Amelia Mary Earhart (24 July 1897 – missing 2 July 1937, declared deceased 5 January 1939) was a noted American aviation pioneer and women's rights advocate. Earhart was the first woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross, which she was awarded as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, a women's pilots' organization.
Earhart disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean during an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight in 1937. Intense public fascination with her life, career and disappearance continues to this day.
Early life
Childhood
Amelia Mary Earhart, daughter of Samuel "Edwin" Stanton Earhart (1868-1930) and Amelia Otis Earhart (1869-1962), was born in Atchison, Kansas, in the home of her maternal grandfather, Alfred Otis, a former federal judge, president of the Atchison Savings Bank and a leading citizen in Atchison. Alfred Otis had not initially favored the marriage and was not satisfied with Edwin's progress as a lawyer.
Amelia was named, according to family custom, after her two grandmothers (Amelia Josephine Harres and Mary Wells Patton). From early on, "Meeley" (sometimes "Milie") was the ringleader while younger sister (two years her junior), Grace Muriel (1899-1998.) or "Pidge," acted the dutiful follower. Both girls continued to answer to their childhood nicknames well into adulthood. Their upbringing was unconventional since Amy Earhart did not believe in molding her children into "nice little girls." Meanwhile their maternal grandmother disapproved of the "bloomers" worn by Amy's children and although Amelia liked the freedom they provided, she was aware other neighborhood girls did not wear them.
Early influences
A spirit of adventure seemed to abide in the Earhart children with the pair setting off daily to explore their neighborhood for interesting and exciting pursuits. As a child, Amelia spent long hours playing with Pidge, climbing trees, hunting rats with a rifle and "belly-slamming" her sled downhill. The girls kept "worms, moths, katydids and a tree toad" in a growing collection gathered in their outings. Some biographers have even characterized the young Amelia as a tomboy. In 1904, with the help of her uncle, she cobbled together a home-made ramp fashioned after a roller coaster she had seen on a trip to St. Louis and secured the ramp to the roof of the family toolshed. Amelia's well-documented first flight ended dramatically. She emerged from the broken wooden box that had served as a sled with a bruised lip, torn dress and a sensation of exhilaration. She exclaimed, "Oh, Pidge, it's just like flying!"
Although there had been some missteps in his career up to that point, in 1907 Edwin Earhart's job as a claims officer for the Rock Island Railroad led to a transfer to Des Moines, Iowa. The next year, at the age of 11, Amelia saw her first airplane at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. Her father tried to interest her and her sister in taking a flight. One look at the rickety old "flivver" was enough for Amelia, who promptly asked if they could go back to the merry-go-round. She later described the biplane as "a thing of rusty wire and wood and not at all interesting."
Education
While her father and mother found a small home in Des Moines, Amelia and Muriel (she never used Grace) remained with their grandparents in Atchison. Until she was 12, Amelia and her sister received a form of home-schooling from her mother and a governess. She later recounted that she was "exceedingly fond of reading" and spent countless hours in the large family library. In 1909, when the family was finally reunited in Des Moines, the Earhart children were enrolled in public school for the first time with Amelia entering the seventh grade.
Family fortunes
While the family's finances seemingly improved with the acquisition of a new house and even the hiring of two servants, it soon became apparent Edwin was an alcoholic. Five years later (in 1914), he was forced to retire, and although he attempted to rehabilitate himself through treatment, he was never reinstated at the Rock Island Railroad. At about this time, Amelia's grandmother Amelia Otis died suddenly, leaving a substantial estate that placed her daughter's share in trust, fearing that Edwin's drinking would drain the funds. The Otis house, and all of its contents, was auctioned; Amelia was heart-broken and later described it as the end of her childhood.
In 1915, after a long search, Amelia's father found work as a clerk at the Great Northern Railway in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Amelia entered Central High School as a junior. Edwin applied for a transfer to Springfield, Missouri in 1915 but the current claims officer reconsidered his retirement and demanded his job back, leaving the elder Earhart with nowhere to go. Facing another calamitous move, Amy Earhart took her children to Chicago where they lived with friends. Amelia was enrolled in Hyde Park High School but spent a miserable semester where a yearbook caption captured the essence of her unhappiness, "A.E.- the girl in brown who walks alone."
Amelia graduated from Hyde Park School in 1916. Throughout her troubled childhood, she had continued to aspire to a future career; she kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about successful women in predominantly male-oriented fields, including film direction and production, law, advertising, management and mechanical engineering. She began college at Ogontz School in Rydal, Pennsylvania but did not complete her program.
During Christmas vacation in 1917, she visited her sister in Toronto, Ontario. World War I had begun and Amelia saw the returning wounded soldiers. After receiving training as a nurse's aide from the Red Cross she began work at Spadina Military Hospital in Toronto, Ontario with the Volunteer Aid Detachment. Her duties included preparing food in the kitchen for patients with special diets and handing out prescriptions in the hospital's dispensary. She continued to work in the hospital until after the Armistice ending World War I was signed in November 1918.
At about that time, she visited an exposition held in Toronto with a young woman friend. One of the highlights of the day was a flying exhibition put on by a World War I "ace." The pilot overhead spotted Earhart and her friend, who were watching from an isolated clearing, and dove at them. "I am sure he said to himself, 'Watch me make them scamper,'" she said. Earhart characteristically stood her ground, swept by a mixture of fear and exhilaration. As the plane came close, something inside her awakened. "I did not understand it at the time," she said, "but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by."
She had a serious sinus infection that year. This was before antibiotics were available and she underwent surgical treatment. The procedure wasn't successful and Earhart subsequently suffered from sharpening headache attacks. Her convalescence lasted nearly a year, which she spent at her sister's home in Northampton, Massachusetts. She passed the time by reading poetry, learning to play the banjo and studying mechanics. By 1919 Earhart prepared to enter Smith College but changed her mind and enrolled at Columbia University to take a course in medicine. She quit a year later to be with her parents who had reunited in California.
Early flying experiences
In Long Beach, on 28 December 1920, she and her father visited an airfield where Frank Hawks (who later gained fame as an air racer) gave her a ride that would forever change Earhart's life. "By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground," she said, "I knew I had to fly." After that ten-minute flight, she immediately became determined to learn to fly. She drove a truck and worked at the local telephone company to earn $1000 for lessons. Earhart had her first flying lessons, beginning on 3 January 1921, at Kinner Field near Long Beach but to reach the airfield Amelia took a bus to the end of the line, then walked four miles. Her teacher was Anita "Neta" Snook, a pioneer female aviator who used a surplus Curtiss JN-4 "Canuck" for training. Amelia arrived with her father and a singular request, "I want to fly. Will you teach me?"
Six months later, Amelia purchased a second-hand bright yellow Kinner Airster biplane which she nicknamed "The Canary." On 22 October 1922, Earhart flew it to an altitude of 14,000 feet, setting a world record for women pilots. On 15 May 1923, Earhart became the 16th woman to be issued a pilot's license (#6017) by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI).