This young lady showed amazing courage, fortitude, and talent. She goes down in history with a long list of avition firsts to her credit.
Born July 24, 1897, Amelia Earhart was six years old when the Wright Brothers made their famous flight at Kitty Hawk. As a child she saw a plane at a fair, and later wrote remembering being significantly unimpressed by the old ragged biplane. Her father was an alcoholic, and her tom boy childhood was turbulent with several separations and reunions. Her grandfather (a former Federal Judge) had left a trust fund for her education, so that her mother was able to send her to good schools despite the extreme difficulties that faced mothers living separate from their husbands in the early 1900’s.
Amelia finished high school. And was enrolled in Medical school when her parents reconciled their differences and moved to California. She dropped out to join her reunited family there. In California she went on a stunt flight with her father, and soon began taking flying lessons from Anita Snook, a female flight instructor. She bought her own plane, a Kinner Airster, and got her first taste of record setting by flying it to a record altitude for a female of 14,000 feet.
Her parents marriage turned sour again, and she sold her plane and bought a Kissel Roadster to drive her mother to Massachusetts. In Boston she got a job as a social worker, and promoted and sold Kinner Airsters. The local press seems to have been quite taken with her, and she soon had quite a reputation as a pilot. The fickle finger of the hand of fate then pointed to her as a rich American woman living in London who had planned to fly the Atlantic chickened out, but offered to provide plane and financing to any woman who would undertake the feat.
So it was that Amelia Earhart became the first woman and the second person to solo across the Atlantic, landing her Lockheed Vega (short of her goal of Paris) in Ireland due to mechanical problems. She was hailed as the latest great American aviation hero. She was awarded a number of medals including America’s Distinguished Flying Cross.
She married a rather mercenary man named George Putnam, who had promoted her flight, and the couple made great profits off her fame. She then wrote a book, performed flying exhibitions, gave her name to a wide variety of products including cigarettes (and she didn’t even smoke). She flew the Pacific solo from Hawaii to California as well, and got a post at Purdue University as a an advisor on women’s careers.
Her fame was at its height, and she could have basked in the glow for years, but the University bought her a new plane, a Lockheed L-10E Electra, and she determined to circumnavigate the globe by a 29,000 mile long Equatorial route.
Second half of the story coming soon
