Daughter of the sky

by Jr. Paul L. Briand

It is a great pleasure to come here and share in your honoring of Mrs. Amelia Earhart Putnam. She has shown a splendid courage and skill in flying alone across the Atlantic Ocean.... She has been modest and good-humored.

All these things combine to place her in spirit with the great pioneering women to whom every generation of Americans has looked up, with admiration for their firmness of will, their strength of character, and their cheerful spirit of comradeship in the work of the world....

Her success has not been won by the selfish pursuit of a purely personal ambition, but as part of a career generously animated by a wish to help others to share in the rich opportunities of life, and by a wish also to enlarge those opportunities by expanding the powers of women as well as men to their ever-widening limits.

Mrs. Putnam has made all mankind her debtor by her demonstration of new possibilities of the human spirit and the human will in overcoming barriers of space and the restrictions of Nature upon the radius of human activity.

[The President turned to Amelia] The nation is proud that an American woman should be the first woman in history to fly an airplane alone across the Atlantic Ocean. As their spokesman [he moved to Amelia now standing beside him] I take pride and pleasure in conferring this rarely bestowed medal of the National Geographic Society upon Mrs. Amelia Earhart Putnam.

Amelia took her place behind the microphone. She spoke calmly in a low, well-modulated voice. “I think,” she said, reaffirming the position she had often taken, “that the appreciation for the deed is out of proportion to the deed itself.... I shall be happy if my small exploit has drawn attention to the fact that women, too, are flying.”

Later, at a less formal occasion, Mrs. Hoover added her personal opinion to what her husband had said in his prepared statement. “I often think,” the President’s wife said, “that if a girl was to fly across the Atlantic alone and so, in a sense, represent America before the world, how nice it is that it was such a person as Miss Earhart. She is poised, well bred, lovely to look at, and so intelligent and sincere.”

It was not until the Roosevelts came to Washington, however, that Amelia became a close friend of the White House. AE gave Eleanor Roosevelt her first experience in night flying, both women taking to the air in evening clothes. The first lady of the nation and the first lady of flight became fast friends. At one time Mrs. Roosevelt decided to take flying lessons from AE, and even went so far as to get her student pilot permit. But the President strenuously objected to the idea of his wife becoming a pilot, and the matter was finally dropped.

After her solo flight, Amelia could count enough awards and decorations to fill a display cabinet, but she cherished one above all. In tribute to her accomplishment the Congress of the United States presented her with the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Not content to rest on her Atlantic laurels, AE now turned to more challenges, some in the air and some on the ground. The Pacific Ocean, Mexico and its gulf, the transcontinental speed record: each in turn presented the unexpected in life that could indeed become the inevitable.