Amelia Earhart
Amelia EarhartAmelia Earhart
Amelia Mary Earhart was born on July 24, 1897 at her grandparents' home
in Atchison, Kansas. It was not till 1908 that the girls moved to Des Moines to be
with their parents, Amelia was 10 years old when she saw her first airplane at the
Iowa State Fair. It would be more than a decade before Amelia's interest in aviation
would be awaken. Amelia began to realize that her father was a drunkard as well as
to neighbors and friends around them. In 1914 Amy and the girls left Edwin after
he was fired from The Rock Island RR, and went to live with friends in Chicago.
After visiting her sister in 1917 at a college preparatory school in Canada,
Amelia decided to train as a nurses aid in Toronto and served as a Voluntary Aid
Detachment nurse at a military hospital until the Armistice in November 1918. In
the fall of 1919 Amelia enrolled as a pre-med student at Columbia University. In
1920 she decided to join her mother and father in California. They had recently
reunited and were encouraging the sisters to join them. Several months after her
arrival in California Amelia and her father went to an "aerial meet" at Daugherty
Field in Long Beach. She had become very interested in flying. The next day, given a
helmet and goggles, she boarded the open-cockpit biplane for a 10 minute flight over
Los Angeles.
Amelia had heard of a woman pilot who gave flying instructions and shortly
afterwards began lessons with Anita "Neta" Snook at Kinner Field near Long
Beach. She had several accidents during this period, some could be attributed to
unreliable engines and slowness of the planes. By October 1922, Amelia began
participating in record breaking attempts and set a women's altitude record of
14,000 feet, broken a few weeks later by Ruth Nichols.
In 1925, Amelia took a position at Denison House in Boston as a "novice"
social worker and was later employed as a staff member. She joined the Boston
Chapter of the National Aeronautic Association, and invested what little money she
had in a company that would build an airport and market Kinner airplanes in
Boston. During this time she took full advantage of the circumstances to promote
flying...especially for women. She regularly became the subject of columns in
newspapers. On April 27, 1926 her life was to change forever...a phone call from
Captain H.H. Railey asked, "how would you like to be the first woman to fly across
the Atlantic?"...
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