Then he heard a loud crash. GP spun around. The giro lay broken in a cloud of smoke, the rotor blades cracked and splintered, the landing gear smashed.
He ran toward the wreck. Ignoring the ground beneath him, he struck one of the support wires. He flew up, over, and down, and hit the ground flat on his back.
Amelia emerged from the accident without injury. When she saw her husband sprawled on the ground, and apparently hurt, she ran to him. She saw that he was winded but otherwise, it seemed, in good condition.
“So flying is the safest, after all!” she teased him. “If you had been with me, you wouldn’t have been hurt.”
GP turned to get up. His face creased in pain.
He had cracked three of his ribs.
7. George Palmer Putnam
George Palmer Putnam II was a man of many accomplishments. Because of his highly active and extroverted nature, people either liked him or disliked him. No one who knew him felt an apathetic indifference toward him.
Newspaperman, mayor, publisher, explorer, author, promoter, manager, publicity man extraordinary, he was tall, good-looking, aggressively masculine, brilliantly informed, and he married some of the most charming women of his day. (GP’s four wives were Dorothy Binney, Amelia Earhart, Jean Marie Cosigny, and Margaret Haviland.) In appearance he was deceptive: he looked like an intellectual, a scholar, a college professor, perhaps because of the rimless glasses that he wore; yet he was very much the man of action, the man of constant activity in many fields at the same time.
“Lens louse,” photographers later dubbed him, as he managed to get into picture after picture with Amelia. He loved the limelight and as much publicity for himself as he could manage, yet he would do many charitable things for people which he would absolutely forbid them to mention. “The meanest,” some called him; others said, “The kindest.”