'Lady Lindy': The Remarkable Life of Amelia Earhart

A tomboy who defied early-20th-century conventions, Earhart
successfully crusaded for women pilots’ place in the sky.

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By C.V. Glines

They called Amelia Earhart “Lady Lindy” after her first flight across the Atlantic. She was tall and slim, with short, wind-swept hair, and looked so remarkably like Charles Lindbergh that she could have been his sister. Although she disappeared flying the Pacific in 1937, her name is still frequently in the news, thanks mostly to “aviation archaeologists” who believe they know the circumstances of her demise and where her plane and other evidence can be found.

Amelia Mary Earhart was born 100 years ago in Atchison, Kan., on July 24, 1897. She referred to herself simply as “AE,” and that’s what her friends called her. Earhart was considered a tomboy because she dared to do things that girls at the turn of the century usually did not do–she climbed trees, “belly-slammed” her sled in the snow to start it downhill, and hunted rats with a .22 rifle. Later, she attended a girls school in Pennsylvania and became a nurse’s aide in a Toronto hospital, helping to care for wounded soldiers during World War I.

At the time Earhart was growing up, women were beginning to assert their right to enter careers traditionally reserved for men. She kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings that highlighted women entering occupations in motion-picture directing, law, advertising, management and automobile mechanics.

Her introduction to aviation came on Christmas Day 1920, when her father, a lawyer, took her to the official opening of a new airfield in Long Beach, Calif. She had her first airplane ride three days later with barnstormer Frank M. Hawks. “As soon as we left the ground,” she later said, “I knew I myself had to fly.”

Earhart took her first flying lesson on January 3, 1921, from Neta Snook, one of the first women to graduate from the Glenn Curtiss school. The flight cost $1 per minute, which Earhart paid for in World War I Liberty bonds. The airplane was a dual-control Canuck, the Canadian version of the famous World War I Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny.”

In July 1921, Earhart bought a rebuilt Kinner Airster for $2,000. The Kinner was an unstable, two-seat biplane powered by a 3-cylinder, 60-hp Lawrence L-2 engine. The airplane was painted yellow, and Earhart promptly named it The Canary.

There is no denying that Earhart had difficulty learning to fly. It took her more than 15 hours of flight time and nearly a year to solo the Kinner, and she had a number of mishaps afterward, most of them during landings. As one biographer noted: “Unfortunately, though highly intelligent, a quick learner, and possessed of great enthusiasm, Amelia did not, it seems, possess natural ability as a pilot. This is no disparagement of Amelia, it is simply the view of many of her contemporaries in the flying world. Indeed, given this apparently important drawback, it is to her great credit that she was subsequently able to achieve so much.”

One aspect of Earhart’s personality proved dominant–perseverance. She was obsessed with flying and built up solo flying time in The Canary when she could afford it. She set a women’s altitude record in October 1922 by coaxing the Airster to 14,000 feet. The record was broken by Ruth Nichols a few weeks later, but the effort had put Earhart in the news.

In 1925, Earhart moved with her mother and sister to Massachusetts. She attended college, became a social worker in Boston, and taught English to immigrants. But the lure of flying remained strong. When she was financially able, Earhart invested a small sum in a local airport. She was soon back in the cockpit, where she attracted much press attention by promoting flying, especially for women.

Earhart’s life changed abruptly in April 1928, when she was invited to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. It was primarily a publicity effort instigated by George P. Putnam, a book publisher with a flair for finding and promoting profitable book projects. One of Putnam’s coups was Charles Lindbergh’s book We, which became a best seller after it was published in July 1927.

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