AMELIA LOST! This was the newspaper headline thousands of Americans woke up to on July 3, 1937. And for the next ten days the lost flier stayed on the front page as people grasped for any tidbit of information. They stayed glued to their radios and flocked to movie theaters to watch newsreel films showing ships and planes searching the expanse of the Pacific. “We are stunned,” declared a Kentucky woman. As the days passed, newspapers, unsure about when to print an obituary, began running lengthy articles eulogizing the lost flier. And hundreds of Americans sent letters of consolation to Amelia’s family.

Among them were these lines from a fifteen-year-old California girl: “I want to choke the Navy for not finding her. . . . I feel she is alive and I know she needs us.”

In another letter, a New Jersey woman wondered, “How can she just be gone?”

And one aspiring female pilot from Oklahoma shared these feelings: “I have had people tell me I’m crazy to stay up all night listening to the radio about Amelia and they say Miss Earhart was nothing to me, but I loved Miss Earhart as if she were my own sister, because I know she is a kind and wonderful woman. There isn’t another woman I worship more.” Reading her words, recalled one family member, “practically reduced George to tears.”

Distraught, he refused to leave the coast guard station in San Francisco. He simply stayed in the radio room, going days without sleep, waiting for news that his wife had been found. Those present remembered how he paced back and forth for hours, sweat running down his face. “A.E. will pull through,” he told a reporter. “She has more courage than anyone I know.”

Unable to publish a eulogy, the Los Angeles Herald and Express instead included this pictorial summary of Amelia’s life, entitled “The World Remembers,” in its July 13, 1937, issue. (picture credit 18.1)

As the hours and days wore on, George wracked his brain for possibilities, going over and over the sea charts. Had the navy searched the vicinity of the Phoenix Islands? he wondered. Could it be possible that, unable to find Howland Island, Amelia had turned back to the Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati)? Might her plane be afloat and drifting south?

George called navy and coast guard chiefs to request that ships be diverted from the organized search to follow up on his ideas. He even offered to pay for any additional costs involved in these searches. “George was a doer,” recalled one friend. “It was impossible for him to retreat into helplessness.”

He refused to quit even after the government abandoned the search. Weeks later, he was still following up on his own questions. He even flew to Washington, D.C., where he badgered anyone who would listen about continuing the search.

But it all came to nothing. Eventually, he was forced to face the sad truth—Amelia was dead. “I feel I have been running away from something I should have faced,” he confessed to his mother-in-law. “Mostly, my days have been filled with an effort to keep from thinking. The total emptiness is appalling.”

He kept busy by flinging himself into two new projects. The first was a book based on the notes Amelia had mailed from various stops on her world flight. Titled Last Flight, it was published in November 1937, and while it did not become a bestseller, sales were strong.

Sales for George’s second project—a biography of Amelia—were also strong. Calling this book Soaring Wings, George delved into his wife’s past by writing to friends and relatives for their stories and remembrances of her. His work—which first uncovered such often-told tales as the ones about little Amelia’s backyard roller coaster and the hand-sewn bloomers she wore—became the basis of all future biographers’ work.

“Even after her death,” commented one friend, “he was still working for Amelia Earhart . . . still promoting her heroic image.”

Flat-out Broke

Some people criticized George for profiting from his dead wife’s name. “He must be making millions,” remarked one newspaper editor. But in truth, George was broke. “For many years I had been pouring my fullest energy and thoughtfulness, and largely my income, into A.E.’s activities and ambitions,” he wrote to his mother-in-law. “You know that the final tragedy, and its aftermath, deeply involved me financially. . . . For which . . . I have no regrets. If we had to do it again, I’d spend everything I had again.”

When the bills related to Amelia’s flight, as well as her search, began pouring in, George hunted for the means to pay them. But the book deals went only a small way toward clearing the debt. Eventually, he was forced to sell his Rye, New York, estate to keep from going bankrupt. Still, “the money was never important,” said George, “considering the greater loss of my wife and friend.” For the rest of his life, he suffered under the financial burden caused by the failed flight.

But no publicity scheme concocted by George Putnam could have enhanced Amelia’s image more than her tragic accident. In life, she had been famous. But now—by vanishing—she became a legend. As the mystery of her disappearance gripped the public’s imagination, rumors began to swirl.

It was whispered that Amelia had really been on a top-secret mission for the U.S. government. Her objective had been to fly over Japanese fortifications in the central Pacific, gathering important military information.

Was this true? When Amelia’s mother asked the Roosevelts about the rumor, Eleanor said no. “We loved Amelia too much to send her to her death,” she replied.

Another rumor speculated that a Japanese fishing boat had picked up Amelia and Fred after the fliers had crash-landed off course. Since relations between Japan and the United States were strained at that time (war between the two countries broke out four years later), Earhart and Noonan were imprisoned on Saipan, where they eventually died.

Still another rumor suggested that Amelia, tired of all the publicity, faked her death, assumed an alias and moved to New Jersey.

Until his death in 1950, George worried that the mystery of her disappearance would overshadow Amelia’s real legacy.

And what was Amelia’s legacy?

Wrote biographer Mary S. Lovell, “[It] is the legend of an ordinary girl growing into an extraordinary woman who dared to attempt seemingly unattainable goals in a man’s world.”

No Funeral

Because no body was ever found, Amelia Earhart was never given a funeral or memorial service. There were no national tributes or flags lowered to half-mast. Instead, on January 5, 1939—two years after her disappearance—this tiny paragraph appeared in the back pages of newspapers all across the country:

Amelia Earhart, noted woman flyer who disappeared on an around the world flight in the summer of 1937, was declared legally dead today. The action was taken at the request of the flyer’s husband, George Palmer Putnam.

It is impossible to gauge how much Amelia’s life inspired the generations of women who came after her. At a time when women felt limited to the roles of wife and mother, she encouraged them to challenge themselves and seize their dreams. And she did it with zest, boldness and courage.

Amelia Earhart was not afraid of death. She had said so many times. A paragraph from a letter she left behind in case she did not return from her world flight proved that. She wrote:

Please know I am quite aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.

As a grief-stricken Eleanor Roosevelt told reporters, “I am sure Amelia’s last words were ‘I have no regrets.’ ”

The letter Amelia left behind. (picture credit 18.2)