“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.