Free Amelia Earhart by Doris L. Rich Page A

prevent anyone’s taking the dimensions of the Airster and constructing a ship from them and marketing that ship?… I wonder if you are safe in letting your product out here in the east unless you have a very strong organization to protect it?”
    Amelia had planned to go to California that summer to learn more about Kinner’s new motor but her work with him was cut short by a telephone call in April. The caller was Capt. Hilton H. Railey, ex-Army pilot and public relations man. He wanted to know if she would fly the Atlantic. She suspected a publicity stunt, a followup on the solo flight ofCharles A. Lindbergh less than a year before, but she agreed to aninterview with Railey in his Boston office. She had to. If his offer was legitimate she—Amelia Earhart—would be the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane.
    Lindbergh’s flight on May 20, 1927, had made him the most famous man in the world. There were four other crossings later that summer—Clarence Chamberlin and passenger Charles Levine from New York to Berlin; Commander Byrd, Bert Acosta, Bernt Balchen, and George Noville from New York to France; Edward Schlee and William Brock from Newfoundland to London; F. de Pinedo with del Prete and Zachetti from New Foundland to Portugal. None could challenge Lindbergh asAmerica’s favorite hero who had just performed “the greatest feat of a solitary man in the records of the human race.” The handsome, modest, twenty-five-year-old, ex-airmail pilot was the personification of an American dream. “Romance, chivalry, and self-dedication—here they were,” author Frederick Lewis Allen wrote, “with the machinery of ballyhoo … ready and waiting to lift him up where everyone could see him.”
    A master of that machinery of ballyhoo was George Palmer Putnam, grandson of the founder of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, publishers. It was Putnam who urged the new hero to write a postflight book,
We
, published by Putnam’s Sons. It was Putnam who instigated Railey’s call to Amelia Earhart. Putnam, who had also published Richard Byrd’s polar story,
Skyward
, heard that Byrd had sold his Fokker trimotor plane to an Englishwoman who wanted to cross theAtlantic in it. The person who knew her identity was said to be a lawyer, David T. Layman.
    Putnam went to Layman, who told him the buyer was a client,Amy Phipps Guest, heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune and wife of the former British Air Minister, Frederick E. Guest. Putnam then asked Railey to check on the plane, which was at the East Boston Airport. If the story was true, he told Railey, they might “crash the gate” and manage the flight of the first woman to cross the Atlantic by plane.
    Both men soon learned that Mrs. Guest’s family had refused to let her make the flight and that she had decided she wanted another woman to try, provided her substitute were “the right sort of girl.” Layman entrusted Putnam and Railey to find him one, a woman who was a flier (which Mrs. Guest was not), well educated, with a pleasing appearance and manners acceptable to the English as well as to the less demanding American public.
    Railey asked a friend, Rear Adm. Reginald K. Belknap, if he knew of anyone who might qualify. Belknap did. “A thoroughly fine person,” he said, whom he had seen at lectures sponsored by the Boston NAA. “I noticed her,” he told Railey, “because she was always there and seemed so much in earnest.… She said she had been flying about four years then and was still doing a little at Dennison Airport.” Her name, he said, was Amelia Earhart.
    From the moment Amelia walked into his office Railey knew she was “the right sort of girl.” “Her resemblance to Colonel Lindbergh wasextraordinary. Most of all I was impressed by the poise of her boyish figure. Mrs. Guest had stipulated the person to whom she would yield must be ‘representative’ of American women. In Amelia Earhart I saw not only their norm but their sublimation.”
    Although