Amelia Earhart's Life Being Made into Movie
Finding Kansas’ Missing Record Setting Woman Pilot through History
Sep 12, 2009
Born on July 24, 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, Amelia Earhart was a woman who exercised great courage from the start. As noted at the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum, the aviator spent her growing up days in Atchison, Kansas City and Des Moines, Iowa.
Amelia Earhart as a Restless Soul
A born traveler, after she graduated from Hyde Park High School, Amelia enrolled at Ogontz School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was 19 years old. She stayed at Ogontz for two years then she left the girls’ finishing school and traveled to Toronto, Canada. While in Canada, she stayed with her sister, Muriel, and later enrolled in a Red Cross First Aid Course.
Staying put was not Amelia’s strong suit. Before she left Canada, she worked as a nurse’s aide at the Spadina Military Hospital, the original location for Toronto’s Knox College. After she finished her work at the hospital, the legendary pilot traveled to New York and attended Columbia University. Her academic focus remained in the medical field at this point in her young life.
The next move Amelia Earhart would take would bring her to California, the place where she began to learn to fly aircraft. She was 25 years old when she purchased her first airplane with financial help from her sister and mother. Although Amelia enjoyed flying, she didn’t begin her long record setting solo flights until after she met her husband, George Palmer Putnam, an American book publisher.
Life as Wife and Partner to Book Publisher George Putnam
George was already familiar with aviation. He published Charles Lindbergh’s autobiography We before he met Amelia. The aviator would become the second of four women who George would wed throughout his lifetime. She is also the woman George Putnam is most famously known for having been married to.
Years later George would publish two books Amelia authored titled The Fun of It and Last Flight. According to the Amelia Earhart official website and the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum, the couple had a rewarding union that was a balanced partnership.
It was George who dispatched an airline cutter from Hawaii to help find his wife after her plane went down. Despite his efforts, the search did not locate Amelia. He had his beloved aviator wife declared dead on January 5, 1939 after she had been missing for nearly two years. He went on to pen her biography Soaring Wings.
Records Setting Flights Made by Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart reached several great milestones in her life. She was the first person to from Hawaii to the mainland. No other aviator had flown the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on their own prior to Amelia’s 1935 flight from the Hawaiian islands on January 11, 1935 and her flight across the Atlantic three years earlier in May 1932.
Throughout her career Amelia would set flight speed records on June 25, 1930 for a 100 kilometers route with no load and her July 5, 1930 record for reaching a speed of 181 miles per hour during a 3K flight. She set the woman’s autogiro altitude when she flew her aircraft to a height of 18,415 feet.
Amelia Earhart’s Last Known Flight
On June 1, 1937 Amelia Earhart took off on her first global flight. She would become the first person to fly from the Red Sea to India. By July 2 she had completed 22,000 miles of the trip when her aircraft disappeared en route to the Howland Island.
The only other person onboard the aircraft was her navigator, Frederick Noonan. Amelia radioed her last known recorded messages early on the morning of July 2. One of the those messages was, “200 miles out.” The pilot would not be seen or heard from again.
Fans, historians and theatre goers will get to see Amelia Earhart brought to life on the silver screen when Hillary Swank and Richard Gere portray the legendary aviator and her husband, George Putnam, in the movie Amelia.
Undoubtedly the pilot’s courage, tenacity, sense or adventure and curiosity with life will be displayed during the upcoming film that is being shot in Toronto, Canada. And rightly so, for as Amelia Earhart herself said and as quoted at the Amelia Earhart Official Website, “Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things.”
Sources:
Amelia Earhart Official Website. 12 September 2009.
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