2.Girlhood in Kansas
Grandfather Otis stood in front of the fireplace in the long living room of his home. He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked back and forth, his black, square-toed, handmade shoes squeaking on the hard wood floor. He was a big, thick-chested man, and even in retirement he was still every inch the judge he had been before his two granddaughters were born.
His wife Amelia sat in the rocking chair, darning a black knee stocking. The chair creaked as it rocked, keeping involuntary time with the heel-and-toe swaying of the thick black shoes.
Two little girls, their daughter Amy’s only children, sat on the stiff horsehair sofa and exchanged knowing looks. The older girl, Amelia, who was named after her grandmother, bent over and whispered into her sister Muriel’s ear. “A squeaking good time!” They giggled. They wished they had shoes that squeaked, too.
The girls loved their grandfather because he often entertained them with stories about his early days in Kansas. Judge Otis hadbeen one of the first settlers of Atchison. Shortly after the Civil War, when he graduated from the University of Michigan, he came by overland stage from Kalamazoo to Chicago, took a flatboat to St. Louis, then went up the Missouri River and debarked at Atchison to make his home. He built a large two-story brick-and-frame house on a site overlooking the river, and added a big barn and woodshed. The work completed, he sent for his bride, who had been staying with her Quaker family in Philadelphia.
Amelia Otis found the country nearly savage. The railroad tracks going into Atchison were lined with buffalo bones, and the so-called “friendly” Indians scared her half to death. They were too friendly. Whenever she went shopping in town, the curious Indians fingered her dress and poked into her shopping basket. Grandfather Otis chuckled when he told this story about his wife, for she would always remind him that she had preferred the civilization of Philadelphia and the society of Friends.
The Earhart girls enjoyed their grandfather but he never replaced their father, who, it seemed, was always away on a business trip. One of Amelia’s earliest memories of her childhood was waiting for her father to come home for the weekend, to see what presents he would bring and, best of all, to play with him during the day and to listen to his stories at night. He had bought them a baseball and bat and also a basketball, and had shown them how to play with them, despite the protests of some of the neighborhood mothers.
At bedtime for the girls, instead of sending them upstairs to their room, he would sit in the straight-backed chair by the fireplace, cross the long legs of his slender frame, and tell them stories of his family and boyhood.
Edwin S. Earhart had been born a few miles from Atchison, the youngest of twelve children. His father David and his mother Mary had labored many long hours on the tough Kansas sod, only to encounter crop failure, drought, dust storms, and grasshopper plagues. David Earhart had been a missionary ministerfor the Lutheran Church, and though he had traveled sometimes sixty miles to preach a sermon, his congregation had never numbered more than twenty. During the great drought of 1860 his family would have starved if David had not received two gifts of money, totaling $250. Thereafter, to insure some income, however small, David became a schoolteacher. Eventually he was named as one of the regents of the state college at Lawrence. Certainly the greatest figure in the Earhart family was David’s uncle, John Earhart, who had been a private in General Washington’s army and was killed in the battle of Germantown. All twelve children were proud of Uncle John, a hero.
Edwin Earhart received his law degree from the University of Kansas in 1895 and the same year married Amy Otis. He worked for the railroad as a claims agent and his job kept him from home and family for days, often weeks, at a time. Grandfather Otis, then a judge of the district court, had often advised his son-in-law to open up a law office in Atchison, but Edwin was stubborn. He liked the claims work and he liked to travel.
Amelia M. Earhart was born July 24, 1898, at the Otis home in Atchison, where her parents were living at the time. Since her father’s job with the railroad kept him moving from place to place as he settled claims or went to Topeka to plead a case before the Supreme Court, and her mother often accompanied him on the longer trips to Iowa and Illinois, Amelia and her sister Muriel spent most of their childhood living with the Otises.
As a child, Amelia was an irrepressible tomboy. “I was a horrid little girl,” she said about staying with her grandparents, “and I do not see how they put up with me, even part time.” A harsh judgment upon herself, but she did cause her mother and grandmother many moments of fret and anxiety about her unorthodox behavior.