Daughter of the sky

She had been nineteen at the time. It was in 1917, during the Christmas vacation of her senior year at Ogontz, the Philadelphia finishing school, when Amelia and her mother went to visit sister Muriel, who was attending St. Margaret’s in Toronto.

On one blustering morning, a few days before Christmas, Amelia went shopping. She pulled the collar of her long, warm coat close to her neck and buried her chin in the fur against the cold. She bent into the icy wind whipping in from Lake Ontario and slowly pressed her way down the street. Late shoppers bustled in and out of the stores and up and down the sidewalk.

Toward her came four one-legged soldiers with crutches, thumping and swinging up the pavement, and grimly pressing their shoulders against the wooden supports. The sight of one of the veterans in particular greatly disturbed Amelia. He was younger than the others and he caught her eye as they went by. He had smiled at her with difficulty and in his face was the look of incredulous bewilderment, as if he had suffered his loss too soon to realize what had happened to him. Amelia tried not to stare at his empty khaki pants leg which had been folded and pinned to his hip. She forced a smile in return for his, and then looked the other way as her eyes welled up with tears.

For her, war had been simply a matter of parades and brass bands and men in uniform. She had been unaware that Canada had been at war for four years. Like so many other Americans, especially women, she really didn’t know what war was like. The crippled soldiers made her feel guilty and ashamed. She decided she must do something to help.

That night she had a long talk with her mother. “I want to stay in Toronto,” she told her, “and help in the hospitals. It’s useless for me to go back to school.”

Mrs. Earhart tried to dissuade her daughter. “But you’re graduating this year, Melia,” the mother said. “You should graduate from school before you do anything.”

“I don’t care,” she answered. “I want to help. A diploma doesn’t mean anything; but what you do does. I’m old enough to know what I want to do, and I want to do something useful in this world.”

The mother had met this stubbornness before, when as a child Amelia had wanted such things as a flat-bellied sled, a football, a baseball bat. Mrs. Earhart relented: her daughter was of an age to make her own decisions, even if they did seem somewhat impulsive. She would have to learn for herself, now, and discover the consequences of her own acts.

Amelia started training under the Canadian Red Cross and soon qualified as a nurse’s aide. Her first assignment was to Spadina Military Hospital, a converted college building. With characteristic energy in meeting a new challenge, she scrubbed floors, made beds, and carried trays of food. She worked from seven in the morning until seven at night, with two hours off in the afternoon.

“Sister,” the patients would call to the slender girl in the white coif and the white starched uniform, “please rub my back.” Sister Earhart would rub backs—some of them lovely ones, she frankly admitted. “Sister, please bring some ice cream today instead of rice pudding.” Sister Amelia, remembering the rice puddings that came back untouched, bearing little crosses with the epitaph R.I.P., matched pennies with the help in the kitchen. With her winnings she bought ice cream for her patients.

Although Amelia found much satisfaction in her work as a nurse’s aide, there was another activity that attracted her as no other had. At first she had looked simply out of curiosity, but now she would go out to the edge of the city to Armor Heights whenever she had time off. She had become fascinated by the training planes and the way they took off and landed. She had seen and talked with some of the young beginning pilots at the hospital; they had crashed their planes through some mishap or other, and some of them had barely escaped death. Yet they were of unqualified good humor: they laughed and joked with one another about their accidents, and spoke gruesomely yet smilingly about an ambulance as a “meat wagon.” They were blasé and devil-may-care, and such an attitude toward life and death, so kindred to her own, intrigued her.

She wanted to know more about these young men and their business of flying. Despite their surface merriment, she wondered what it was that made them fly, even in the face of death. Certainly they realized the danger involved; if so, she reasoned to herself, there must be something beyond the danger that somehow lured the pilots into the air. She would have to find out for herself what it was.

Soon she ventured closer to the airport and the operations shack where she could watch the young men. They were Canadian, Scotch, Irish, American. She talked with some of those she had seen at the hospital either as patients or as visitors. She loved to watch their descriptions of various maneuvers; “hangar flying,” they called it. They simulated with their hands the best way to execute a loop, or a barrel roll, or a lazy-eight. Their enthusiasm fired her with an irrepressible urge to go up.

She begged one after another of the pilots for a ride to see what it was like. Just a take-off and a landing, and she was willing to pay. “Sorry,” they would say. “Regulations absolutely forbid giving civilians any rides.” Certainly not a woman. “Even the general’s wife couldn’t go up,” one of them said. “And she can do just about anything she wants.”

The pilots laughed at the expense of the general’s wife. Amelia, turning away in disappointment, kicked her toe into the packed snow. A plane with skis turned off the ramp and taxied out to the field; the blast from its propeller flung back a sheet of snow that stung Amelia full in the face. She raised her arm against further lashing, and walked away toward the side of a building.

Here, she thought, was a challenge she would like to meet. She watched the pilots put on their big padded helmets and adjust their goggles. The men smeared grease on their faces to prevent freezing in the biting cold of the Canadian sky. Someday she would get her chance to fly in an airplane, and maybe fly one herself. She wanted to be the master of one of those planes and make it obey her will like a horse, a winged horse, and send it roaring through the sky. Amelia was a lone and disconsolate figure as she nurtured her private dreams and left the eager pilots and their planes to their man’s world of flight. She headed back to the city and to woman’s work at the hospital.

AE was still working as a nurse’s aide at the time of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, and at the time of the great Toronto Exposition a few months later.

Amelia and a friend joined the crowds that pressed through the fairgrounds to see the displays and exhibits. AE wanted especially to see a highly advertised added attraction: a demonstration of stunt flying by one of the returned aces of the war.

As the time drew near for the air acrobatics, the two companions settled themselves in the middle of a clearing. Suddenly they heard the plane. Shading their eyes against the afternoon sun, they looked up.

The plane was black against the sky, then red as it turned and the wings and fuselage caught the sun. The little plane twisted and turned and rolled; then it looped and spun down to the right. As the plane swooped down close to the ground, the crowd broke and ran like frightened deer.

The friend grabbed Amelia’s arm; she wanted to get out of the field, fast. Amelia stood her ground. The companion fled for safety.

Nose down and motor roaring, the plane hurtled headlong in a steep dive toward the lone girl in the middle of the clearing.

Amelia gripped her hips, spread her feet and planted them defiantly on the ground. No plane and pilot were going to scare her. She had seen them pull out of dives many times before. Certainly this pilot was no fool, and he seemed to have the plane fully under control.

The plane, a bare 200 feet from the ground, roared out of its dive, wings and struts shaking, and climbed in a tight half-loop back into the sky; now on its back, the plane kicked over in a half roll, then sped away, a disappearing speck on the horizon.

Amelia hadn’t moved an inch. And because she had faced it in that moment of danger, the plane had said something to her—something thrilling and buoyant and exhilarating. There was now no question that someday she, too, would fly. And it didn’t matter if she was a woman. Someday she would get her chance.