ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 14, 1997 TAG: 9702140016
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
DID THE WORLD'S most noted female flier take to the skies to please her husband? To satisfy a deep compulsion? Or just for the thrill and glory?.
The Hartford Courant
When she disappeared over the South Pacific on July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart was the most famous female pilot in the world.
It says something that 60 years later, she is still the best-known U.S. aviatrix of all time.
Earhart's name has endured partly because of the mystery about what happened to her on that last flight from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island. But her fame goes beyond that.
``She certainly brought aviation into the limelight, to the average person of the day,'' said Dorothy Cochrane, a curator at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington. ``Everybody knows who Amelia Earhart was.''
But what motivated her to fly such dangerous flights? Historians disagree.
Earhart and dozens of other aviation pioneers, both male and female, captured the public's imagination in the 1930s with speed records, nonstop flights and trips to exotic places - feats unimaginable just a few years earlier.
Earhart wasn't the best pilot of her day, pointed out Richard Wellman, director of Pratt & Whitney's customer training center and the company's unofficial archivist.
But with her simple humor, good looks, and an incessant publicity machine run by her husband, George Palmer Putnam, Earhart stood out.
Earhart grew up a tomboy and drifted from job to job until settling into a position as a social worker in Boston in the mid-1920s.
She had dabbled in flying a few years earlier in California, and was active in Boston aviation circles. In 1928 she got a call from Putnam, a New York publicist who was looking for a woman to cross the Atlantic on a plane owned by a client.
Earhart accepted and became the first woman to fly the ocean. She was honored in Europe and America, but was embarrassed that she hadn't been the plane's pilot. She wasn't capable of flying the heavier plane.
Smitten with aviation - and Putnam - and determined to prove her abilities, Earhart went on to become the first person to fly solo across the Pacific from Hawaii to California, the first person to cross the Atlantic twice and the first person to fly both oceans alone.
``They were phenomenal flights at the time,'' Cochrane said.
Putnam promoted each project.
Afterward, Earhart would write about her adventure and crisscross the United States on lecture tours he had arranged. She earned up to $250 a speech, a handsome sum during the Great Depression.
An avid supporter of air travel, Earhart helped start the airline that became TWA, put her name on a line of luggage and was ``aviation editor'' at Cosmopolitan magazine.
She was also an outspoken supporter of women's rights.
Three weeks shy of her 40th birthday when she was lost, Earhart wanted that flight to be her last major one.
By 1937, most ``firsts'' were already accomplished, and she knew critics thought the dangerous feats contributed little to aviation.
Recent biographers have debated Putnam's influence on her life and speculated on how childhood disappointments - her father was an alcoholic whose career as a lawyer fell apart - may have driven her to succeed.
In a 1989 biography, Doris Rich suggested that Earhart and Putnam might even have been on the verge of divorce when World Flight began.
Wellman also believes Putnam pushed Earhart too far.
But Mary S. Lovell, another biographer, thinks Earhart was enchanted by flying, loved Putnam and had too strong a personality to let someone else force her into something she didn't want to do.
That's also the opinion of Linda Finch, the San Antonio pilot who plans to re-create Earhart's final voyage this spring.
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