one sunday in December 1920, Amelia Earhart appeared at Kinner Field with her father and requested lessons. Earhart’s first lesson, which lasted 20 minutes on January 3, 1921, marked the start of a legendary career as well as a firm friendship between the two women.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Aviation History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Snook tutored Earhart for five hours in the Canuck. She then spent 15 more hours — unpaid — teaching her new pupil in a Kinner Airster that Amelia had bought after Snook tested the plane in early January. In July Earhart, with Snook accompanying her, crashed the Airster at nearby Goodyear Field. The Airster had proved too slow to gain sufficient altitude to clear a eucalyptus grove on takeoff. Neither woman was hurt, but the plane needed a new propeller and repairs to the landing gear. When Snook turned around to check on Earhart, she found the future media star fully composed and powdering her nose to prepare for the reporters.

Although Snook said she would have made the same move as Earhart on that occasion, pulling the plane up rather than nosing down, she did express some reservations about her student’s talent, remarking later, “Perhaps I had misjudged her abilities.”

But she seems to have kept her concerns largely to herself. Although Snook was still only in her early 20s, she was doing what she could to advance the idea that women could make a strong contribution to the fledgling field of aviation. “Women are really more adventurous in their hearts than men are,” she told a Los Angeles Evening Herald reporter. “This spirit of adventure has been suppressed all these centuries and now it’s coming out in the 1921 woman.” When Snook became the only woman entered in an race against 40 men held at the Los Angeles Speedway in February 1921, she told the press, “I have to fly for the whole sex, as it were, and I’m going to show the world that a woman can fly as cleverly, as audaciously, as thrillingly as any man aviator in the world.” She finished in fifth place.

By the spring of 1922, however, Snook’s life had taken a different turn. She was by then married to Bill Southern and expecting a baby. “I wanted that baby above everything, and I made a vow that if I could just have a healthy baby, I would give up flying forever,” she wrote. She got her healthy baby — named William Curtiss Southern after his father and Glenn Curtiss — and kept her bargain, selling her business and retiring from aviation. A few years later, when Earhart invited her to join the group of women pilots she was organizing, later named the Ninety-Nines, Neta declined.

Around that time, Earhart had sent another letter to Snook, which concluded with the line “Sometime our paths may cross again, and we may be able to have a few words about the old days.” But Snook never saw her again. In 1937, after Earhart famously disappeared during a flight over the Pacific, Snook renewed contact with Earhart’s family. She subsequently became a popular lecturer, speaking about her own career as well as Earhart’s. Her autobiography, I Taught Amelia to Fly, was published by Vantage Press in 1974. On March 23, 1991, she died at the age of 95. One year later, Neta Snook Southern was inducted into the Iowa Aviation Hall of Fame.

This article was written by Patti Marshall and originally published in the January 2007 issue of Aviation History magazine. For more great articles subscribe to Aviation History magazine today!

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to