6.Premed at Columbia
Amelia studied hard and long at Columbia. She had enrolled in the fall of 1919, when she was twenty-one, as a premedical student. After having been a nurses aide in Toronto during the war, she decided to try medicine as a possible profession. She took all the courses ending in “ology,” and chemistry and physics; and she treated herself to a luxury course in French literature.
Marian Stabler, a close friend at the time, was amazed at the number of credit hours that AE was carrying. “This course she was taking,” Miss Stabler writes, “was really a three-man job, with the full quota at Barnard, and listening courses elsewhere. Apparently Columbia and Barnard didn’t compare notes, as she wouldn’t have been permitted to carry a load like that if anyone had known. She could only manage it because there was little homework or preparation in the science courses.”
But Amelia found time to give free rein to her exploratory nature. As she had adventured into the caves along the shores of the Missouri River below the Otis house, so now she had to investigate every nook of the underground passageways at Columbia. She would go down the steps to the basement of Hamilton Hall, enter through a heavy door, follow the maze of steam pipes wherever they led, and, happily surprised, come out at Schermerhorn Hall on the other side of the campus.
One Thursday evening at about eight o’clock in the summer of 1920 Amelia, seeking unusual diversion on the one night off she allowed herself during the week, decided to climb to the top of the Columbia library dome. Somehow she had managed to borrow the key that would admit her up the winding stairs.
Impatient to be off, she ran up the long, wide steps in front of Low Library. She brushed past the bronze statue of Alma Mater and puffed up more steps to the library door.
Once inside, she walked past the check-out desk and around to the northwest flight of stairs. She climbed the steps to the fourth floor, and came out on one side of the rotunda. There before her on the north parapet were the more than life-size statues of Euripides, Demosthenes, Sophocles, and Augustus Caesar. She turned to the door and unlocked it.
She took the steps of the spiral staircase two at a time. She pushed open the door and entered onto the narrow walkway at the base of the dome. Gripping the railing that went around the top, she took a deep breath. The view was marvelous, but not so good as it could be at the very top. She now crawled on her hands and knees up the smooth rounded arches to the peak.
Sitting there and looking out over the city which was veiled in the half light of dusk, she felt a warm excitement spread through her body; then suddenly coupled to the warmth, as she caught sight of Alma Mater far below, a quick chill pierced the base of her spine. She grinned: this same mixture of feelings had gripped her before. She had them as a girl when she first tried the roller coaster and when she had coasted down the hill on the belly whopper and nearly hit the junkman’s horse. And in Toronto, when she thrilled to the sight of the pilots taking off in the snow and was suddenly seized with fear. It was a question of which feeling would overcome the other.
As before, she waited for the warmth to overtake the chill; then calmly she drank in the view of New York at night as lights turned on against the enveloping darkness. To the left on Amsterdam Avenue was an angel perched against the sky on the highestpoint of the cathedral of St. John the Divine. Trumpet raised, the angel sounded a flourish of unheard celestial music to unhearing earthly ears below.
To the right, Broadway stretched downtown into the night as far as she could see. She swung around on the peak and looked up the Hudson to the dock at 125th Street. The ferry was on its way across to New Jersey.
The ferry made her think of Sundays when she liked to ride across the river and go for hikes along the Palisades. It was as much fun as Atchison had been. Now Atchison was all over. Grandfather and Grandmother Otis had died and the property had been sold. Amelia’s father and mother were now living in California; they had been urging her to come out there so they could be together. Mr. Earhart had left the railroad and gone into private practice, first in Kansas where he was eventually raised to a judgeship, and now in Los Angeles where with a partner he had opened a law office. “Dear Parallelepipedon,” her father’s last letter had begun. Perhaps the big word for a solid of six sides was both a description and a prediction. In later life she looked on herself as having been successively student, nurse, teacher, social worker, clothes designer, and ultimately flier.
She would like to see California, she mused. Columbia had been interesting, but she didn’t feel that she really wanted to be a doctor, after all. She had liked the courses as such, and the lab work. And she had enjoyed feeding orange juice to the white mice and dissecting the cockroaches. But visions of the practical application of medicine, the actual dressing of wounds and the sewing of stitches, sickened her.
For a few more minutes she sat on the top of the dome and breathed deeply of the clear night air. Then she slid down to the walkway, opened the door, and clattered down the metal spiral staircase.
Back outside, she stopped at the statue of Alma Mater and for no reason climbed into her lap. That it was an irrational thing to do, she readily admitted, but she liked to do silly things oncein a while. She decided to walk for a few blocks down Broadway. She turned the corner at 116th Street. Campus couples were walking arm in arm up Broadway and down the side streets to Riverside Drive. She walked in long, even strides, moving with the easy, unconscious grace of the natural athlete.
“The girl in brown who walks alone.” She remembered the inscription under her picture in the high-school yearbook. She had cried over it when she had shown it to her mother; the tag line had been unkind but true.
She blinked her eyes quickly at the memory. She could not be like those other girls who clung to boys as if they were gods or something. It was worth it to be different and go it alone and do what one wanted to do.