One day, in the summer of 1906, Amelia and Muriel watched the neighbor saddle and mount Nellie. The girls glared as the rider reined his horse in tight. They followed horse and rider as they moved into the street. Suddenly Nellie reared and bucked high into the air. The owner shouted, cursed, and beat the animal with his riding crop. Nellie reared again and bucked higher. The owner tumbled off and fell to the ground in a wild heap. Nellie galloped off to the end of the driveway, then raced to the foot of the street, to the narrow bridge over a little stream. The horse was cornered and bewildered. In defiance she jumped over the railing of the bridge into the rocky stream below. The next day the broken body of the horse was found near the milldam a mile below the bridge.
It was an experience Amelia never forgot, and in later years she loved to read Vachel Lindsay’s poem, “The Bronco That Would Not Be Broken of Dancing.” It always reminded her of Nellie.
Amelia greatly admired spirited animals, and perhaps even as a young girl she learned something of her own nature from them. There was much of the untamed and the unrestrained in herself and she resented what she considered unnecessary restrictions.
In 1907 her family moved to Des Moines, Iowa, and she saw her first airplane. She remembered the exact day she saw the plane; it was at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, on July 24, her ninth birthday.
Amelia and Muriel were enjoying the merry-go-round and the pony rides, but Mr. Earhart was impatient to see the airplane, which, it had been advertised, was going to give a demonstration flight. Ever since he had read about Wilbur and Orville Wright, who only four years ago had flown successfully from the sand dunes at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Edwin Earhart had wanted to see a plane, especially see one fly. But his daughters wanted another pony ride, and after that he had to buy them some paper hats. Mr. Earhart obliged, but only after they promised him they would go directly to the flying field.
Later, Amelia remembered looking beyond the fence to the airplane. She thought it was an ugly thing of rusty wire and wood. It had two wings, one above the other, and between the wings at the center a man sat with goggles over his eyes and with his feet on a crossbar. Just behind the man was a motor with a big wooden propeller. The tail looked like a large box kite. An assistant spun the propeller. The motor sputtered. Slowly the plane rolled over the ground on its small wheels; then it moved faster. All of a sudden it rose into the air.
A woman who was standing beside Amelia took her arm and said, “Look, dear. It flies!” But Amelia was more interested in the ridiculous paper hat she was wearing, which looked like an inverted peach basket and had cost fifteen cents.
5. Over the Atlantic
AE shook her head and looked out the small square window in the side door of the Friendship. She wondered what the implications were of her nine-year-old disinterest in that early airplane. Certainly now, as she had for many years, she hated hats and loved airplanes. Why the exact opposite in attraction repulsion, why the substitution in meaningful symbols, why the clean and clear-cut reversal? She did not trouble herself for the answers; she took out her log and made some quick entries:
140 mph. 3,600 feet. Mist and fog, white from the afternoon sun churn in the props. 4:15 P.M. It is cold in the cabin and colder outside. Bill Stultz has picked up XHY Rexmore, a British ship, which gives him a bearing—48 North, 39 West, 20:45 GMT. The HXY has promised to give New York the Friendship’s position.