11

Golden Girl

• • • • Amy Guest was waiting impatiently with her family in London. She had a lot riding on the outcome. It was her dream, her creation, that the world waited upon. She had chosen Byrd, she had set the standards for the woman who would take her place, she had passed on all plans, including the choice of the Fokker. And she had extended herself financially. Not only had she bought the plane and financed its refitting and new equipment, paying the agreed-upon sums to the pilots, paying the living expenses for Amelia, Slim, and Bill for the duration of the adventure—picking up the tab in Boston, in Halifax, in Trepassey and (hopefully) in England—her commitment extended to paying for the transportation, hotel and peripheral expenses of Hilton Railey and his assistant, now into their ninth day of waiting in Southampton, where the Friendship was expected to land. And she would have to get them all home.

It was in Southampton that Bill Stultz found Hilton to report that they had landed in Burry Port and that Amelia was waiting aboard the plane. Hilton requested that Bill ask Amelia to remain aboard the Friendship until he could join them. Now Amy Guest, exhibiting her usual style, gave the nod to Hilton Railey to charter a seaplane from Southampton-based Imperial Airways so that he and Allen Raymond of The New York Times could immediately fly to Burry Port.

Three hours after the Friendship landed, the Imperial Airways plane glided to a stop a few hundred yards away, and the two men saw Amelia seated cross-legged in the doorway of the plane, apparently oblivious to the clamor caused by the two thousand astounded inhabitants of Burry Port lined up at the water’s edge, talking among themselves and staring at her.

They went ashore to find, as would happen again and again all over the world, that the assemblage only had eyes for Amelia. As she stepped on land, the crowd surged toward her—some to touch her flying suit, some to get her autograph, some to shake her hand, some just to see her up close. Fingers grabbed a corner of the bright silk scarf sticking out from under her flying suit, tugged it off her neck, and moments later the scarf was a souvenir being distributed among the onlookers. She was almost crushed. At which point the high sheriff of Carmarthenshire, Burry Port’s three policemen, plus helpers, locked arms to form a ring around Amelia and slowly fought their way into the offices of the nearest building a hundred yards away, locking the doors behind them. They stayed there until more policemen and the motorcars Hilton Railey had arranged for arrived to take them to the Ashburnham Hotel, a ways outside the town, where they could safely spend the night.

The next morning they motored back, and quickly boarded the Friendship, bound for Southampton, their original destination. Carrying only the fifty gallons of gas Bill had put aboard the afternoon before, the big plane took off effortlessly, even with the added poundage of Hilton Railey and the Times reporter.

Southampton went wild when the Friendship came into view. The ships waiting in the harbor let loose their sirens, and as the fliers stepped onto the landing platform, there was again a wild outburst of enthusiasm among the eager throng, some of whom surged forward, almost pressing people into the water.

There on the dock amidst the various local officials—everyone from the mayor (who happened to be female) on down—waited Amy and Frederick Guest. There on the dock Amelia and Amy met for the first time. One can imagine them forthrightly shaking hands and congratulating and thanking each other, but the words are lost to posterity. Together they all escaped into waiting cars and were driven to London.

There the continuing tumultuous interest initially stunned Amelia. In her wildest imaginings nothing came close to the appalling furor the trip had created; she could find no place to hide. Even with Hilton Railey running interference, the first twenty-four hours in London were rocky indeed. For a fleeting moment she was overwhelmed, bursting out, “I am caught in a situation where very little of me is free. I am being moved instead of moving.... It really makes me a little resentful that the mere fact that I am a woman apparently overshadows the tremendous feat of flying Bill Stultz has just accomplished. But having undertaken to go through with this trip I have to go through with it.” Reporters even managed to gain entrance to her room at the Hyde Park Hotel that first morning, catching her, as they carefully noted, wearing a too-large borrowed silk frock as she plowed through the mountains of telegrams and cablegrams. Escape became imperative. At this juncture Amy Guest again stepped into the breach, offering Amelia forthwith the hospitality and privacy of her home, and so Amelia moved into her house in Mayfair.

Part of Amelia’s outburst of course was due to exhaustion. As the world marveled at the sheer nerve of the exploit, without ever learning about the crucial role Amelia had played in getting the plane off the ground in Trepassey, it also conferred fame upon her without appreciating the amazing grit, the unusual tenacity that enabled her to write about it. All anyone knew was that they couldn’t get enough of her. What was helping to fuel the excitement was Amelia’s personal achievement: she had scooped the world press. Even though fighting exhaustion, Amelia didn’t collapse in the plane in the three hours she had waited for Hilton in Burry Port. She had a ten-thousand-dollar contract with The New York Times and The London Times for her story, and showing remarkable composure, clear-sightedness, and detachment, she had written the first installment of the story of the flight while she waited—an incredible achievement for someone who had barely slept in over twenty-four hours. So that by the time they arrived in London, the newspapers were full not just of the facts of the achievement and the profiles of the participants—her story under her own byline was running simultaneously in The London Times and The New York Times.

She had truly hit the ground running. “I have arrived and I am happy—naturally. Why did I do it?” was how Amelia opened her first article. Then she went into details of the trip, and plainly and carefully stated the obvious before everyone forgot: that she had been merely a passenger and that the men deserved the credit. And each day for the next several days, no matter how full her schedule, Amelia wrote a sequel. The second article started with a wonderful hook. “Some day women will fly the Atlantic and think little of it because it is an ordinary thing to do”—in its day a totally mind-boggling notion. The articles were all anyone could hope for—readable, accurate, and informative.

And novel. No other adventurer—for that was what she had become, the first female adventurer—had pulled off such a clever feat, for the simple reason that no other adventurer could write. Even if she hadn’t laid a hand on the controls, she was a flier and brought to her writing the informed perspective of a flier. It immeasurably enhanced her image.

And so, because it was such a scary accomplishment, because the fear factor was still so high, because people still didn’t want to fly—wanted rather to see the planes and read about the exploits but stay on the ground—all the world’s great lined up to sing Amelia’s praises. President Coolidge was just one of many who sent her a congratulatory telegram; Henry Ford put a limousine at her disposal. The London Times editorialized that the flight was “A Woman’s Triumph” and reported virtually every word she uttered. When she was discovered sitting in the royal box at one of the big movie theaters, she was given a ten-minute ovation. She had lunch at the American embassy, took tea with the prime minister, was guest of honor at a dinner given her by the Guests, saw Helen Wills Moody play at Wimbledon, was Lady Astor’s guest in the House of Commons, and was invited for Sunday lunch at Cliveden. She attended Ascot, where she was photographed looking very chic and feminine in an elegant frock, and laid a wreath at the Cenotaph and a bouquet of roses in front of the statue of Edith Cavell.

Hilton Railey, meanwhile, kept hiring secretaries (he stopped at four) to help him deal with the onslaught, and still he could not keep up with the telegrams, letters, and offers of everything from jobs to marriage that were pouring in. By the second day Amelia had gotten her second wind. “I don’t want to be known always merely as the first woman to fly the Atlantic,” she was quoted as saying, and took pains to remind everyone she was a social worker. “Aviation is a great thing, but it cannot fill one’s life completely.... I am bringing a message of good will and friendship from American to British settlement houses.”

As Amelia hit her stride, she began to do more things her own way. She went to visit Toynbee Hall, the famous settlement house in the East End of London started by a group of Oxford men that, she reminded everyone, was the model for all the settlement houses in the United States and most particularly Denison House. She also took the time to visit a Denison House friend of hers in Sheffield.

She spoke, along with Winston Churchill, Lady Astor, and the Duke of Sutherland, at a luncheon given by the Women’s Committee of the Air League of the British Empire. She was perfectly at ease both in one-on-one conversations with these famous people and on her feet speaking before them—so much so, it was a subject for commentary: “She spoke calmly and with perfect poise,” summed up one observer. Instead of talking about the flight, her speech dwelled upon how much farther ahead England was in popularizing flying, both in number of air passengers carried and in developing new light airplanes and the pilots to fly them, and what steps the United States should take to catch up.

In spite of her protestations, she suddenly didn’t sound like a social worker.

She sailed for home on the steamship SS President Roosevelt, arriving on July 6 to another tumultuous frenzied welcome. New York City’s official welcoming yacht, the Macon, full of august officials, steamed out to meet the President Roosevelt to transfer her to shore, and as it approached the pier, circling fire boats pumped streams of water into the air and blew off their whistles. The trio was given a triumphal parade up Broadway, followed by a reception at city hall; Commander Byrd, who continued to act like the proud father (and, with the Guests still in London, with even more success) gave them a star-studded luncheon.

The pattern established in England—that Amelia, the passenger, was accorded more acclaim than the crew—held true as well in her own country: “City Greets Miss Earhart; Girl Flier, Shy and Smiling, Shares Praise With Mates” ran the banner headline in The New York Times, reflecting national sentiment.

In spite of it all, Amelia managed to be lionized with a minimum loss of control. One thing that softened the blow was that she still didn’t quite realize that her life as a social worker was over. She kept telling New Yorkers she would be going back to Denison House “if I haven’t been fired.” She enthusiastically submitted to the lunches and dinners, teas and receptions George Putnam set up for her those first few days, most of which, at her direction, were heavily weighted toward women’s organizations and social work: she attended and spoke at a lunch at the Women’s City Club and at a reception at the United Neighborhood House, and she always talked up the roles of Lou Gordon and Bill Stultz, who were usually by her side.

But it was summer, and it was sweltering hot in the grand limousine that ferried her around the baking streets, and on her second day in New York, emerging from the children’s ward at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital at 158th Street, instead of getting back into the limousine with Dorothy and George Palmer Putnam, she calmly climbed into the empty sidecar of one of the police motorcycles escorting them and blasted off. The patrolman, Officer Minnett, obligingly opened up his siren, and, it was observed, “the flier’s tawny curls became a snarled cluster of yellow as the motorcycle picked up speed.” With the siren’s wail opening up traffic before them, Minnett streaked down Riverside Drive, down Broadway, turned onto Seventy-second Street, fled past the lawns and trees of Central Park, and then roared down Fifth Avenue, to the Biltmore, at Forty-fourth Street and Vanderbilt Avenue, where Amelia was staying. When she got out, it was observed that her cheeks were pinker than usual and that there was “a brighter light” in her eyes. “It was wonderful,” she said, “I’d sneak out any time for a ride like that.”

Her trip to Boston for the great reception planned for her there was like a royal tour. The Ford Company provided her with a Ford trimotor and pilot. A second plane took Bill and Lou. Also on the plane was a Paramount News photographer and three reporters, one of whom breathlessly datelined the resultant story “Aboard the Earhart Plane”—plus of course the Putnams. Unfazed, she napped a little, sat in the cockpit with the pilot, Nathan Browne, asked him questions about the trimotor, so similar to the Fokker, and tried her hand at flying it for a little while. Porter Adams, the clean-cut ex-naval officer, improbably the nation’s first aerial policeman (in Los Angeles in 1916), now a Boston banker and august president of the NAA, was standing on the tarmac to greet her, flanked by more than a quarter of a million people waiting to catch a glimpse of their hometown girl. Among all the scheduled events—the NAA lunch honoring their newest Boston vice-president, at which she impishly held up three five-dollar bills she had just extracted for signing up three new members, and the speeches at the state house and city hall and to the thousands gathered on Boston Common—she fit in a visit to Denison House. She thrilled all the families—the parents and the children whom she knew so well, greeting them as naturally as she had ever done, picking up where she had left off. “What did she say? What did she think of the flight? How did she like her reception in Boston?” asked a reporter of one of the women. “That I don’t know” was the reply. “I don’t know those things. She didn’t say. She just asked about us.”

Nevertheless Amelia was acutely aware of the uproar her appearance created, and after that she made no more statements about returning to Denison House to work.

The extraordinary attention continued. Wherever she went, she was mobbed; whenever she traveled, she was treated like royalty. When she left Boston, the president of the railroad gave her his private car and had the train make a special stop at Rye, where she was visiting the Putnams.

Besides the reception in Boston, George Putnam had picked, among the many eager supplicant cities who wanted to throw triumphal receptions for the three of them that summer, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Bill Stultz’s hometown, Williamsburg, Pennsylvania. Chaperoned by George and Dorothy Putnam, Amelia, Bill, and Slim traveled by private railroad car, and at each station, as their train ground to a halt, bands played, crowds cheered, and cameramen gathered.

Chicago claimed her as its own. Amelia visited her old school, Hyde Park, spoke to the assembled students, then stepped from stage to piano to reach the audience, much to the horror of the principal and the delight of the audience. She went to the race track and presented a bouquet of roses to the winner of a six-furlong sprint named in her honor, saw three innings of a Giants—Cubs baseball game, made a brief radio speech, and in the sweltering heat, managed to fit in a swim in Lake Michigan. She also visited Hull House.

Pittsburgh was the next stop, a two-hour layover on the trip back east. Upon their arrival they were driven to city hall so that Amelia could be given the keys to the city. It was still sweltering, and after the hot limousine ride back to the railroad station, instead of getting into the private car with her group, she pulled another switch on her companions—she calmly requested, received, and donned overalls, cap, and goggles and climbed into the cab of the engine at the front of the train. As the train rolled out of Pittsburgh, there is a marvelous photo of her leaning far out the cab window of the locomotive and waving a final adieu. But it wasn’t an experience she would repeat—it was much hotter, standing above the firebox, and much dirtier than she expected; when she got out in Altoona, she had to scrub down before rejoining her companions.

By the last weekend in July, Amelia was again ensconced at the Putnams’ house in Rye working on the book of her flight that Putnam’s would shortly publish. It was an easy place to take. Dorothy and Amelia got on famously; Dorothy was as taken with Amelia as her husband, and in fact the scarf that had been torn from Amelia’s neck at Burry Port had been a gift from Dorothy.

By this time Amelia knew both Putnams as well as anyone else in the world. Both of them had been her constant escorts, shepherding her to every function: in New York sitting with her in the limousine and reduced to watching her take off in the motorcycle sidecar; flying with her in the trimotor to Boston; and going on the train to Williamsburg, Pennsylvania, where Dorothy and Amelia had sneaked off and gone shopping. They had also been her companions on the long train ride to Chicago and back.

Yet if Dorothy had any idea that her husband was falling in love with Amelia, she didn’t show it. Amelia settled down in the spacious Putnam home in Rye across from the eleventh hole of the Apawamis Club and in two weeks finished the manuscript that Putnam’s would almost immediately publish. She dedicated the book to her hostess: “To Dorothy Binney Putnam under whose roof tree this book was written.” George gave it the title of 20 Hrs. 40 Min., Our Flight in the Friendship, very much in his usual style—which leaned to the tongue-in-cheek-informational. When he wrote his own autobiography, he called it Wide Margins: A Publisher’s Autobiography.

Time magazine profiled George Palmer Putnam as a person with a dangerous combination of literary ability, business acumen, and energy; brash, effusive, unstoppable, and very bright. From a conservative family, he had grown up in Rye, New York, the son and grandson of publishers. His grandfather, for whom he was named, had started G.P. Putnam’s, a publishing house that, by progression, by the time George was growing up, had become G.P. Putnam’s Sons and was run by George’s father and his two brothers.

Washington Irving had been one of the early Putnam writers. (The “Irving Table,” upon which the author had written many of his works, resided in the Putnam library; Amelia undoubtedly used it too.) Putnam’s had published the early editions of Poe, Lowell, Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, and Parkman, and their volumes lined the walls of George’s family library. Yet George was proud to boast that although the atmosphere in his home was decidedly literary, he was not: “Just as ministers’sons are supposed to go bad ... I fell from literary altitudes early, and often.” More than anything else, he loved the great outdoors—the untended, untouched, if possible unexplored parts of the world. As a child, he favored adventure books about daring boys and the great outdoors, with titles such as Cab and Caboose and Canoe and Saddle. And when he grew up, his tastes were the same—the only substantive difference being that his adventurers were now daring adults.

He attended the Gunnery School in Washington, Connecticut, where, interested as he was in trout fishing, rock climbing, and hunting and uninterested as well as untalented in the team sports that were so important to the school, he found himself a loner. He went to Harvard, where he found himself similarly out of sync, stayed for just a short time, then went adventuring—heading for what was then the fringe of the desert south of Los Angeles in a fruitless attempt to acquire gold mine claims. Undoubtedly pressured by his father, he then enrolled at Berkeley, lasted just one term, and then again succumbed to the call of the wild. He was, he said, “an easterner in the far reaches of the roaring west” who wanted to find the “roar.” He chose to settle in Bend, Oregon, because it was in the center of the largest area in the United States not penetrated by the railroads.

Bend in 1909 was a town of twelve hundred mostly unruly people, who supported twelve saloons and countless gambling and whore houses. When the mayor, in the midst of a brawl, fell to his death out the window of one of the houses, George, by then married to Dorothy Binney, a Smith girl with a taste for adventure and the great outdoors herself (they had met at a Sierra Club outing) and the father of a baby boy, became mayor. He succeeded in cleaning up the town to some extent, then became publisher and editor of the Bend weekly newspaper The Bulletin and, from 1914 to 1917, secretary to the governor of the state. He cut such a wide swath in Oregon history that he was deemed worthy to be the subject of a college thesis (Frontier Publisher) in 1966. He enlisted in the army when World War I started, and by the time the war was over, his father as well as his elder brother had both died, as a result of which, instead of heading back out west after the armistice, he moved back to Rye, New York, and took his elder brother’s place in the family publishing firm. By that time he had written four books—two about Oregon, one about his travels in Central America, and one about Field Artillery Training School.

Ensconced in New York, he gave publishing his all. He concocted a bit of literary pastry for which he wrote a detailed plot and then corralled Louis Bromfield, Rube Goldberg, Frank Craven, Alexander Woollcott, and various other authors each to write a chapter. Bobbed Hair, as the finished work was called, appeared first as a novel serialized in Collier’s magazine, then as a book, then as a movie. He published Alexander Woollcott’s first book and collected for the Putnam imprint Heywood Broun, Louis Bromfield, Edward Streeter, and James J. Corbett. Having established his credentials with the literary community (or at least made them take notice), he went back to his metier—adventure stories by real-life adventurers. He became more than just a publisher of adventurers’ tales—he became a participant. And if their dreams needed organizing or their expeditions required financing, he was there ready to help out. His great friend from childhood was the artist Rockwell Kent. As a young man, he had done Kent an unusual favor—he had masqueraded as Rockwell’s wife when Rockwell had built himself a house on Monhegan, an island off the coast of Maine, where tradition decreed that after a bachelor built a house, he brought home a bride. Rockwell brought George, dressed in bridal finery, whisked him into the house, and kept him “under wraps” inside until the islanders’ attention turned to something else and the presumed bride could disappear to the mainland—forever. So it was quite natural that when Rockwell Kent needed financing for a trip to Alaska, George would arrange it in return for the rights to the chronicle of his life there. Rockwell’s Alaska years evolved into the book Wilderness—published, naturally, by Putnam’s.

His brashness, energy, intelligence and showmanship soon made him the most talked-about publisher in New York. His métier was the adventurers—the explorers of the far reaches of the planet and the new explorers of the skies who were unlocking the secrets of the world; they were his greatest success. He cornered the market in heroes, as it were. He published (and wrote the foreword for) Winged Defense by General William Mitchell, head of the U.S. Air Force as well as a famous pilot. He published Roy Chapman Andrews’s treks into the Gobi desert, and the explorations of William Beebe, Knud Rasmussen, Lincoln Ellsworth, Bob Bartlett, and Fitzhugh Green. He was responsible for the publication of Skyward, the account of the flight over the North Pole (since disputed) by then—Naval Lieutenant Richard E. Byrd. (He put the plane on display at Wanamaker’s department store in New York and Philadelphia, and it drew thousands.) Nor did he neglect his first love, boyhood adventurers. He sent his twelve-year-old son David off to the Galapagos with William Beebe and published David’s journal as David Goes Voyaging, the first of a string of books Putnam’s published by boy explorers that would also include Among the Alps with Bradford by the then-young and unknown explorer Bradford Washburn, and Derek Goes to Mesa Verde by the son of the superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park.

Nor did he neglect himself. Having organized another adventuring expedition, in which David would accompany Bob Bartlett, Peary’s skipper to the North Pole, aboard a hundred-foot fishing schooner bound for Greenland to collect live specimens of narwhal, walrus, seal, and other Arctic fauna for the American Museum of Natural History, George succumbed to the lure of the wild and signed himself on.

Addressing his restless, unconventional mind to the problem of rounding up specimens, he drew on what he had learned in his western days and came up with the novel idea that the best way to capture the animals would be to lasso them. He then persuaded his old friend, Carl Dunrud, a western guide whom he had met on pack trips through Yellowstone who was a crack artist with a lariat, to come along to rope the sought-after animals. Carl thus became the first and possibly the only man ever to successfully lasso musk ox, polar bears, and walrus.

In a nod to Carl Dunrud, George titled the resultant book, by expedition historian Edward Streeter, An Arctic Rodeo; his son’s second book was David Goes to Greenland.

Adventuring was simply in his blood. The summer before he entered Amelia’s life, George organized and went on an expedition to Baffin Island, off the west coast of Greenland, that given his irrepressible nature, became known as the George Palmer Putnam expedition. The result of his energy and the well-trained team of workers he had assembled was that the expedition corrected numerous errors in the map of Baffin Island. Just that past winter he had chosen to spend Christmas on top of Mount Washington, the highest mountain in New Hampshire, with Bradford Washburn and David.

The most impressive feat he had performed for Putnam’s was snaring the greatest hero of the age, the courageous sky explorer who had conquered the Atlantic and flown into the hearts and imagination of the world, Charles Lindbergh. For that coup George became a celebrity in his own right.

George had snared Charles Lindbergh by the seemingly simple expedient of prevailing on the Paris office of The New York Times to place his telegraphed request for publishing rights into the hands of the harassed and still-exhausted flier. One of George’s virtues, as far as his adventurers were concerned, was that he made things as painless as possible for them by finding, at the drop of a hat, suitable ghostwriters to flesh out their tales. In his highly unusual but for him normal fashion, efficient George had the writer for Lindbergh’s book, with an already partially written manuscript, on the ship Lindbergh took home. George assumed that Lindbergh, like Richard Byrd and the others, would accept the finished work presented to him—but he didn’t know his man. Lindbergh didn’t like having words put in his mouth. He decided to write the book himself. Bound by the terms of his contract, Lindbergh holed himself up at a friend’s and wrote the agreed-upon forty-thousand-plus words. The book went on sale the month after the flight.

For George this was the normal way of doing things; he himself wrote his book about the tragic death of the balloonist Salomon August Andrée in the space of ten days. George didn’t think it was anything special to crank out a book with such speed—he had the whole thing down to a formula; in the normal course of events, without rushing, start to finish, he would get a book out in two or three months. When pressed, he did it in less. Bradford Washburn, boy mountain climber, was astonished in later years to recollect that under George’s guidance he actually wrote his first book in fourteen days. The secret to the speed was very little editing and almost instantaneous printing by the Knickerbocker Press, the Putnam printing plant in nearby Yonkers (for which George had designed as logo Henry Hudson’s ship the Half Moon, which appeared on all frontispieces). The books were beautifully illustrated, superbly promoted, and efficiently distributed. In that heady era when the oceans were being flown across for the first time, great mountains scaled, deserts spanned, and the hitherto mysterious poles explored, these bare-bones accounts—pedestrian, unadorned—of the doers, usually beefed up with a little autobiographical information, were all that was needed. The haste of his publications sometimes showed, but George didn’t care.

Amelia’s book must be seen in this light; it is very much of a piece with all George’s adventure books. For the foreword George efficiently lifted, verbatim, the description of Amelia by Denison House headworker Marion Perkins that had just appeared in the July issue of Survey magazine. More to the point, he prevailed on Amelia to write the text in a matter of weeks. She returned from England on July 6, and did not have a chance to settle down to work on the manuscript until after the midwestern tour. But she had 20 Hrs. 40 Min. finished by mid-August. “My book goes to press very soon,” Amelia self-mockingly wrote her friend Marian Stabler. “I should like to have made it better but time was short and I done as good as I could.” She phrased the same thought more elegantly in the foreword:

In re-reading the manuscript of this book I find I didn’t allow myself to be born. May I apologize for this unconventional oversight as well as for other more serious ones—and some not so serious? I myself am disappointed not to have been able to write a “work”—(you know, Dickens’ Works, Thackeray’s Works), but my dignity wouldn’t stand the strain.

Even in the brief time she supposedly was devoting herself exclusively to the manuscript, she was doing other things. There was the odd matter of her endorsement of Lucky Strike cigarettes (even though she didn’t smoke). Hilton Railey and George Putnam, both involved with Byrd, who was poised to embark on his expedition to Antarctica, cooked the idea up between them. Hilton had become Byrd’s public relations adviser, fund-raiser, and general manager; George had the contract to publish his book on the expedition. Now Hilton arranged for Amelia to be paid fifteen hundred dollars to endorse Lucky Strike cigarettes, the brand Bill and Lou had smoked on the trip, specifically so that she could publicly donate it to the Byrd expedition—which would give added hype to his trip. Amelia agreed to the arrangement in gratitude for Byrd’s unstinting public and private support of the Friendship enterprise. She wrote a formal, lengthy, gracious letter to Byrd that George and Hilton released to the newspapers simultaneously with his equally lengthy reply. The timing was perfect: the gesture received more press coverage than President Coolidge’s vacation activities in Wisconsin.

Amelia’s gesture had two consequences, both of which also took time to deal with. Otis Wiese, editor of McCall’s, had come out to Rye to see if Amelia would write for his magazine, and she had enthusiastically agreed, but he was put off by the Lucky Strike endorsement and withdrew the offer. David Layman, too, was dumbfounded, although for a different reason when he read about the endorsement. In his eyes she had broken word never to endorse a product; he wrote her a “stiff” letter to which she never replied.

After the McCall’s disappointment George arranged a meeting with Ray Long, the dynamic, dapper editor of Cosmopolitan, at his office on Fifty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue, out of which came a contract for Amelia to be aviation editor of the magazine—the first ever; she was to devote her time to writing about “the popular phases of aviation.” On top of these activities, there was her social life—suddenly very full, what with lunches, dinners, theater performances, fascinating people to meet, groups to talk to, and old friends to see. In addition she agreed to fly to Sea Girt, New Jersey, the second of August, to be present when the governor awarded Wilmer Stultz a major’s commission in the national guard, so there was another day gone.

It was a miracle the book got written at all.

Amelia seemed to have no trouble coping with George or with anyone else. She appeared to have walked into the eyes of the world fully formed, so relaxed and at the same time so in control did she appear. Only to Amy did she admit how triumphant she felt, and how vindicated. A letter that fall to her mother opens, “The night’s activities. Byrd’s dinner, Theater, Jimmy Walker’s. Hooray.”

She felt triumphant about her new financial state as well. The long dark days of penurious living had weighed her down—and only with the burden lifted did she admit how heavy it had been. Now, with her earnings as an author and editor, she paid off her debts—and still there was money left over. Caring and family-minded as she was, she saw to it that Amy and Muriel shared in her good fortune; whatever Amy—and in the beginning Muriel—wanted from then on, they could have. She notified Amy, “Sent package to P [Muriel]. If you know something she wants get it for her and I’ll pay. Also you. My treat, at last.” And a short while later, in the same vein, she is imploring her mother, “Please throw away rags and get things you need on my account at Filene’s. I’ll instruct them. I can do it now and the pleasure is mine.”

She even had a plane again. At the various social functions in England, Amelia had met England’s most famous aviatrix, Mary Heath, the wife of Lord James Heath. Lady Heath, a formidable woman who held the first transport license ever granted to a woman in England (the law was changed for her), had just returned from a long and difficult twelve-thousand-mile flight: solo in her Avro Avian, she had flown from Croydon, England, to Cape Town, South Africa, and back, returning to England that May. The year before, she had set a new altitude record for light planes in the Avian. Lady Heath had rushed home after meeting Amelia to send her her address and phone number and assure her that “if you phone me I’ll throw down whatever I’m doing to come and fly with you or talk.”

As they finally arranged it, Amelia slipped out to Croydon early one morning to try out the famous plane, its fuselage covered with plaques and medals from its travels. The flight was a great success; Amelia thought it the best machine of its kind in the world. To her delight, Lady Heath offered to sell it to her. Such a sale was a leap of faith on both their parts, for by no stretch of the imagination could a settlement house worker (over a thousand dollars in debt) come up with $3,200—the price they agreed upon. What they both must have had in mind was a different future for Amelia—one much more lucrative than her past. It bothered Lady Heath not at all that Amelia had agreed not to profit from the flight and would turn over the money The New York Times paid for her story to her benefactor—through syndication they would earn $12,460; it established her earning power. And so it was decided—Lady Heath had one more plaque made and affixed to the Avian before it was shipped. It read, “To Amelia Earhart from Mary Heath. Always think with your stick forward.”

The British registration for the little plane was G-E Bug. Avro Avians were highly respected both for dependability and performance. This particular plane, manufactured in 1924 by the A.V Roe Company of Manchester, was powered by an 85-horsepower, 4-cylinder air-cooled Cirrus engine. Amelia would have felt quite at home in it, for like her old Airster, which it rather resembled, it was a 2-seater open biplane. It was almost as small, at 24 feet 3 inches only 5 feet longer, with a wingspan of 28 feet, just 1 foot wider, and at 880 pounds almost as light.

The Avian was crated and shipped to the United States, and by the end of July, as Amelia returned from the West, it was being assembled at Curtiss field on Long Island. Amelia was flying under her 1923 FAI certificate issued by the NAA. In those years it wasn’t really necessary for a pilot to have a license—one could fly for sport, non-commercially in a plane, as long as the plane was unlicensed. But if the plane was licensed, then the pilot had to be too. The Avian was not licensed in the United States. George asked Porter Adams, vacationing in Thetford, Vermont, to help, and particularly to see if a license for the plane and a new pilot’s license for Amelia could be issued without any publicity. As the director of aeronautics informed Porter, Amelia could simply identify the Avro Avian and fly it “non-commercial” as an unlicensed plane, in which case she wouldn’t need a new pilot’s license, or she could opt for licensing the Avian, which involved submitting complete engineering data in accordance with Air Commerce regulations, in which case she would need a new license for herself.

Amelia decided the time and circumstances demanded a new pilot’s license and therefore a license for the plane as well. While waiting for the registration, a complicated and lengthy procedure, Amelia applied for a simpler but more restrictive Department of Commerce identification for the Avian that would at least let her fly it legally. On the application Amelia made one significant change: she scratched out the “his” underneath her signature on the affidavit, changing the phrase so that it ran: “Amelia Earhart, being first duly sworn, says that the foregoing statements are true of [her] knowledge.”

While Amelia had been in Boston for her triumphal homecoming, she had told her friends at Dennison airport to prepare for the arrival of the Avian, then still on the high seas. She had said it with the full intention of returning there herself, picking up her old life at Denison House, and flying out of her old airport. Then she had holed up in Rye and realized that her life had changed and that she was never going back, so she had sent it to Curtiss field on Long Island to have it assembled and hangared. Whether from embarrassment or oversight or a combination of both, she neglected to tell Harold Dennison of the change in plans, with the result that into the beginning of August, Dennison airport officials were still waiting for the crated ship and anxiously inquiring of the Department of Commerce as to its classification.

In the meantime she had flown it to Rye, and, assigned the number 7083 by the Department of Commerce, it sat less than a mile away from the Putnam home at the Westchester Country Club. Finally Amelia got to do what she had been itching to do for two months—get her hands on the controls of an airplane. She had no trouble getting used to the Avian. By the end of August, she was giving demonstration flights, taking off and landing on one of the carefully mowed country-club-immaculate grass polo fields. It must have reminded her of California four long years before, to be giving demo flights in her own plane. On the last Friday in August, a sizzling hot day when the temperature reached into the nineties, Amelia took up several passengers, including the intrepid David Putnam, taking the opportunity to gun the plane into the cooler air high above Long Island Sound.

Amelia had by that time decided that the time was ripe to fulfill her ambition of 1924: to fly across the country. This time there were no obstacles—she was in superb health, it was the right time of the year, and the material she gathered could be used in her brand-new job as aviation editor of Cosmopolitan. The veteran plane, its fuselage studded with medals from many of the towns and cities where it had been, made it easier, reminding one and all as it did that in it Lady Heath had end-to-ended Africa—which made flying across the continent seem tame and eminently achievable. Even though Amelia had five hundred flying hours under her belt, she had never done serious long-distance flying.

She left on Sunday, August 31. With her was George, off on another adventure, as usual unable to resist playing hooky if there was an exciting event he could take part in. This time he got more than he bargained for. The realities of flying kicked in when Amelia tried to land the Avian at Rodgers field outside Pittsburgh. It was not a polo field—so highly prized by fliers because they knew that a field where horses wheeled and galloped had to be flat and true—but a normal farm field, with rocks and gullies, stumps and ditches. The plane rolled into a shallow ditch hidden in the grass. An incredulous George Putnam couldn’t believe such a bizarre thing had been allowed to occur, insisting, “Miss Earhart had made a perfect landing and was taxiing to a stop when the plane struck an unmarked ditch on the field and went into it. The plane made what is called a ground loop and nearly turned over.”

In 1928 (and for many years following) in the world of flying, ground loops were so unavoidable that pilots thought of them in the same way that car drivers did flat tires: as one of the unpleasant breaks of the game. Amelia wasn’t upset, although she did blame herself for not having first “taken the precaution of flying low over Rodgers Field to examine it,” as she admitted in an article later that fall.

But the plane was a mess; it needed new landing gear, a new propeller, and probably a new lower left wing. A distressed George Putnam, faced with the grounding of his star performer, got to work and in record time found the parts needed—but parts for the English plane were hard to come by in the United States, he had to buy a whole new plane to get them. He arranged for a pilot from Air Associates to fly out an identical Avian from Curtiss field within twenty-four hours of the accident. Then four mechanics worked night and day, and forty-eight hours after the accident, Amelia’s plane was fixed. Who bore the expense is not known. What is known is that George was more distressed at being caught out, as it were, accompanying Amelia sub rosa, and having his idyllic little outing not only discovered but ruined. He tried to be jaunty about it and almost succeeded.

Miss Earhart had visited my home and while there, we decided to take a little jaunt. As she was just “playing around” with no particular object in view, she headed her ship for Pittsburgh. We had a lovely trip, stopping at Bellefonte Field. We had lunch there and then headed for Pittsburgh. There was no incident of any kind to mar the journey until we ran into that ditch in Rodgers Field.

As for Amelia, she used her enforced layover time to buy a sufficient number of white flags to mark the length of the ditch so that, she said laconically, “maybe there won’t be so many that run into it.” George originally had planned to head back home after Pittsburgh, but he used the accident as the excuse to continue with her as far as Dayton, Ohio.

There is a prophetic 1928 photo—undoubtedly snapped on the roof of the Copley Plaza by Jake Coolidge—of the two of them before the Friendship flight. Amelia, in boots, breeks, and leather jacket is smiling into the distance; George, tall, handsome, in a well-cut business suit, is staring adoringly into her eyes. Right after the Friendship had taken off from Boston Harbor, he had given the following remarkably prescient interview:

No money in the world could induce her to go upon a stage or in a film. She would shrink from that sort of exploitation. She might consider writing or a short and carefully selected lecture tour, but I know that she would not give a moment’s consideration to anything of a theatrical nature.

Indeed she thinks right now that when the flight is over she is going back to Denison House settlement far from crowds, forgotten. She won’t be able to, of course, we all know that. But she honestly thinks that no one will pay any attention to her after it is over. She is an extraordinary girl. She has captivated all who met her.

In truth, from the beginning of June on, Amelia was rarely out of George’s sight, and as compulsive as he was to keep busy, as driven as he was to always have several projects going at the same time, she was never far from his thoughts. He was forever writing to her, forever offering her bits of advice. Now he even managed to convince her to let him, as well as her mother, know where she was every day of her transcontinental flight. If there were telegraphic facilities available, both got telegrams. And she signed the telegrams to him, those fall days, in a way that was meaningless to anyone but him—“A.E.” To no one else was she known by her initials.

But no matter his attention, his planning, or the long reach of his influential arm, the flight across the country was for Amelia an exercise in self-reliance, as she had intended it to be. Later, when she wrote it up for Cosmopolitan, she called it a vagabonding trip, and it was; some stops were planned, most were not. “I’m just a tramp flyer now,” she said at one airport. The first night after George left her was one of the planned stops, giving him no excuse to worry. She went to Belleville, Illinois, where two friends from college days, Annabel Hoppe and Dr. Elizabeth Conroy, arranged a dinner for her at the local country club, and she stayed with the Hoppes.

A surprising number of times she managed to avoid hotels, lodging instead in private homes, even when nothing had been arranged beforehand. She turned into an expert at coaxing food and lodging invitations out of perfect strangers. After she landed unexpectedly at some airfield, she would sigh and murmur how tired she was of hotel rooms (absolutely true), and before the person knew what had happened, a woman (always a woman and usually married) would timidly proffer her home, thrilled to be able to protect Amelia from a night in a hotel, and from crowds and questions. “She said she hated to go to a hotel, that she knew she’d be bothered all the time there,” said her hostess in Muskogee, Oklahoma, who was at the field looking for her husband, the field manager, and happened to see her land; in Casa Grande she even found a woman with whom she had acquaintances in common. Nor did she ever get into trouble this way, for a further talent she found she had was a knack for picking the right people; she enjoyed herself, and inevitably so did her hosts.

Once, toward the end of a morning, in some unnamed place, hungry, Amelia dropped down and landed on an isolated farm and was invited in for a chicken dinner. The plane, so small and easy to handle, with a propeller she could crank by herself standing on the back side (and then quickly hop into the cockpit), made such independent actions possible. But the realities of flying kept kicking in with a vengeance. A woman or a man traveling alone across the continent in 1928, in the still-not-quite-perfected-air machine, was bound to find trouble, particularly since there was no such thing as a pilot who had not had at least one forced landing. That was where luck and skill came into play—with both on your side, the trouble would be minor. It had gotten to the point that Popular Aviation magazine gave away a hundred dollar watch for the best forced landing story it received each month.

Navigation was a serious challenge. This was Amelia’s first long-distance flight, and she learned how hard it was to navigate (or avigate, as aviators called it back then) with the inadequate maps of the day and the lack of defined fields. And it got harder as the populated East gave way to the less populated Midwest and the more sparsely settled Southwest, and even harder as cities gave way to featureless towns, towns became smaller and then became hamlets—just clusters of houses really; and harder still when the empty spaces between the settlements grew, and the farms turned into the endless plains of the Southwest. She learned dead reckoning; she had no choice.

The open cockpit made it even more challenging. The wind rushing about made the maps blow around. Amelia resorted to pinning the map she was using to her knee with a safety pin, but the pinning and unpinning as she flew off the edge of one map and onto another was never easy and became difficult when there were other things to do. West of Fort Worth, Texas, heading for Pecos in bumpy air, she was pumping gas from the reserve tank and didn’t, momentarily, pin, and suddenly the map of west Texas blew away. She followed her last compass course southwest, but then in pursuit of signs of life, and needing gasoline, she followed cars on a road going northwest, followed the road and the cars into the purple haze of the setting sun, and finally saw a small cluster of houses grouped around an oil well, one road running through. She had to land before darkness fell and rolled right through the town on its one road, its Main Street, to find out that she had flown clear across Texas and was in Hobbs, New Mexico. The townspeople helped her fold up the wings of the little Avian and move it to a safe place for the night (an overhelpful cowboy managed to put his foot through a wing; a piece of tablecloth was glued down over it), fed her at the Owl Cafe, found her some gasoline, and gave her a bed. The next morning she took off down Main Street, with more help from her new friends, but still without a map, heading southwest as instructed, looking for the Pecos River and a railroad line, her markers for the town of Pecos.

It was a short flight, only a hundred miles. The engine started to sound rough, but she thought it would work its way through and ignored it. She set down in Pecos, where she ended up at a Rotary Club lunch, then took off for El Paso, and then suddenly real trouble—the engine started kicking up badly—and she had to put down in the desert amidst the mesquite bushes. Friendly passersby helped her tow the plane, its wings again folded, down the highway back to Pecos. It turned out the Hobbs gasoline was bad and had ruined the engine valves. She remained there for the five days it took the mechanics to bring the engine back into working order.

Pecos was one of the control stops in the cross-country flights of contestants for the National Air Races, on their way west to Los Angeles. Amelia had planned to slip in and out of Pecos before the contestants ever landed, but that plan went up in the smoke of her engine. Instead, there she was watching as the forty-odd planes piloted by the top fliers in the country clocked in.

She had, of course, let George know where she was, and he had a surprise in store for her: a first copy of her just-off-the-press book, delivered to her there in Pecos.

Several days later she landed at Fly field in Yuma, Arizona, to gas up for the final leg of her journey to Los Angeles. As often happened after fueling, onlookers helped push the plane into position for takeoff. This time among the helpers was the Union Oil man who serviced the plane, who should have been able to control things but couldn‘t, or didn’t—perhaps it was the excitement combined with the 104-degree heat. Suddenly the Avian was nose down in the sand. Later headlines and stories by reporters not on the scene turned it into another drama and had Amelia hammering out a bent propeller prior to takeoff, but it wasn’t true. This time no damage was done. Later still, near Long Beach, California, she did make a forced landing in a field of five-foot grass and turned completely over.

On September 14, the seventh day of the National Air Races and Aeronautical Exposition at Mines field in Los Angeles, fliers were still straggling in from their cross-country odysseys. Amelia arrived that day in between George Haldeman, who had been forced down in Albuquerque by lack of fuel and bad headwinds, and Jack Iseman, who, flying Charles Levine’s Columbia, had been forced down in Amarillo by a leaky fuel valve. She was given a standing ovation, and later, while many in the crowd had eyes only for Charles Lindbergh, flying in formation with two military aviators, Amelia took the opportunity to spend the afternoon examining the hundreds of different planes parked on the field, the latest and best of the day. Compared with them, she said, hers was just a toy, with no commercial possibilities—a plane for an amateur. She was boning up on aviation information; she didn’t intend to stay an amateur forever.

Amelia took the more northerly route east on her way home. It was a first for her, flying so high, and she had carburetor trouble in the high altitudes that the Continental Divide demanded. The motor sounded so bad that a hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, just east of Tintic, Utah, she had to make a forced landing in a plowed field; the earth was soft, the wheels sank, and again the Avian nosed over; and again the propeller broke. (“I am going to find out all about carburetors immediately,” she told a waiting reporter.) She spent that night in Eureka, Utah, with Maude Hillsdale, which would have been an interesting experience because Maude had driven an ambulance in World War I, for which the French government awarded her the Croix de Guerre.

The following day, none the worst for wear, Amelia went to Salt Lake City and assumed her public relations persona—George Putnam had booked her into various speaking and social engagements. She talked to three high school groups, led a discussion on social work and social problems at a meeting of the board of the Salt Lake Community Chest, spoke before the Ladies’ Literary Club, was taken on a tour of a copper mine, visited a settlement house, and was guest of honor at a dinner.

It was not until Tuesday, October 9, nine days later, that she finally climbed into the cockpit of the Avian and took off over the Wasatch Mountains for Cheyenne and points east. She had indeed learned about mountain air—how it thinned and reduced engine power and affected the carburetor, how it sucked up and down and switched directions and suddenly turned to fog. This time she threaded her way through the high peaks of the Rockies without incident.

In the 1920s Cosmopolitan was a magazine for forward-thinking “modern” young women but it had a general audience as well. It published topical articles and fiction reflecting the fashionable currents of the day. At that time it was a fabulously successful magazine, publishing Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Emil Ludwig, and Damon Runyan, among others. When Calvin Coolidge decided to explain himself, his article, “Why I Did Not Choose to Run,” appeared in the May 1929 issue. Amelia was signed on because she was a “hot” commodity doing the most exciting thing a woman could do: fly. Ray Long was just jumping on the bandwagon; flying was arguably “the” hot media topic—newspapers were creating aviation sections, radio stations were scheduling aviation hours in prime evening time. Now, with Amelia, Cosmo had the first aviation editor.

She was presented as daring, ultrafashionable, chic, beautifully dressed, and apparently wealthy. Photos of her in that first issue show her dressed for riding, flying, and tennis, and with a fur draped about her shoulders dressed for a ball; every outfit is beautifully fitted, her hair is perfectly coiffed, she is wearing makeup, and a bemused smile plays about her lips. If Ray Long’s object was to present her as the most glamorous woman of the moment—the Cosmopolitan girl to end all Cosmopolitan girls—he succeeded. He turned her into the Renaissance woman.

In the 1920s the boyishly slender figure had become the object of every woman’s ambition, and nowhere was that more evident than in the pages of Cosmo. Amelia was exactly what he wanted the Cosmo girl to become. She was tall, slender, with gray eyes and short, apparently curly hair, a nice little round nose with freckles, the Harres family high forehead, white teeth, pale complexion, quick flashing smile. She looked the perfect heroine of the age; she had the perfect figure. She had long legs and walked with a long-legged, loose-jointed stride, usually wearing slacks, an exciting new fashion statement that Cosmo wanted its readers to note.

No one knew that Amelia wore pants to hide her thick ankles. Not even becoming the most famous and most photographed woman in the world assuaged her self-consciousness about her legs—she had hated her legs as a child, and fame made absolutely no difference to the adult woman, she still hated her legs. But such was her charisma that even though she wore her trademark pants from sheer vanity, to hide her ankles, as the world’s newest fashion plate, with her innate sense of style, she turned pants into a fashion alternative.

As the chic, glamourous aviation editor, Amelia, of course, was limited to writing about flying. In the first articles she wrote about how she had gotten into flying, how much she enjoyed it, the planes she had owned. The thrust of all her articles was that flying was safer as well as easier than the general public believed it to be. She answered readers’ questions, published their poetry, and described her trip vagabonding about the country. She told how to go about getting a license, how to make sure of getting a good instructor, how much it all cost. She stressed the safety factor always. She urged women to let their daughters learn to fly and proclaimed that “the year of 1929 is ushering in the Flying Generation.” She wrote about Anne Lindbergh, who was a pilot, and about Amy Earhart, whom she had taken flying so many times that she was bored and now always took a book with her, usually a mystery story.

But Cosmopolitan was not the right place for articles urging women to be pioneers, to open up new fields of endeavor to other women, or to further the cause of aviation for all by forming aviation country clubs, Amelia’s new interest. A gentle prod not to be scared was about all that Cosmopolitan could handle. Cosmo was for playgirls—it was about image rather than accomplishment. If Amelia was perfect for Cosmo, it was not perfect for her—its subject matter was too limited.

Although Amelia had made the decision to become a member of the staff of Cosmopolitan and live in New York, in her own mind she still thought of herself as a social worker—perhaps one temporarily on assignment, but a social worker for all that. Indeed, years later, when a reporter asked her if she missed social work, she replied that she had never left it. Actually, from the first day, she had been a bit self-conscious about working for such a high-profile magazine as Cosmopolitan. In early December, in a letter to a social worker she had known in Boston before the Friendship flight, she admitted as much. She had spoken at a New York State dinner for social workers, she informed her friend: “I talked at the Better Times dinner the day before yesterday in order to pay, if I could, the debt I feel I owe to social workers. I know it was not adequate, but it seemed as much as I could do.”

At some point before she flew west, Amelia had written to Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch—head of Greenwich House, a settlement house in Greenwich Village, who had come to the July settlement house reception given Amelia—asking if she could become a member of the Greenwich House staff, explaining that it wasn’t feasible for her to go back to Denison House. Mary recalled that Amelia had had it in her mind to maintain an association with social work, “as active as her altered way of life would permit.” Simkhovitch, knowing Amelia’s reputation as one of the most promising and respected of the younger social workers, undoubtedly aware of the dilemma Amelia found herself in, said that Greenwich House would consider itself privileged to make a place for her there, that she could be a resident. This situation allowed her to maintain as active an association with social work as her altered way of life would permit and be a member of the staff. So for the rest of 1928 and most of 1929, Amelia made her home in the handsome six-story brick Georgian house designed for Mary by Delano and Aldrich at 27 Barrow Street in the East Village.

Mary was an exceptionally capable as well as charming woman. A member of one of the Boston Brahmin families, which had been pillars of the church, public servants, and part of the literary establishment of the city for generations, she had graduated from Boston University (refusing to be shut up in a women’s college), studied at Radcliffe, then had gone to Berlin for further training. While in Germany, she met her future husband, Vladimir Simkhovitch, and Denison House founder Emily Balch. Mary, a contemporary of Emily and Vida Scudder, founded Greenwich House at roughly the same time as they founded Denison House. In the 1920s it was the most dynamic settlement house in New York. It reflected Mary’s vision of an unstratified society, a vision that extended even to the board, which was composed of workers and neighbors as well as the traditional wealthy upper-class donors that usually comprised all board members.

Amelia was a very unusual resident, the only person permitted by Mary Simkhovitch to use Greenwich House somewhat as a hotel. It provided her with the constant challenge of interesting company, the comforting presence of a world she knew, and perhaps more important, it shielded her from an overly curious world.

The needy and the interested, the sick and the well, literally in the thousands each week, came to the settlement house. Children flocked to Greenwich House to attend the public school Mary ran on the premises, then stayed to be part of the after-school clubs; the elderly came to be taken care of and to have their health checked by the nurses; the able came to acquire skills in the shops; all came to listen to Mary. Under her stewardship the house became such a catalyst for change that the movers and shakers of society were irresistibly drawn to its side and contributed funds. She had just launched a campaign to raise $150,000 for the Greenwich House Music School, and before she started, she already had $27,000 in hand from generous benefactors. The long arm of Mary Simkhovitch even extended to protect the illegal Patsy’s Barn, two blocks away, where behind a green door lived a horse, a goat, and chickens, which the settlement house children loved to visit.

Mary achieved a high degree of competence in all projects. She prevailed on the dean of American education, John Dewey, to set up the education department and be its first head; it remained affiliated with Columbia University and Teachers College, with four representatives on the Greenwich House board. The workshop-apprentice programs that Mary set up, based on those she had seen in Florence, flourished. The pottery workshop was so successful, it became self-supporting, selling wares at its own store on Madison Avenue—its pots were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum for its permanent collection as well as by J.P. Morgan. There was an equally professional stone-cutting shop. The music school students held recitals, and their choral groups competed successfully in city-wide songfests. The children’s theater gave Christmas performances on Broadway.

When Amelia moved in, the workshops were operating out of their own buildings down the street, as did the music school. What she encountered at 27 Barrow Street were the core residents: basically the administrators, headworker Mary, whose life was seamlessly intertwined with her work, her husband Vladimir, their children, and the staff. But leading social thinkers of the day from all over the world also came, to exchange ideas and see the life of an American city, or to attend a conference. They stayed for dinner or for several days or several weeks, which meant that Amelia would as likely as not end up talking to a leader of the British labor movement, a social worker from Japan or Russia, or a Russian revolutionary or Frances Perkins, then New York State commissioner of labor down from Albany for a lecture, or Emily Balch—any and all of whom might drop in for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It was all quite civilized; nor did the extra guests cause the slightest ripple, since as was traditional in settlement houses, meals were cooked by a cook and served by a butler who both took great pride in the settlement house.

Amelia felt at home and fitted in. Her impact on the children and adults alike was incalculable; she inspired them all and continually “got involved,” causing Mary to comment approvingly that she had “a very tender heart” and was “sensitive to injustice.” She was, however, a slow, careful writer who “sweated out her sentences,” observed Mary, herself a prolific writer, author of several books, who routinely dashed off perfect letters and statements to newspapers in record time.

Amelia found companionship not just with Mary but with Vladimir, a professor at Columbia who had a fine collection of ancient art. She could drop her defenses and relax with him. He was fascinated by her—and worried about her future. He admired her sincerity, honesty and gaiety of spirit; but he thought she gave too much of herself to the public side of her career and wanted her to concentrate on social work. He wasn’t sure she was tough enough, that she had the emotional fortitude to endure the notoriety that her new high-profile life demanded. “I felt scared for her, watching her lose her priority in herself. She seemed to have no plan for self-protection,” he told Janet Mabie; life on the outside would be very different. He was aware of how complex Amelia was, aware that she was driving herself to become a top pilot, the spokesperson for her generation of women, and at the same time had a great need to make money and it made him apprehensive. If she had stayed in social work, he mused, “she wouldn’t have made so much money, but then, a lot of it never did her any good anyway.” But the world was almost sucking her out of social work; she would move on.

It was to Vladimir that Amelia opened up a side to her personality that rarely showed: her restless desire for new challenges, wanting him to understand what drove her on. “Are you interested to know I shall try a parachute jump next week? I’ve tried to analyze my desire and find it’s the seeking of a new sensation. Why do we use the same ones over and over again? We hold hands in the moonlight—and then spend the rest of our lives trying to repeat the moment.”

Amelia didn’t do a great deal at the settlement house, but her presence was enough to energize everyone, and she did her bit and made it count. She spoke at the children’s annual club council awards dinner and, to everyone’s delight, presented the cup to the senior Greenwich House basketball team, which defeated Denison House in the big annual grudge game. The junior girls’ basketball team, with Amelia watching over them, came out first in their local contest. She mesmerized a neighborhood gathering with a description of her transatlantic flight. She became a member of the committee for the children’s theater annual Christmas production at the John Golden Theater. She also arranged for her mother to give ten dollars to be a member of the settlement house—a respectable sum, not as much Eleanor Roosevelt gave that year but the same amount contributed by Condé Nast.

It seemed as if her life were in perfect balance: she was earning her living as a writer, flying when she had the opportunity, and contributing to the social work movement by living in a settlement house.