19.Purdue University
“You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein had said to Ernest Hemingway about him and the group of disillusioned postwar expatriates who lived in Paris. Hemingway had quoted her inThe Sun Also Rises, published in 1926. The phrase “lost generation” became a touchstone of the times; in the early thirties it still persisted, but now included in one wide sweep all who were the young, the troublesome, the enigmatic.
In 1934 the New YorkHerald Tribuneheld its annual conference; the topic: “Women and the Changing World.” Amelia Earhart was a guest speaker. In the audience was Dr. Edward C. Elliott, president of Purdue University. Up on the platform Mrs. William Brown Meloney rose to introduce the famous woman flier.
“I present to you,” Mrs. Meloney said, turning to AE, “evidence against a ‘lost generation.’ For I remind you that no generation which could produce Amelia Earhart can be called a lost generation. She has set a pace for those of her age and time. She has never been content to rest on her laurels. She has worked, and is working, and will continue to work hard to further the science to which she has dedicated her life.”
Amelia, thirty-six years old and born in the same year as Ernest Hemingway, sat uneasily as she listened to the introduction. She had been asked to discuss youth. Although she did not consider herself a member of the younger generation, she certainly did not consider it lost. She got up from her chair and walked to the speaker’s stand. Her voice was low and confident. The speech was short and to the point.
“It is true,” she said, after making the usual introductory salutations, “that there are no more geographical frontiers to pushback, no new lands flowing with milk and honey this side of the moon to promise surcease from man-made ills. But there are economic, political, scientific, and artistic frontiers of the most exciting sort awaiting faith and the spirit of adventure to discover them.”
She brushed her hair back with a quick sweep of the hand. “Probably no field,” she continued, now with more animation, “offers greater lure for young people—explorers—than aviation. It has the color and movement of flying to kindle the imagination, and its growing importance as an industry is tempting to those who plan serious careers in transportation, for aviation is simply the newest form of transportation—the climax of the human pageant of human progress from oxcart to airplane....”
She listed some of the problems in aviation that had to be solved, and admitted that there were no easy solutions. “For,” she then explained, “the economic structure we have built up is all too often a barrier between the world’s work and the workers. If the younger generation finds the hurdle too absurdly high, I hope it will not hesitate to tear it down and substitute a social order in which the desire to work and earn carries with it the opportunity to do so.”
She narrowed to a conclusion. “The ancients, such as I am,” she said, as she drove home a burning conviction, “should be listening to young ideas, rather than pointing up opportunities in a world”—she paused for a quick breath—“which has the elders decidedly on the run.”
President Elliott of Purdue nodded in agreement. Such a woman, he decided, who believed in young people, belonged on a college faculty.
A few days later Dr. Elliott joined the Putnams for dinner at GP’s favorite restaurant in New York, the Coffee House Club. GP and AE sat with their guest at a little table on the second floor. The room was cozy. The men talked.
Amelia glanced at the familiar surroundings, and was gladthat her husband had taken her to such a place. As if clearing the area before making a turn in the Vega, she directed her eyes across the books and paintings along the wall, the piano in front of the little stage, the Fish drawings and Chappell cartoons along the other wall.
George looked at his wife. She seemed particularly lovely to him that evening. Her long bangs, neatly combed over the high forehead; the clear blue-gray eyes, forever hiding a mystery; the sensuous lips and the wide mouth; the strong jaw; the long, lovely hands: on such a night as this he could propose to her all over again.
After dinner they walked casually out of the room toward a couch against the far wall. Dr. Elliott pulled up a chair; AE and GP sat on the couch. Amelia leaned to one side, held her skirt, and tucked her feet up and under her.
President Elliott looked at the bulletin board above the couch, then at the slight figure of Amelia. He caught her eye, then told her how much he had enjoyed her speech at theTribuneconference. Young people, he explained, were his business and he could never find enough of the professionally trained to motivate and inspire his students.
“Amelia,” he said, smiling, “we would like to have you at Purdue.”
AE thought a moment. “I’d like that,” she said, knowing nevertheless that she had no degrees to qualify for such an assignment. “But what do you think I could do?”
Dr. Elliott’s eyes brightened and crinkled at the corners. “We have about six thousand students. Eight hundred of them are girls. We don’t think the girls are keeping abreast of the opportunities of the day nearly as well as they might be.”
Amelia warmed to the possibilities. “And I...?” She began a question.
“You could supply the spark they need,” he answered. “Something from outside the classroom.”
For two hours they continued to discuss the idea. By the time President Elliott had been taken to Grand Central for a midnight train, the project had assumed a definite shape. For one month during the academic year Amelia would deliver lectures, act as a counselor to the girls, and advise the department of aeronautics. AE liked the challenge. Purdue at the time was the only university in the country that had its own airport.
On June 2, 1935, after the Pacific and Mexico flights, President Elliott formally appointed Amelia Earhart to the faculty of Purdue University. “Miss Earhart,” he announced, “represents better than any other young woman of this generation the spirit and courageous skill of what may be called the new pioneering. At no point in our educational system is there greater need for pioneering and constructive planning than in education for women. The university believes Amelia Earhart will help us to see and to attack successfully many unsolved problems.”
Amelia was heartened by the announcement. Not satisfied with the record flights of the spring, she now tested the high-speed capabilities of her plane. In July she set the transcontinental speed record for women, by flying from Los Angeles to Newark in seventeen hours, seventeen minutes, and thirty seconds.
In November, AE was the “flying professor” of the Lafayette, Indiana, campus. With the students, male and female, she was easy, casual. Dressed in slacks at a conference, she would swing her legs up on a desk or table and chat. She invariably preferred an atmosphere of informality.
She lived in one of the women’s dormitories at Purdue, and kept her door open for any of the girls who wanted to drop in for a visit. In the dining hall she had a different group sit at her table for every meal.
Amelia soon declared herself as the empiricist and pragmatist which she was. Learn by doing and have fun at it had guided her every step through life. At one of her first lectures she explained why she came to Purdue. It was her kind of school—atechnical school where all instruction had its practical side. Education, she felt, had failed to discover individual aptitude soon enough. If a child’s bent could be determined early, much study and work in the wrong direction could be avoided.
“We have watched the colleges,” she said, “produce countless graduates who could only demand jobs for which, notwithstanding the adequacy of their formal education, they might be totally unprepared or unfitted, and in which they were often even just plain not interested.
“It’s a fundamental problem, and I can imagine that reform may involve the entire reconstruction of our educational system. Because Johnnie liked to play with tin soldiers, his mother has jumped to the conclusion, since the year one, that he wanted to be a soldier! So she packed him off to military school—which he hated—though maybe she never found it out—all because what really interested him about tin soldiers was that they were made of lead, and lead is metal, and you heat metal and melt it and make it into lots of things—steel for skyscrapers, decorative ironwork, leading for stained-glass windows....”
Although she would have liked to, AE soon discovered that it would be impossible to interview all 800 women students. She therefore sent out a questionnaire to them. In answer to one question she learned that 92 per cent of the coeds wanted to go into useful employment after graduation.
She would assemble the girls in large groups and talk to them.
“After all,” she said to them, drawing from her own experience, “times are changing and women need the critical stimulus of competition outside the home. A girl must nowadays believe completely in herself as an individual. She must realize at the outset that a woman must do the same job better than a man to get as much credit for it. She must be aware of the various discriminations, both legal and traditional, against women in the business world.
“I cannot tell you that you will be able to bounce right outof college into your life work. I believe, under existing conditions, that it is almost impossible to do. But I believe also that it doesn’t greatly matter, for the business world will draw out one’s aptitudes.
“Probably no sure way has yet been discovered for women—or men either—to know before they reach the age of sixty-five if they have done right by their lives; and even then I believe they can’t be exactly sure that something else they could have chosen would not have made their lives richer.
“Probably people of outstanding talent—like Lily Pons, for instance—couldn’t do anything but follow their natural bent. Such people must know they’re in the right profession. The rest of us, I fear, can never know for certain until we can take a backward look in old age, for we must have a background of experience against which to make comparisons. So our vocational starts are somewhat conditioned. But not fatally, surely. Of course if men and women are very unhappy in their work, they are entitled to a pretty good opinion that they are in the wrong work. Yet if they are happy in it—I don’t believe it means, necessarily, that they couldn’t be happier.
“And so I’m inclined to say that, if you want to try a certain job, try it. Then if you find something on the morrow that looks better, make a change. And if you should find that you are the first women to feel an urge in that direction—what does it matter? Feel it and act on it just the same. It may turn out to be fun. And to me fun is the indispensable part of work.”
Aptitude, trial and error, practicality, fun: such were the tenets of her proclaimed philosophy for living. For the girl who initially had accidentally become a heroine of flight, then had to prove it to herself, and for the rest of her life to the world who acclaimed her, it was the only possible philosophy.
Although she forgot to mention it, there was in her life, in addition to the necessity of fun for work, much work in her fun. And despite the fact that her practical self would neveradmit it, she was also a romantic and a visionary. Like the skylark and the nightingale of Shelley and Keats, she was a blithe spirit and a light-winged dryad, who soared on the wind and pranked the starlight sky. Without her dreams she could not live in the wide-awake world.
Like Henry David Thoreau, the famed mystic of Walden Pond, she could say:
I hear beyond the range of sound,I see beyond the range of sight,New earth and skies and seas around.
I hear beyond the range of sound,I see beyond the range of sight,New earth and skies and seas around.
I hear beyond the range of sound,I see beyond the range of sight,New earth and skies and seas around.
I hear beyond the range of sound,
I see beyond the range of sight,
New earth and skies and seas around.
There was fitful restlessness in the way Amelia had skipped from job to job and interest to interest on the ground, the ground in which her soaring ambition could never take root. It was only in the air that she found the repose and the leisure to probe the depths of her own soul, to come to a sustaining knowledge of herself.
Dr. Elliott was pleased with her work. So was the Purdue Research Foundation, which set up an Amelia Earhart Fund for the purchase of a plane that she could use experimentally at her own discretion.
AE, despite a deep interest in the engineering and mechanical aspects of flight, wanted to study the human elements involved—“the effects of flying on people.” She had named herself as the first guinea pig.
Early in 1936 enough funds were declared available for her to make her choice of airplanes. Amelia picked a new twin-engined ten-passenger Lockheed Electra transport plane. It was what she had wanted for a long time: a bigger, safer airplane.
Amelia now announced to GP that she planned to fly around the world at the equator. It was something no man had done, not even Lindbergh.
Like the matador of many victories who pits his ability against the bull by getting closer and closer to the horns and making more and more difficult passes, or the mountain climber who hasproven himself the victor over the tallest peaks and has yet to climb Everest, so Amelia, who had triumphed over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and the North American continent, now would set out to conquer the one remaining adversary to her skill and courage—the world.