IntroductionB by
Colonel Hilton H. Railey,
United States Army (retired)

On the pivot of my casual conversation with George Palmer Putnam turned the career of Amelia Earhart, her transformation from social worker at a Boston settlement house to a world figure in aviation.

If it had not been for that conversation with Mr. Putnam the chances are that Amelia Earhart would still have become a constructive factor in the industry to which she was so devoted; and that she would be alive today.

In the spring of 1928 I dropped in to see Putnam in New York. He told me that Commander Byrd had recently sold his trimotored Fokker to “a wealthy woman who plans to fly the Atlantic.” He did not know her name or anything more about it, except that he believed floats were being fitted to the plane at the East Boston airport.

“It’d be amusing to manage a stunt like that, wouldn’t it?” he remarked. “Find out all you can. Locate the ship. Pump the pilots.”

In Boston I cornered Wilmer (Bill) Stultz, the pilot, and Lou Gordon, his copilot and mechanic. Stultz admitted he was getting ready for a transatlantic flight, but maintained that he knew only his backer’s attorney, David T. Layman.

In New York, some days later, I got in touch with him and learned that Mrs. Frederick E. Guest of London and New York, whose husband had been Secretary of State for Air in Lloyd George’s cabinet, was the mysterious sponsor who had planned to be the first of her sex to fly the Atlantic. Her family, said Mr. Layman, was much concerned. Soon it was agreed that if I could find the “right sort of girl” to take her place Mrs. Guest would yield.

When I returned to Boston I telephoned Rear Admiral Reginald K. Belknap, retired.

“I know a young social worker who flies,” he said. “I’m not sure how many hours she’s had, but I do know that she’s deeply interested in aviation and a thoroughly fine person. Call Denison House and ask for Amelia Earhart.”

Guardedly, when Miss Earhart came on the wire, I inquired whether she would like to participate in an important but hazardous flight. I had to come out with it because she had declined an interview until I stated the nature of my business. That afternoon, accompanied by Miss Marion Perkins, head worker at Denison House, she appeared at my office.

At sight convinced that she was qualified as a person, if not as a pilot, I asked forthwith:

“How would you like to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic?”

She asked for details, whatever I was at liberty to tell her. Miss Earhart had owned several planes and had flown more than five hundred hours. She said the role of passenger did not appeal to her much, and hoped that, weather conditions permitting, she could take her turn at the controls. At that time, however, she was unable to fly with the aid of instruments alone, and her experience with trimotored ships had been inconsequential.

In the light of subsequent events, in the tragic shadow of the last, I quote a letter addressed to me by Miss Earhart on May 2, 1928:

Some weeks after Mrs. Guest had retired in Miss Earhart’s favor, my wife, in daily touch with our secret preparations, broached the subject and, woman to woman, urged her to back out if she felt the slightest degree uneasy. Her reply was characteristic:

“No, this is the way I look at it: my family’s insured, there’s only myself to think about. And when a great adventure’s offered you—you don’t refuse it, that’s all.”

At Mrs. Guest’s request, Mr. Putnam agreed to act as the “backer” of the flight. It was at Miss Earhart’s request, primarily, that I agreed to see her through the rumpus in Europe. About the middle of May I set out for London. Mrs. Guest had preceded us.

Stultz and Gordon, the press believed, were Byrd’s men, grooming the giant Fokker, named the Friendship by Mrs. Guest, for the trip to the South Pole.

Toward noon on June 17 the Friendship cracked the ill luck which had glued her pontoons to the bay at Trepassey, Newfoundland, for more than two weeks. News of the take-off was flashed to the world.

Early the next morning we heard that the Friendship had circled the S.S. America, a few hundred miles out, to get her bearings; silence through the night had meant only that her radio was out of commission. After some hours I received direct word from Gordon that they had come down safely at Burry Port, Wales. I telegraphed them to remain aboard ship until I arrived by flying boat from Southampton.

That afternoon, landing near the Friendship, I caught a glimpse of Miss Earhart seated in the doorway of the fuselage.

“Hello!” she said.

After a flight of twenty hours and forty minutes they were all dog tired, but there was something else in Miss Earhart’s expression—disappointment.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Aren’t you excited?”

“Excited? No. It was a grand experience, but all I did was lie on my tummy and take pictures of the clouds. We didn’t see much of the ocean. Bill did all the flying—had to. I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes.”

“What of it? You’re still the first woman to fly the Atlantic and, what’s more, the first woman pilot.”

“Oh, well, maybe someday I’ll try it alone.”

The next morning we boarded the Friendship and flew to Southampton, where, for the first time, Miss Earhart met Mrs. Guest, to whom she owed the position which, thereafter strengthened by her own steady hands, she was to turn to such brilliant account.

As Miss Earhart’s escort, I felt increasing pride in her natural manner, warmed, as it was, by humor and grace. Whether confronted by dozens of cameramen demanding over and over, “A great big smile, please!” or asked to wave to crowds (a gesture she used sparingly); whether laying a wreath at the Cenotaph or before a statue of Edith Cavell; whether sipping tea with the Prime Minister and Lady Astor at the House of Commons or talking with Winston Churchill, she remained herself, serious, forthright, with no bunk in her make-up.

Even in those days I sensed that for all her lack of ostentation she would yet write drama in the skies; her simplicity would capture people everywhere, her strength of character would hold her on her course; in calm pursuit of an end not personal she would achieve greatness. Above all, she had a quality of imaginative daring that was to wing her like an arrow.

Aboard the mayor’s boat, Macom, during Miss Earhart’s welcome in the harbor at New York, Commander Byrd told me that he needed help in the financing of his projected expedition to the Antarctic and urged me to join him as soon as I could cut loose from the Friendship’s show. After a day or two I did.

In the years that followed, with pride and sure knowledge of Amelia Earhart’s motivations, but with a tinge of fear as to the outcome, I watched her gain distinction in aviation.

Genuinely as a tribute to her sex rather than for her own glorification, she accepted the honors that accrued; for the participation of women in aviation, which at all times she strove to encourage and pace, was the obsession which lured her to her death.

After she had flown the Atlantic as the first woman passenger, it was inevitable that she should attempt to fly it alone. Having done so, having established, seriatim, transcontinental records of one kind and another, there remained the Pacific.

Long before she mentioned it, I knew that next, and perhaps fatally, must come her globe-circling adventure. Why—when even to her it must have seemed a stunt without constructive benefit to the aeronautical industry—did she attempt that hazardous expedition?

She had to. She was caught up in the hero racket that compelled her to strive for increasingly dramatic records, bigger and braver feats that automatically insured the publicity necessary to the maintenance of her position as the foremost woman pilot in the world. She was a victim of an era of “hot” aeronautics that began with Colonel Lindbergh and Admiral Byrd and that shot “scientific” expeditions across continents, oceans, and polar regions by dint of individual exhibition.