The Deans' Bible. Angie Klink

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СКАЧАТЬ Amelia mailed her written documentations to her husband from along her route as she traversed the globe. Amid the clouds, Amelia recalled her quest for the very airplane from which she wrote: “Where to find the tree on which costly airplanes grow, I did not know. But I did know the kind I wanted—an Electra Lockheed, big brother of my Vegas, with, of course, Wasp engines.… Such is the trusting simplicity of a pilot’s mind, it seemed ordained that somehow the dream would materialize. Once the prize was in hand, obviously there was one flight which I most wanted to attempt—a circumnavigation of the globe as near its waistline as could be.”

      In the sky, her ship’s twin engines a droning backdrop, Amelia poetically penned her dream for girls: “I have harbored a very special ambition. The imaginary file card reads, ‘Tinkering For Girls Only.’ The plan is to endow a catch-as-catch-can machine shop, where girls may tinker to their heart’s content with motors, lathes, jigsaws, gadgets, and diverse hickies of their own creation. Where they may sprawl on their back, peering up into the innards of engines, and likely as not get oil in their hair.… And emerge somewhere in the scale between grease monkeys and inventors.”

      Amelia’s thoughts were also on Purdue. While in the midst of her world-circling project cultivated by Elliott and Ross, she wrote, “The flight was to be the forerunner of activities at Purdue, where miraculously, there exists a real comprehension of the quaint viewpoint I have tried to indicate. Practical mechanical training, engineering and the like, is available without discouragement to women students there.… Which perhaps explains my enthusiasm for Purdue, womanwise as well as aviation-wise.”

      Amelia took formal delivery of her Lockheed Electra on July 24, 1936, her thirty-ninth birthday. It was a standard commercial plane that Amelia had modified to her specifications. “It’s simply elegant,” Amelia said to mechanics who crowded around the gleaming all-metal craft, with its smooth curvatures and duel propellers poised to add sway like anticipant, graceful butter knives. “I could write poetry about this ship.”

      President Elliott traveled to Los Angeles for a scheduled inspection of the flying laboratory in August. The “twin-motored ship” had been repainted in Purdue’s colors, gold and black.

      Years later when Helen was in her eighties, she would give talks about Amelia and what it was like to know her and have her at Purdue. In 1984, Helen said, “When plans were announced for what turned out to be Miss Earhart’s last flight, there was tremendous interest and excitement on campus. We went out to the Purdue Airport to see the plane when Miss Earhart flew it in from California. We followed preparations for the world flight. We followed all of the changes in plans and delays in planning the trip. Finally, in March 1937, Miss Earhart left Purdue for California and then on to Honolulu.”

      One can visualize Dorothy and Helen, colleagues and friends, assembling their charges, young women standing in their sweater sets and wool skirts, as the Indiana March wind whipped the grassy fields surrounding hanger number one at the Purdue Airport. They would gaze, blinking, at the polished Lockheed Electra, a metallic condor of the sky, and watch the gentle woman who would settle into the cockpit and study her maps that were, to Amelia, like adventures in and of themselves.

      Reporters and admirers asked Amelia why she decided to attempt an around-the-world flight. Her answer was always, “Because I want to.”

      In Last Flight, she expounded upon her usual brief answer, perhaps because she could express her reasoning best with pen and paper: “Here was shining adventure, beckoning with new experiences, added knowledge of flying, of peoples—of myself. I felt that with the flight behind me I would be more useful to me and to the program we had planned at Purdue.”

      Helen goes on to explain the ups and downs of Amelia’s start to her circumventing the globe “at its waistline”: “Again a change in plans—a tire blew and a strut collapsed and the plane had to come back to California for repairs. The route of the flight was reversed. In May the plane was flown to Miami for a ‘shakedown cruise.’ Finally, on June 1, 1937, the long flight began. As the flight progressed, we all followed whatever scraps of information came via radio and in the press with the intense personal interest and concern.”

      The mood on the Purdue campus must have been eager and electric. It was, in a sense, Purdue’s plane. Purdue’s Amelia. Purdue’s world flight. It was March 20, when Amelia’s plane “ground looped” and she crashed taking off in Hawaii, headed for Howland Island. As Helen said, Amelia returned the plane to the Lockheed factory in California for repairs.

      President Elliott sent a telegram of encouragement to Amelia. On March 25, he wrote a letter to George, who was at Union Air Terminal in Burbank, California. Evidently, to help buoy his wife, George had suggested the telegram idea to Elliott. By this time the two men had become close, as indicated by the salutation of familiarity:

      My dear G.P.:

      Thanks for the clippings and for the suggestion of a special message for A.E. when she lands today. This has gone and reads as follows:

      YOU ARE COMMISSIONED AND CHARGED TO GIVE A.E. A SPECIAL PURDUE GREETING WHEN SHE LANDS TODAY STOP HER COURAGEOUS EXPLOIT HAS GIVEN THRILL TO EVERY MEMBER OF THE BOILERMAKERS GUILD STOP THEY ARE ALL WITH HER TO THE SUCCESSFUL END OF THE FLIGHT

      I hope it contains pep for her.

      Four months later, Lae, New Guinea, would be Amelia’s final stop, where she reveled in the native tongue. She wrote on July 1, 1937, in Last Flight:

      My only purchase at Lae besides gasoline has been a dictionary of Pidgin English for two shillings. I was well worth the price to discover that all native women are called Mary. The natives have their own name for everything. For instance airplanes are called “balus,” or “birds.” … My plane has acquired special distinction over other metal ones here, which have corrugated surfaces. The Lockheed is smooth and to the native resembles tins in which certain biscuits are shipped from England. Therefore it is known as the “biscuit box.”

      Amelia and her biscuit box would attempt to cross eastward over the Pacific to land on Howland Island, along a route never traveled before by airplane. She wrote before taking off, “Shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.”

      Rather than behind her, the hazards would forever be Amelia’s mystery and legacy.

      Decades later, Helen described hearing the news that Amelia was lost at sea: “On July 2, the final radio message came. It was picked up by a New Guinea radio station: ‘circling … cannot see island … gas running low.’ There was no more word.”

      The Purdue community collectively displayed shock. Yet hope. There was always hope. Maybe Amelia would be found. Helen continued: “We were all sad and unbelieving. It did not seem possible that the vibrant, beautiful person we had known would not return. She will always be a symbol of high courage to those of us who were fortunate enough to know her.”

      Until she passed away in 1992, Helen kept a newspaper clipping with the headline “Earhart’s Radio Mixed Bared.” Dorothy had scrawled a note at the top and evidently given it to Helen. She wrote, “Have you seen this explanation? Certainly tragic and apparently needless.”

      The July 8, 1937 news story stated that the tragedy was due to a communication failure with a coast guard cutter, which cruised along one of the loneliest stretches of the earth’s surface to guide Amelia:

      Far from the scene of the search for Amelia Earhart and her navigator on the coral reefs and watery wastes of the Pacific, maritime radio experts today piece together the story of a radio mixup which may spell the doom of the fliers.

      Briefly the mixup was this:

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