East to the Dawn (70 page)

Amelia took all this in stride. When Paul dive-bombed Hart's ranch, the retired film star had roared out of the house and gotten the number of the plane. Amelia ended up accompanying Paul to visit and apologize. (“Damn near shook the bricks out of the chimney,” Bill Hart later grumbled.) It resulted in a new friendship; Amelia and George spent many hours at his Horseshoe ranch east of Hollywood, among treasures such as Charles Russell's finest Western paintings, shoes from every horse Bill had ever owned, and his two enormous dogs, Minnie and Prince, who insisted on chasing rabbits across the lawn and put Amelia in mind of Daudet's rabbits, who “warmed their paws in the moonlight.” So she couldn't stay mad.

She had stayed with the Mantzes in their Toluca Lake home in North Hollywood twice, once for approximately a month, once for a few days, before she and George rented a house for themselves. By then the Mantz marriage was breaking apart, and when Myrtle sued for divorce (the divorce was granted in July 1936), she used those visits to name Amelia as co-respondent. There was never evidence that Amelia and Paul were interested in each other, particularly because Paul was head over heels in love with another woman, Terry Minor, whom he had recently met and who would shortly become his wife. It was more annoying than serious—” the silly accusations fell of their own weight,” Amelia assured Amy. Amelia had decided to go into business with Paul, putting her plane in with his for charter, making plans for a flight school, thinking of putting on an air circus—she wasn't sure just what, after her record flights, but the commercial possibilities seemed very attractive. Paul seemed to have the big business commercial touch. Amelia was looking to enhance her income stream, and the income potential of linking their names seemed like too good a deal to pass up. She could give United Air Services greater visibility,
more customers, and respectability and benefit financially at, she hoped, no great investment of time, for Paul appeared to be immensely successful. They rolled over the possibilities, as did George, who after some hesitation agreed that it was a sound business idea. She bought into United Air Services. In September Paul and Amelia would sign a business agreement to form the Earhart-Mantz Flying School.

Meanwhile Boston-Maine Airways was just beginning to do quite well. FDR had opened up the bidding for airmail contracts and the B&M won the contract for mail service north of Boston. Amelia and Gene now had the opportunity to sell their stake in Boston-Maine and took advantage of it, doubling their investment: each got twenty thousand dollars.

In June Amelia and George bought a house of their own in the Toluca Lake district, one of the fastest-growing townships in North Hollywood. Amelia had decided to move to California earlier that fall, but it had taken George, a bit left out in the beginning, some prodding to fall in with her plans. Amelia expected that he, of course, would be handling the publicity for any Earhart-Mantz enterprise; she hoped he would also supply ideas. One of the projects she and Paul were talking about was an air circus; George was, she told her mother, “all hep about this too.” Not having been given a great deal of choice, he caved in, went house hunting, and was the one to find the house at the end of Valley Spring Lane in North Hollywood. The house was on a square lot, with two sides on the golf course of the Lakeside Country Club and the rounded California hills beyond. The house was too small but well situated; by the time they did it over, it would have nine rooms: four bedrooms, four and a half baths, and a sun deck.

Amelia had never let up on what aviation historian Don Dwiggins called her “constant hammering” at Cliff Henderson and Vincent Bendix to rescind his ban on permitting women to enter the Bendix. Her pressure, in combination with her most recent record-breaking long-distance flights, which demonstrated more clearly that women could safely fly long distances, plus the crash of more Gee Bees (all with male pilots), decided the issue; the men had no choice except to readmit women into the race. But since Vincent Bendix shared Henderson's basic attitude that women didn't measure up to men as pilots and therefore couldn't possibly win, he put up a $2,500 “consolation prize” for the first woman who finished. Amelia waited until the last minute to submit her entry, and when it was announced, it moved the Bendix onto the front pages of the country's newspapers.

The Bendix race that year, 1935, would start out on the Friday of Labor Day weekend at the Union Air Terminal in Los Angeles and end in Cleveland at the opening of the National Air Races. It was no longer a solo race.

Roscoe Turner, who held the Los Angeles-to-New York speed record of 10 hours and 2 minutes was flying a powerful Wedell-Williams capable of speeds in excess of three hundred miles an hour. Jacqueline Cochran, newcomer to the aeronautics scene, was flying a 1,000-horsepower Northrop Gamma plane, as was Russell Thaw; Roy Hunt was flying a fast Lockheed Orion low-wing monoplane; Earl Ortman had an R-3 Silver Bullet powered by a 750-horsepower Wasp engine; Benny Howard, a vacationing United Airline pilot, accompanied by his wife Maxine “Mike” and Gordon Israel, both pilots, were in a Wasp-motored monoplane of Howard's design. Royal Leonard was in Q.E.D., a plane that had crash landed at least once.

Amelia knew her plane—“the old family bus,” with its 500-horsepower engine—was dependable but not fast enough to win, unless—and the possibilities were always there in those years—unless mishaps took out the rest of the field. But she couldn't very well not enter, given her status as the best female long-distance flier and the champion of the right of women to enter. Paul decided to fly with her as a passenger, and an engineer friend, Al Menasco, owner of an up-and-coming engine company, joined up for the ride.

Henderson had planned to have starting times and they were tentatively set, but when fog rolled in, the idea was abandoned, and it was decided that the first plane ready would take off, mainly because several of the pilots said they wouldn't take off unless the fog lifted. Amelia, again less intimidated than others, was again the first contestant off, her wheels beginning to roll at 4:53 A.M. on the foggy morning of August 30. Roy Hunt stayed on the ground another hour, and then took off at six o'clock, followed almost immediately by Howard. Turner, remarking that “any man is crazy to take off in this kind of weather,” waited till almost eight. One pilot, Seward Pulitzer, withdrew rather than take off in such thick fog. Cecil Allen and Jacqueline Cochran were the last to take off.

Cecil was flying one of the unreliable Gee Bees, and this one too now killed its pilot as it went out of control on takeoff. Jacqueline Cochran, following him, missed the end of the runway by three hundred feet and caught her trailing antenna in a fence, thereby knocking out her radio; she pulled out of the race upon landing in Arizona. Ortman in his Silver Bullet landed at Kansas City and decided to remain there; Leonard was forced down at Wichita by a broken fuel line. Benny and Mike Howard
and Roscoe Turner were in a dead heat to the finish line, but Benny and Mike managed to win by twenty-three seconds. Russell Thaw came in third, Roy Hunt fourth. Amelia, who stayed at the controls for most of the race (Paul and Al played cards in the rear), piloted her cargo to fifth place and picked up the five-hundred dollar prize, which would pay for gas and incidental expenses. For her it was just one more flight most of the way across the country; she had lost count of the exact number she had made.

After the race was over, Amelia and Paul formalized their agreement to open the Earhart-Mantz Flying School with a contract. Then Amelia went off on the lecture circuit, visiting thirty cities in thirty days in Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Kansas.

Two days after the Bendix, Laura Ingalls, the pretty New Yorker who had flown around South America, got into her Lockheed Orion and flew nonstop from Burbank to Floyd Bennett field in 13 hours, 35 minutes—breaking Amelia's nonstop coast-to-coast record by more than five and a half hours. Laura Ingalls had destroyed her record not only because she was a good flier but because the
Auto-da-Fe,
her sleek black Orion with the zodiac sign painted on the cowling, was new.

“I'd like to find the tree on which new airplanes grow. I'd certainly shake myself down a good one,” Amelia had said a few weeks later. George evidently was listening, and reported it to President Elliott.

The Lockheed Electra, named after a star in the Pleiades, was Amelia's dream plane. It was the first fully pressurized plane, could carry twelve, had a wingspan of 55 feet, was almost 39 feet long, could fly to an altitude of 19,000 feet, and had a range of 4,000 miles.

But why did she want a huge twin-engined plane?

Part of the answer lies in tragedy. The summer of 1935, her good friends Wiley Post and Will Rogers, were planning a tour of the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Alaska in Wiley's Vega. Amelia gave Wiley gas tanks from her Vega—traded them for his wheels.

Wiley, a year younger than Amelia, brought up on a hardscrabble farm in east Texas, a school dropout at the age of fourteen, was fearless. An oil field roustabout in Oklahoma, Wiley became a parachute jumper for a flying circus that worked the town and jumped ninety-nine times in two years, along the way learning how to fly. Later, back in the oil fields to earn enough money to buy a plane, he lost an eye through another worker's carelessness. Undeterred, he taught himself to estimate distances with one eye and became such a good pilot that he became a test pilot for Lockheed. It was while working there that he met Amelia.

Will Rogers, the part Cherokee Oklahoma cowboy, probably the most popular man in America, certainly the most popular film star, had done more to popularize aviation than anyone except Lindbergh, Amelia felt. The Sunday before Wiley and Will left, Amelia and George had lunch at Will's ranch in Santa Monica.

Wiley, who loved pushing equipment to the limit, was always changing and experimenting with his planes. For this Yukon tour he had modified a Lockheed Orion. He not only exchanged the wheels for floats and added Amelia's fuel tanks, he substituted wings from the Sirius, another Lockheed design, for the ones designed for the Orion. The biggest change he made, however, according to Kelly Johnson, design engineer at Lockheed, was to put in a more powerful engine—the biggest engine he could—the biggest propeller, and a different gear box. Johnson disapproved because the additional weight of these changes made the plane so nose-heavy that the only way the plane could take off was to be rocked fore and aft on its floats with the power on until finally the nose came up and it bounced into the air.

“Wiley, you'd better watch this. You'll have trouble on takeoff,” Johnson argued, “because I doubt that there is enough elevator power to get the nose up.” Johnson didn't think the CAA (Civil Aeronautics Authority) would certify the altered plane, but they did, although later they would say they didn't know about all the design changes.

Wiley Post and Will Rogers started out on their voyage. They were having a splendid time, were three hundred miles from the Arctic circle, when Wiley set down in an Eskimo encampment, landing in a sort of lagoon to make some repair to the engine and make sure where he was. When Wiley took off again, on August 15, he managed to get the plane into the air and was climbing steeply, but suddenly the engine stalled, everything went wrong, and they crashed to their deaths. Amelia was devastated.

Wiley was every flier's hero. His first solo round-the-world flight in 1931 in a Vega had taken just eight days—an incredible achievement. He wrote a book about it. But he always had ambitious plans and was always short of money. Now he had met his death trying to soup up the engine of a single-engine plane to force it to give higher performance. If he had been in a twin-engine plane, it might not have happened. The big leap for Amelia was the crucial one of going from one engine to two. The death of her two good friends pointed the way; she made her decision.