Free East to the Dawn by Susan Butler Page B

end of the day Amelia and Ginger and the others packed their belongings into their string bags and walked or biked home.
    Amelia was a good student, but bright as she was, her strong streak of independence did not go unremarked. In seventh grade she missed the arithmetic honors that were hers for the taking because, according to Headmistress Sarah Walton, “Amelia’s mind is brilliant, but she refuses to do the plodding necessary to win honor prizes. She deduces the correct answers to complex arithmetic problems, but hates to put down the steps by which she arrived at the results.” Sarah Walton also noted that prizes were not of great interest to Amelia—not the carrot they were for many children : that she listened to a different drummer. She did manage to receive one prize from the headmistress, though—a beautiful copy of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome.
    In the time-honored fashion of the day, girls didn’t play team sports. Their role was to cheer on the boys at the school basketball and baseball games by yelling the school chant:
    Rickety X
Co Ex
Co Ex
Bully for you
CPS
    It wasn’t enough for Amelia; she wanted more. She wanted to play basketball too, although being a realist, she probably didn’t expect to play at school, only on her own with her girl friends. To play, she needed to know the rules. If she had been a timid child, she would probably have asked her friend Balie Waggener. But no; she went to the top of the school world—to team captain Frank Baker, who was older and whom she barely knew. One day during basketball practice, she approached him. They had
never talked because she was so much younger and because boys hung out with boys and girls with girls; in approaching him, she was breaking custom. “We girls would like to play,” she threw out, which startled him, but he agreed to teach her how to hold a ball and shoot for the basket. Amelia thereupon taught Ginger Park and Lucy. This game, too, they played across the road in Charlie’s Park, where there was a single basketball hoop on the side of a barn—all their game required. (The boys at the school also played with just one hoop.) Under Amelia’s guidance, they also played a form of baseball they called One-O-Cat that required only three people—pitcher, catcher, and batter—each out for themselves—another game the boys played.
    Her activist nature is perfectly caught in two photos in Lucy’s 1911 photograph album. In one picture Amelia and three friends—Katherine Dolan (referred to as Dolan), Lucy (Toot), Virginia Park (Ging) are lying on their stomachs, their chins cupped in their hands, staring at the camera either before or after a basketball game; it is Amelia who is holding the ball. In another photo Amelia is standing with her Challiss cousins—but the photo is being taken from too far away, she notices: Amelia’s arm is stretched out toward the camera; she is beckoning the photographer to come closer.
    On cold winter days, when ice floes ten inches thick bubbled on the river and the land was covered with snow, the children—cousins, school friends—would meet at the top of the North Second Street hill with their sleds and coast down to the bottom in waves, the boys lying face-down on their models, the girl sitting upright on theirs. Amelia had a boys’ sled, one of her prize possessions, a gift from her father, and she was the only girl who could lie down while coasting down the hill. She credited it with saving her life, recounting that once, zipping down an icy hill, she found herself heading straight for a junkman’s cart and horse. The junkman didn’t hear her yells so, unable to stop, she aimed for the space between the horse’s front and back legs. Head down, she made it. Other winter days, they all went ice skating on the pond at Jackson Park.
    When Muriel was in Atchison, she played with Ann and Katch. She had a bit of a