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<text>
<title>
(1930s) One in a Million:Amelia Earhart
</title>
<history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1930s Highlights</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
July 19, 1937
One in a Million
</hdr>
<body>
<p> Amelia Earhart was born 39 years ago in Atchison, Kans. Her
father was a lawyer and railway claim agent. She went east to
study at Columbia University, then west to be with her parents,
who had moved to Los Angeles. In California, Amelia saw many
more airplanes than in Kansas. The idea of flying excited her.
Famed Captain Frank Hawks took her up for her first flight. In
1918 she made her first solo, after ten hours of instruction.
Two years later she set a woman's altitude record of 14,000
feet.
</p>
<p> Amelia Earhart and her mother went east in a canary-colored
automobile. The young girl again studied at Columbia and at
Harvard Summer School. She got into social service work,
teaching soiled urchins at South Boston's old Denison House. One
day the telephone rang and a voice asked if she would go along
on a transatlantic airplane flight. The sponsor of the project
thought it would be good publicity to take a woman along. Amelia
said at once she would go.
</p>
<p> Amelia Earhart thus made national headlines as the first
woman to cross the Atlantic, with Wilmer Stutz and Louis Gordon
in the Friendship. After that she settled down to learn flying
as well as she could. She flew for fun, flew for publicity.
While flying for Beechnut Products she made headlines by
cracking up an autogiro, the nearest thing to a foolproof
aircraft. But she learned to fly so well that she became the
world's No. 1 woman flyer, rolled up an impressive list of
"firsts":
</p>
<qt>
<l>-- First woman to fly the Atlantic.</l>
<l>-- First woman to fly the Atlantic alone.</l>
<l>-- First person to fly the Atlantic alone twice.</l>
<l>-- First woman to fly an autogiro.</l>
<l>-- First person to cross the U.S. in an autogiro.</l>
<l>-- First woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross.</l>
<l>-- First woman to fly non-stop across the U.S.</l>
<l>-- First woman to fly from Hawaii to the U.S.</l>
</qt>
<p> Amelia Earhart became a good friend of Eleanor Roosevelt
who shared her belief that women should not stand in the shadow
of men. In 1931 she married Publisher George Palmer Putnam, who
never dissuaded her from flying wherever she wanted to go.
Keynote of Mrs. Putnam's career was the title of her book, The
Fun Of It. But she professed interest also in the scientific
aspect of flying. She became a consulting member of Purdue
University's faculty, specializing in aeronautics and careers
for women, and last year acquired a wasp-motored Lockheed
Electra which was supposed to be a "flying laboratory" equipped
with up-to-the-minute flying and navigating devices. The cost--$80,000--was mostly provided by anonymous members of the
Purdue Research Foundation, but it was specified that the plane
should be Mrs. Putnam's property.
</p>
<p> One thing Amelia Earhart Putnam still wanted to do--for
the fun of it--was to fly around the world. She started from
Miami, Fla. on June 1 with Fred Noonan, onetime Pan American
navigator. They made mostly back page news until last fortnight
when they started across 2,550 miles of Pacific Ocean toward
tiny Howland Island, failed to reach it. Last week the
likelihood was approaching sad certainty that Amelia Earhart
Putnam had made headlines for the last time. (This week
another crew of Soviet flyers was winging its way from Moscow
across the top of the world toward an unannounced destination
on the west coast of the U.S. Near the North Pole the three
flyers radioed that "everything is in order.")
</p>
<p> Several facts made it clear that much more than simple bad
luck was involved. Before the hop-off, when capable Navigator
Noonan inspected what he thought was an ultra-modern "flying
laboratory," he was dismayed to discover that there was nothing
to take celestial bearings except an ordinary ship sextant. He
remedied that by borrowing a modern bubble octant designed
especially for airplane navigation. For estimating wind drift
over the sea, he obtained two dozen aluminum powder bombs. For
some reason these bombs were left behind in a storehouse. The
Coast Guard cutter Itasca, which had been dispatched from San
Diego to Howland Island solely as a help to the flyers, would
have been able to take directional bearings on the Earhart plane
if the latter could have tuned its signals to a 500-kilocycle
frequency. The plane's transmitter would have been able to send
such signals if it had had a trailing antenna. Miss Earhart
considered all this too much bother, no trailing antenna was
taken along. Finally, the Itasca's commander would have had a
better idea where to look if the plane had radioed its position
at regular intervals. But not one position report was received
after the plane left New Guinea. In fact only seven position
reports are known to have been radioed by the flyers during
their entire trip.
</p>
<p> When word that the Earhart plane was lost reached the U.S.,
Husband Putnam wired an appeal for a Navy search to President
Roosevelt. But even before the message reached Washington,
Secretary of the Navy Swanson had ordered the Navy to start
hunting. By last week the search was costing $250,000 a day. The
battleship Colorado hove to off the Phoenix Islands, catapulted
three planes from its deck. The flyers skimmed over Gardner and
McKean Islands and Carondelet Reef, saw nothing but ruined guano
works and the wreck of a tramp freighter. Thousands of startled
seabirds fluttered up, menacing the propellers and forcing the
flyers to climb. Some days equatorial squalls and vanishing
visibility crippled the hunt, but on others the weather was
perfect, visibility unlimited. By week's end the Colorado's
planes had scanned more than 100,000 square miles. The Itasca,
which inaugurated the search last fortnight, continued its
futile patrol until fuel ran short. The minesweeper Swan put
ashore a searching party at Canton Island, where last month a
party of scientists viewed the solar eclipse. Meanwhile, the
aircraft carrier Lexington, with 62 planes aboard (instead of
72 as first announced) and an escort of four destroyers, sped
out of San Diego at forced draft, stopped in Hawaii to refuel,
arrived in the search area early this week. If the Lexington's
great fleet of planes could not find the lost flyers, Rear
Admiral Orin G. Murfin, co-ordinator of the search, planned to
abandon it. Meanwhile the chance of finding the flyers alive,
according to the consensus of searchers, was already down to one
in a million.
</p>
<p> George Palmer Putnam clung to his belief that his wife had
come down not in the sea but on land, because the radio
batteries, located under the ship's wings, would have been put
out of commission in the water. Dozens of amateurs continued to
report messages from the lost plane's radio, but Navy and Coast
Guard radio experts doubted that any of these were genuine. One
amateur who excitedly announced reception of a distress call was
found to have been listening to the March of Time's
dramatization of the tragedy from a commercial station.
</p>
<p> Navigator Noonan's wife was cheered when she received some
photographs from her husband, mailed weeks ago from the Far
East. There was also a letter. Excerpt: "Amelia is a grand
person for such a trip. She is the only woman flyer I would care
to make such a trip with because in addition to being a fine
companion she can take hardship as well as a man--and work
like one."
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>