Amelia Earhart

by Tanya Lee Stone

Amelia Earhart was an author, a record-breaking, thrill-seeking pilot, a committed social worker, feminist, wife, and a trailblazer. She epitomizes the phrase, “What a woman!”

The biography “Amelia Earhart” includes small photographs on most pages with short captions for many of the photographs. Timelines and historical sidebars are in each chapter as well. These really help to follow Ms. Earhart’s story more clearly. If you read this biography, you will find that Ms. Earhart was working as a social worker, learning to fly, and getting married all at the same time. Amelia Earhart was the type of person to be involved in quite a few activities simultaneously so the pictures, timelines, and sidebars help keep the chronologically of her story straight.

Even though I have always admired the courage of Amelia Earhart’s flying adventures, I was surprised to find that she was also the author of two books. When in the world did she have time? “20 Hours and 40 Minutes” is the name of her first book, which chronicles her flight aboard the ‘Friendship’. The ‘Friendship’ is the name of the plane in which Amelia Earhart made her first flight over the Atlantic Ocean. She was the first woman to fly over the Atlantic Ocean, but she was a passenger not the pilot. Her second book, written in 1932, was titled “The Fun of It: Random Records of my Own Flying and Women in Aviation”. This book is a collection of short stories about her and other women pilots.

Amelia Earhart was not wealthy, and she actually hard to work for a living unlike many of the other pilots. Earhart earned some money from flying in air shows doing dangerous stunts with other women pilots. She earned small amounts of money from the sale of her books and wrote articles for “Cosmopolitan” magazine. The bulk of her income came from working at Denison House, a settlement house for impoverished, immigrant families, in Boston as a social worker.

Flying has always been an expensive hobby. Amelia Earhart could not afford to purchase airplanes, flight training time, staff, and other expenses on her own. Several wealthy patrons and business people paid her expenses and bought planes for Ms. Earhart to fly, and she in turn gave public appearances for them and hawked their products. One of the photos shows the words ‘Beech-Nut’ written across the entire length of her plane.

Eventually she married G.P. Putnam. Putnan was wealthy and financed Earhart’s later record-breaking flights including the last flight. Amelia Earhart disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean about twenty hours into the flight off Lae. Lae is a small town on an island east of Australia. Looking at a map, shows that Earhart could have been very close to Hawaii at the time her plane disappeared; however, the truth of what happened isn’t known.

I read this biography in one sitting because the story is engrossing. I have always admired Amelia Earhart and dreamed of being like her when I grew up. What a woman!
Lesson Plans are found at:
http://teacherlink.ed.usu.edu/tlresources/units/Byrnes-famous/Earhart.html