Daughter of the sky

by Jr. Paul L. Briand

The next day when Grandmother Otis discovered the roughly built roller coaster she disapproved strongly. Young girls just didn’t do those things. They stayed at home and sewed and learned how to cook. “Why,” Grandmother Otis used to say to Amelia and Muriel, “the most strenuous thing I ever did as a girl was to roll a hoop in the public square.”

Despite Grandmother’s remark, the girls would scamper hand in hand through the paths from the bluff down to the river where they would search the caves for arrowheads and play Pioneers and Indians. One day when they had returned from such an adventure, Mrs. Earhart looked at her daughters’ dirty pinafores and decided they needed costumes more in keeping with their play. Amy Otis bought for her girls some new gym suits. The neighborhood was shocked. Amelia and Muriel were delighted: now they could climb on the back of the cow in the barn, or play baseball and basketball, and never worry about tearing their dresses.

Amelia and Muriel attended the College Preparatory School in Atchison. Of her days at grammar school Amelia wrote later: “Like many horrid children, I loved school, though I never qualified as teacher’s pet. Perhaps the fact that I was exceedingly fond of reading made me endurable. With a large library to browse in, I spent many hours not bothering anyone after I once learned to read.” But there was some difficulty with her mathematics teacher, Sarah Walton, who had insisted that Amelia put down all the steps she went through to arrive at her answers if she expected to win honor prizes at the end of the term. Amelia didn’t care about the honors: she knew she could work the problems in her head, and it was a waste of time to put the steps down on paper.

Early in her life Amelia revealed a mind that was inventive, original, and stubborn. She was bright and inquisitive about everything. Her parents encouraged her interest in books and took turns reading aloud from Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, and Thackeray. The reading habit became ingrained, and later, when Amelia and Muriel helped in the housework, instead of both of them doing it together, one would read while the other worked. One of Mr. Earhart’s favorite games with his girls was to spring words on them which they had to define without running to a dictionary.

Edwin Earhart, much like Lincoln in stern appearance and with gentle and pervasive humor, was unusually open-minded about his girls and what they wanted to do. He did not think he should keep his daughters in school at all costs. Sometimes he took Amelia and Muriel with him on his trips for the railroad—to Kansas City, Des Moines, St. Paul, Chicago—thinking the visits as educational as classes in school. He also took the girls along whenever he went on a fishing jaunt. For such things as a lunar eclipse he would let them stay up late at night. And Amelia never forgot the one occasion in 1910 when she saw Halley’s comet.

“Anything unusual is educational,” Amy Earhart said, supporting her husband’s views. And the girls, dressed in their dark-blue flannel suits and their “shocking” full-pleated bloomers, collected the unusual and did the unusual. They added toads and spiders and chameleons to the collection of Indian arrowheads. They cooked and baked at the oven outside, and Amelia, forever the experimenter, once tried to make the manna she read about in the story of Moses. She was convinced that it was a cross between a popover and angel-food cake. Whenever she was asked why she wanted to do such things, her answer was always the same: “Because I want to!” The reply may have been unsatisfactory, but she used it all her life—for her ungirl-like interest in house painting, working metal, taking mechanical gadgets apart and putting them together again, and flying an airplane around the world. These were the things she wanted to do.

But nothing was more enjoyable than the new flat sleds with steel runners that Mr. Earhart bought the girls for Christmas, 1905, when Amelia was a round-faced, towheaded girl of seven. As soon as she heard that the hill nearby was covered with snow, she rushed out to try her new sled—a “belly whopper,” she called it. When Amelia and Muriel reached the slope, the other neighborhood girls were sitting on their old-style upright sleds with wooden runners. Amelia noted that her sled was much more practical; it was a sled you could steer this way and that. She made a running start and thumped onto the sled. Down the steep slope of the hill she swooped, blinking, her wet eyes whipped by the icy wind, feeling the cold rush into her nostrils. Suddenly a junkman’s cart labored out of a side street at the bottom of the hill. Amelia shouted to the driver, but he did not hear. The horse, plodding carefully across the icy patches on the road, had blinders on and could not see her. It was impossible for Amelia to stop and too dangerous for her to go off the side of the road into the ditch. With presence of mind born of necessity, she coasted on straight, then carefully guided the sled by the steering bar up front, and shot through the underside of the horse, between his front and back legs. The tomboy way to sled had saved her life.

Despite the disapproval of his mother-in-law, Mr. Earhart continued to give his girls what they wanted to play with, and they wanted to play with footballs, baseballs, and basketballs.

Amelia loved strenuous games and she tried them all. She rebelled at the idea that they were not proper exercise for girls. That made her nearly as mad as some of the stories she read: the heroes were always boys. “Exercise of all kinds gave me intense pleasure,” she said later in her life, after she had become an accomplished equestrienne. “I might have been more skillful and graceful if I had learned the correct form in athletics. I could not get any instruction, so I just played and acquired a lot of bad habits.” She had always wanted to ride a horse, and she would climb onto the back of any nag that stopped in front of her house for a delivery. The most fun was riding the heavy-footed sorrel that pulled the butcher’s wagon. He bucked with devilish determination for no reason at all, and Amelia was often unseated.

Her favorite horse was a neighbor’s mare named Nellie. Nellie’s owner kept her in a small, hot, confining shed near the Otis property. Whenever Nellie, tormented by flies, would kick her heels at the sides of the shed, her owner would beat her with a buggy whip. Amelia hated the neighbor for his cruelty, and often tried to calm the horse with cubes of sugar before Nellie’s clattering and banging aroused her master.