Free Amelia Earhart by Doris L. Rich

become both Kinner’s sales representative atDennison Airport and one of its stockholders. She accepted both offers and somehow scraped up the money for a few shares of stock.
    In a newspaper report on the airport’s official opening, July 2, 1927, Amelia is described as a director of Dennison Corporation, the only woman on the flying staff, as well as a social worker at Denison Houseand professor of English in the State Extension Service (she continued to teach until her full-time employment at Denison House). A few days before the opening Amelia wrote to Marian Stabler: “Though I haven’t a real job for the summer [Marion Perkins did not hire her on a full-time basis until October] I am kept pretty busy doing things for Denison House and Dennison Airport. I am having a great time selecting hangings and furniture for the main hangar.”
    The quiet, reserved woman Bert Kinner had picked to demonstrate his plane became an articulate, persuasive salesperson at the airport. Kinner flew there from Los Angeles the first week in September in a new plane he had just built, one with five cylinders. * He left the plane at Dennison with Amelia as his demonstrator-sales representative.
    Bert was still having trouble with cylinders, one of which broke down during Amelia’s first demonstration. She wrote to him suggesting that he send some heavier ones for replacements and told him that a Boston man wanted to take the plane to New York to someone who could develop a
good
motor for it. She added: “May I report that you will make fittings that can’t be criticized aerodynamically on the next ship? If you do I think the game is almost won.”
    On the same day Amelia wrote a secondletter toRuth Nichols, a woman flyer she had never met. A Wellesley graduate, Nichols was a member of the Junior League who played golf, tennis, hockey, and polo, and had driven automobiles, speed boats, and motorcycles. She had received her FAI license a year after Amelia and was later referred to by polar explorer Richard E. Byrd, along with Amelia, as one of the two who stood out among “a handful of women who shared in the hardships and perils of aviation pioneering.”
    After introducing herself as a fellow FAI licensee, Amelia wrote, “What do you think of the advisability of forming an organization composed of women who fly?” There followed a list of questions as to who might be eligible before she closed: “Personally, I am a social worker who flies for sport, and am on the board of directors of an aeronautical concern. I cannot claim to be a feminist, but do rather enjoy seeing women tackling all kinds of new problems—new for them, that is.”
    Amelia undoubtedly refused to “claim to be a feminist” because theterm was perjorative to the majority of Americans who thought of feminists as marching, shouting eccentrics who were frequently chained to fences or jailed by police. Perhaps the word suggested to Amelia an unattractive woman who did not like men. Although male aviators often regarded their female counterparts as lightweights in the profession, the women were aviators nonetheless, partners in a camaraderie that Muriel thought remarkable atKinner Field. Without the men who built airplanes, Amelia could not pursue the “sport” of flying.
    Pursue it she did, signing a contract for more lessons at twenty dollars an hour with Dennison Aviation Corporation on October 15, 1927. Notations on the contract show that she paid one hundred seventy-five dollars and logged four and two-thirds hours at unspecified dates. The remaining three hours due her are not accounted for. She had already written Kinner, asking him to estimate her total flying time in California, but seemed to do no better at keeping records of it in Boston.
    In November she wrote Kinner again. There were potential buyers for his plane but she could not sell it until the motor had passed government tests. Meanwhile she worried about unscrupulous competitors: “What is to