Free Amelia by Nancy Nahra Page A

with so much in common, Mrs. Roosevelt and Earhart remained friends. Earhart recognized her advantages over others who might have had designs on the same prize. It helped that Vidal was a West Point graduate, an athlete, and the son-in-law of a United States senator – for the time being.
    Even while promoting her new book, lecturing all across America, working to gain contacts who could help promote aviation, and opening new opportunities for women, Earhart still found time to set speed records for flying and to break one she had just recently set. In 1932, the same year she flew across the Atlantic, she set a new women’s record for crossing the United States: nineteen hours and four minutes. (Women’s records, as a category, were created because women weren’t allowed to compete with men.) The following year, Earhart flew west to east across the United States and, with the wind behind her, broke her own record, this time making the trip in seventeen hours, seven minutes, and thirty seconds.
Postmaster Delivers Airmail
    Earhart’s transatlantic flights, just like Lindbergh’s, had been intended to help persuade the public and the government that airmail service was a reasonable and profitable endeavor. But that required support from Washington. Amelia and her colleagues at NYPWA found out what that battle meant by losing it.
    The decision about which airline or airlines got federal contracts belonged to the Postmaster General Walter F. Brown. Leaders at NYPWA, including Earhart, while priding themselves as turning a profit when no other airline had, also knew that they needed the air-mail contract – if their company was to survive. But Brown, who avoided competitive bids or shared contracts, decided to give the contract to Eastern airlines. That infusion of government support put Eastern solidly on its feet and guaranteed that NYPWA’s days were numbered. Eastern acquired it in February 1933.
A Little Help from Her Friends
    Now Earhart looked for ways to give other people, especially women, the means to develop their talents. Her friend Eleanor Roosevelt shared many of Earhart’s beliefs, and did what she could to help.
    In September 1934, a conference at the Waldorf Astoria brought together professionals from a disparate set of disciplines. The naïve sounding title, the annual Conference on Current Problems, provided an umbrella that the participants understood. Each attendee dealt with some aspect of the largest problem that confronted American leaders and citizens in 1934: unemployment.
    Those attending included the United States Secretary of Labor, law enforcement officials, authors such as Pearl Buck , literary critics such as Clifton Fadiman , artists, several college presidents, secretary of the National Committee on Prisons, and Amelia Earhart.
The Past in Ashes
    In many ways Earhart kept finding encouragement to focus on the future. Looking back at her own past became difficult after she lost some treasured memorabilia. Late in 1934, a fire at their home in Rye, New York destroyed some of Earhart’s girlhood souvenirs, including poems she had written and photographs from Kansas. Now more than ever she needed to keep her eyes ahead of her, ahead and above.
    Speed records, altitude records - she saw fewer all the time. And now there were more and more women pilots. New challenges lay farther from home. Early in 1935, Earhart became the first woman to fly solo from Honolulu to Oakland, California. Having flown the Atlantic, she now had her eye set on the Pacific.

 
    Amelia Earhart, so cheerful and usually uncritical, now felt confident enough to speak her mind to the press. The headline introducing a story in The New York Times on January 13, 1935, read, “Amelia’s Own Story of Her Flight Over Pacific: Her Greatest Hazard Was Adverse Criticism Before the Start – Never Experienced Any Nervousness - Weather Not ‘Really Bad.’”
    The newspaper of record dreamed up the headline,