Amelia (2 page)

The sting of Mark’s harsh action both surprised and hurt his sister and her children. Amy became estranged from her sister Margaret, too. Amy no doubt understood Mark’s emotional stake in the situation: After all, it was Mark who had introduced her to Edwin, but she could not forgive him for cutting her off.

Eventually, Edwin did make a new start. He found a job as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he moved with his family in the fall of 1913. But it would be a short-term reprieve for his wife and daughters.

At Central High School in St. Paul, Amelia had to adapt to a different world. She had no trouble academically. When it came to math, she could outshine anyone. Numbers made sense to her. Also, she easily identified patterns and she was analytical in her thinking. Systems of any kind appealed to her, even complicated systems of grammar, such as Latin, another of her favorite subjects.

But Amelia showed little interest in making new friends at Central High. Other students didn’t go out of their way to exclude Amelia; they seldom saw her. That suited Amelia fine; with all the anguish at home, she preferred to keep to herself.

From letters that she wrote to friends back in Kansas, it is clear that, without question, she still thought of Atchison as home. In a 1914 letter to a friend in Atchison, she sounded upbeat and happy, although she wasn’t.

To some extent, money problems exacerbated the awkwardness the Earhart family experienced in St. Paul – they did not have the means to participate in proper society. They had strong family connections, but just about any social activity - clubs, dances, lessons - required money that they didn’t have.

In the long, severe St. Paul winters, teenagers from good families relied on curling (an ice sport) for exercise and to meet and see friends. But the Earharts’ meager financial resources made a curling-club membership impossible. But joining a club was the one and only way to be part of athletic activities, exactly the kind of thing Amelia would have loved.

Amelia’s grades in St. Paul began to slip because of her unhappiness with the continuing drama unfolding at home.

In 1915, Edwin lost his job again. Amy, despairing of the situation, took her daughters to Chicago to live with friends. Looking for the best high-school science program, Amelia eliminated the school nearest her home, dismissing its chemistry lab as being “just like a kitchen sink.” If Amelia wanted to go to a different school, Amy would have to move with her daughters to a different neighborhood, so they moved.

Amy and her daughters moved into rented rooms so Amelia could attend Hyde Park High School, Chicago’s most academically prestigious secondary school. At Hyde Park, Amelia stood out academically, yet again made few friends. Later in her life, when she spoke about those years, she made the moving from place to place sound painless.

Every day after school, Amelia went straight home to attend to her increasingly depressed mother.  Amy seemed to be going through a crisis. Technically she was married, but she had no husband. Legally she was an heiress, but she had no access to her inheritance. Socially she came from a respectable family, but she was living in rented rooms with her teenage daughters. By education and upbringing she showed every sign of refinement, but she could not participate in her rightful social milieu. Having to shoulder the heavy load of all those contradictions was starting to crush her.

An enigmatic fragment next to Amelia’s senior photo suggests the mystique that surrounded this socially invisible girl: “Meek loveliness is round thee spread.” The phrase comes from a poem by William Wordsworth, the English Romantic poet who was, probably by coincidence, one of Amelia’s favorites. In one yearbook comment the year she graduated, she was “A.E. – the girl in brown who walks alone.”

Fellow students described her as “reticent” and “diffident.” When it came time to graduate, she skipped the ceremony. Nor did she bother to pick up her diploma.

All through her childhood, with her mother’s encouragement, Amelia had been determined to have a career. She kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about women who had succeeded in fields dominated by men - advertising, law, management, film production, and so on. But Amelia did not need to look at clippings to see why women might not just want but actually need careers. She lived with the disastrous results of her mother’s dependence on an unreliable husband. Tight finances were one thing, but the embarrassment of being married to an alcoholic felt even worse. Amelia never considered money a worthy goal in itself, but she put huge stock in self-respect. A woman’s identity should, in her mind, come from her accomplishments. She knew she wanted achievements of her own, but she hadn’t quite worked out what kind.

After going to court, Amy finally was awarded her inheritance in 1917. Shortly after the court ruled, on April 16, her brother Mark died.

Now she could pay for Amelia’s education, she decided that what her daughter needed wasn’t Bryn Mawr but a finishing school. There is no record of Amelia’s reaction to this decree, but she did follow her mother’s wishes.

Given Amy’s background and mind-set, only an exclusive institution would do. She wanted refined teachers who could provide a genteel milieu, instilling young ladies with exquisite manners and good characters. So Amelia Earhart was sent to the Ogontz School, a junior college in Rydal, Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia.

Amelia’s great grandmother, Maria Graces Otis, had grown up in Philadelphia in a pacifist Quaker family. Maria had also chosen to marry a Lutheran, for which her family ostracized her (she was “read out of meeting,” in their words). She moved to Atchison with her husband, and, in time, she returned to the Episcopalian faith. Amelia Earhart would also embrace pacifism and independent thinking.

At Ogontz, Amelia went along with the program, observing every courtesy, but she could never bring herself to be docile. Letters home portray her as squirming:

A month later, Amelia could see for herself what war did. While spending the Christmas holidays of 1917 with her mother and sister in Toronto, where Muriel was studying, Amelia decided to apply her Red Cross training.  
World War I
had been raging in Europe for three years before the United States joined the fighting in April 1917, but Canada was already engaged – and seeing more than its share of returning casualties. News of the war’s horrors had yet to ruffle the polite rituals of the Ogontz School, but Amelia learned by looking around. She was exposed to the trauma of war firsthand in downtown Toronto, where she saw amputees or otherwise injured men struggling to make their way down King Street.

About a month later, Amelia asked her mother’s permission to leave school without graduating: She wanted to go to Toronto to work as a nurse’s assistant helping the wounded. Putting her Red Cross training to good purpose, she also worked hard to enlist other young women to join in her efforts. (Her recruits included her sister Muriel.) Amelia wrote about her progress in letters home:

Amelia and Muriel talked to and sometimes made friends with their patients, who included British and French pilots. One day, a young captain in the Royal Flying Corps, who no longer needed medical care, got hold of a plane and did stunts for Amelia, Muriel, and other nurses on their day off. Amelia recounted that benchmark day in her book,
Last Flight
: “. . . [The captain] was bored. He had looped and rolled and spun and finished his little bag of tricks, and there was nothing left to do but watch the people on the ground running as he swooped close to them. . . .

Amelia and her sister stood watching off to one side of the small crowd. The plane dived, flying straight at them. Muriel, terrified, ran away, but something about that moment made Amelia hold her ground: “I remember the mingled fear and pleasure which surged over me as I watched that small plane at the top of its earthward swoop. Commonsense told me if something went wrong with the mechanism, or if the pilot lost control, he, the airplane and I would be rolled up in a ball together. I did not understand it at the time but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by.”

In 1918, the war came to an end with the
Armistice
. Amelia felt the excitement of the men coming home, but she also felt sympathy for the soldiers who, in her account of the wild festivities, were not shown the proper sense of gratitude toward the returning troops. Seeing the human cost of war made her question the sense of settling international differences with military force. She would not be the first in her family to have such a reaction. Her Quaker ancestors had come to America with
William Penn
partly because they didn’t believe in war either.

Amelia’s pacifist convictions having been strengthened by her hospital job, she continued her work even after the war ended. Now, however, she was even more convinced that war of any kind was evil. But soon the volunteer nurse’s aide was doing battle with the Spanish flu, the disease brought home on troopships. Fortunately, she did not contract the flu. The outbreak would spread to become the
Great
Influenza Epidemic of 1918
, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide, far more than had died in the recent war. Amelia, who was constantly exposed to the disease on account of her work, escaped it. However, a bacterial infection related to pneumonia attacked her sinuses. Since antibiotic drugs hadn’t yet been discovered, an already exhausted Amelia had to endure a painful and complicated operation followed by a long recovery.

Consequently, Amelia had to give up her job, postpone her plans for a medical career, and go home to Muriel and Amy, who at the time were living in Massachusetts. Muriel was taking courses in Massachusetts to prepare her to enroll in Smith College; Amy was living nearby and could help her daughter. Amelia needed rest, which seemed easy to arrange in sleepy Northampton - so sleepy, in fact, that she soon found the town unbearably dull.

When Amelia heard about a class being offered to train ambulance drivers, she jumped at it. The ten-week course included training in mechanics and, in particular, engine repair. Amelia learned everything the instructor could teach her about how engines worked and how to fix the ones that didn’t.

Amelia would never recover fully from her infection. As a result, chronic sinusitis plagued her for the rest of her life. But after nearly a year of convalescence, she was ready to enroll at Columbia University in New York, planning to study medicine. She spent the winter taking courses and thinking about her future and her place in the world. At twenty-three, she was outgrowing her childhood faith and was beginning to question her choice of a career. As much as she loved the lectures, the science, and the reading, she could not imagine herself working with patients whose ailments were minor or even imaginary after having seen the grim realities of soldiers’ wounds.

Amy, who visited her daughter in New York, had concerns of a different kind about her daughter’s welfare. Amelia confronted her mother’s worries directly in a letter in the fall of 1919:

Before long Amelia, Muriel, and Amy learned of a turnaround that looked close to miraculous. Edwin was finally “cured” of his drinking. And the Golden State of California held the promise of starting over.

Edwin had been living in Los Angeles for some months when Amy decided to move there with Muriel. Then, when Amelia decided to drop medicine and leave Columbia, she joined the travelers. It was in California that Amelia Earhart finally discovered her vocation and her destiny.