, New York, just as the long campaign for women's suffrage was ending. It filled the need for a women's professional organization for the growing number of such women in post—World War I America. Zonta, whose name was the Sioux word for “honest and trustworthy,” was modeled after the Rotary Clubs. Like membership in the Rotary, membership in Zonta was by invitation; like Rotary it was a service organization; like Rotary it met at lunch. “Their luncheon business meetings dealt with the same matters as those of the men in like positions with similar interests who had always been doing business at lunch,” according to its early literature. The first president was Mary Jenkins, publisher of
The Syracuse Herald.
Significantly, it was not as a social worker that Amelia rated an invitation to join, but because of her flying activities. On her application for membership, she filled in as her employer the Dennison Aircraft Corporation—as her job she wrote, “A director of the Corporation.” She made no mention of her activities at Denison House, listing it only as her home address.

Amelia's application for membership, complete with the obligatory signatures of two “active members in good standing” who were recommending her, was formally dated, signed by her, and submitted to Zonta on May 8, two days after her letter to the Chamber of Commerce, six days after her letter to Hilton Railey.

Suddenly she was invited to New York City to be interviewed. She arranged to spend the night before the interview with Marian Stabler in Great Neck. She told the Stablers only that she had confidential business in the city. If the prospect of the flight excited her, it didn't show at the Stablers', but then, Amelia was never visibly excited,
never
appeared anything but calm and collected, according to Marian. (The only thing that betrayed her excitement to Marian was that when she left for Boston, she very uncharacteristically forgot her coat.)