Amelia Earhart's Last Landing

In a postcard I have pinned to the wallboard above my Olympia typewriter, ten young women line up, linking arms, between the twin engines of a gleaming airplane. It is a Lockheed Electra, Model 10, and they are smiling, their expressions almost giddy with the moment. The photographer apparently has directed the two girls at the ends of the line to reach up and grasp one of the propellers of the plane's two Pratt and Whitney engines. The pose lends a symmetry and frames the shot; they could be reaching to caress the family dog. But this affected casualness is challenged by the girl on the right; she's on the short side, and the reach strains her and has awkwardly pulled aside her tightly buttoned suit jacket.

Sitting high above these young women on the nose of the plane is Amelia Earhart.

The brief information on the back of the card only identifies the aviatrix (the term employed then) and gives her dates (1898-1937) as it describes the enthusiastic crew beneath her as "young women ferry pilots." The light reflected from the aluminum-clad fuselage and wings of the plane illuminates Earhart's face as if a spotlight has been focused on her, a kind of spectral display to mark this last year of her life. She looks pleased, perhaps delighted by this gathering of young women beneath her who seem eager to fly after her into fame and adventure. The photo also presents a commentary of the time, as an automobile has been parked beneath the plane's right wing, and its blunt radiator contrasts with the sleek nacelle of the plane's engine. Efficient and very modern, the gleaming future shelters the old-fashioned fabrication.

The future for women then was limited—not much to aspire to beyond motherhood and being a homemaker. Maybe with typing skills, a secretary could sometimes take a seat at a business meeting—and Hollywood was a beacon on the western horizon; but records were being made in the sky by women like the one perched on the Electra. Earhart had already set an altitude mark in a plane with only a sixty-horsepower engine, and in 1932 she flew across the Atlantic solo, only four years after Lindberg. By the time of this photo she had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and had slept several times in her new leather jacket to give it that crumpled look affected by male pilots, some of them aces from World War I.

When Purdue University invited her to join its faculty in 1935 as a women's career counselor, the appointment seemed just right; it fit her, for Purdue boasted of being the first university to have its own airfield. It's very possible the picture on the postcard was taken at that airport because Purdue had also raised the money to buy that gleaming Electra.

My maternal grandfather, Tom Coyne, avidly followed the achievements and the stunts of flyers such as Earhart, for their exploits seemed to endorse his infatuation with human courage and genius and its inventions, whether they defied gravity or built the Panama Canal. Each feat seemed to dramatize his own achievements as a self-taught civil engineer building railroads in the Andes and to vindicate his own courage and enterprise as an Irish immigrant. On Sundays he would pay five dollars to join a sightseeing tour of Kansas City in a lumbering Ford Tri-motor, the same kind of early airliner in which Knute Rockne would lose his life; and a year or two later he would buy me a ticket on a Trans Western airliner to fly me, one of a dozen passengers, from Kansas City to New York to join my parents. We stopped in Chicago and Pittsburgh to refuel and then finally flew on to New York's LaGuardia airport. The stewardesses kept me fortified with chocolate cake and chewing gum. "Oh, I can see his little legs dangling through the clouds," my grandmother worried.

My grandfather followed the reports of Wiley Post flying around the world in 1931. The accounts of...