Amelia Earhart’s Legacies Fly High : Memories of Famous Flier Live On in Kansas Hometown

This small Midwestern town is a mecca for women pilots from throughout the world because this is where Amelia Earhart was born.

When women fliers make pilgrimages here in their light airplanes they land at Amelia Earhart Airport, the only airport in the United States named after the famed aviator.

Nearby in a forest and in a downtown mall are two identical life-size bronze statues of the pilot depicted in her familiar short leather flight jacket, scarf and slacks, her hair tousled by the wind.

Amelia Earhart Stadium is the local high school and college football facility. The town’s baseball diamond is called Amelia Earhart Field.

The largest collection of Amelia Earhart’s possessions, memorabilia and artifacts are housed in the Atchison County Museum.

“Way things are going around here, one of these days they might change the name of this place from Atchison to Amelia Earhart, Kansas,” observed Joe Carrigan, 69, a former mayor who remembers a visit by the pilot when he was in high school. “Every kid in town got to shake her hand,” he said.

Senator From Missouri

Atchison, population 12,000, birthplace of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, was named after David R. Atchison, U.S. senator, not from Kansas, but from Missouri, who visited his namesake only once.

The two-story white clapboard Victorian home where Amelia Earhart was born on July 24, 1897, and spent her first 12 years sits on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River. The house, considered a shrine by women pilots, is owned by the Ninety-Nines. Earhart was the first president of this international organization of women aviators she helped found in 1929. She suggested the name because there were 99 original members.

Each July the Ninety-Nines stages its annual three-day fly-in here. Women pilots fly in from nearly every state, from as far away as Australia, Japan, Brazil, Italy, France and Great Britain. They come to the small Kansas town to mark Amelia Earhart’s birth date.

“Next year will be the biggest fly-in ever,” noted Fay Gillis Wells, 78, of Alexandria, Va., one of 28 surviving charter members of the pilot organization.

“Next year will be the 50th anniversary of Amelia’s disappearance, July 2, 1937, near Holland Island in the Pacific on her around-the-world flight with her navigator Fred Noonan. And, next year would be Amelia’s 90th birthday if she were still alive,” said Wells, herself a noted aviator and former newspaper foreign correspondent.

In America’s bicentennial year, 1976, the Ninety-Nines, the city of Atchison and the forestry department of Kansas State University, Manhattan, gave to America the International Forest of Friendship.

It was Fay Gillis Wells’ idea to establish the forest to further honor the memory of Amelia Earhart and pay tribute to men and women of the world who have made outstanding contributions to aviation.

Wells, chairperson of the Ninety-Nines Bicentennial Committee, and Atchison’s former mayor and civic leader Joe Carrigan, bicentennial chairman for the town, headed up the friendship forest project from its inception and have continued as its co-chairman ever since.

Within the park overlooking Lake Warnock are trees from the 50 states, Washington, D.C., U.S. territories and 33 foreign nations where Ninety-Nines chapters exist. At the foot of each tree is a granite marker listing its species and the state or county it represents.

There is a tulip tree from the White House, a cherry tree from Japan, a redwood from California. The English oak tree was a gift from British Ambassador Peter Ramsbotham, who flew out from the nation’s capital to Atchison to plant it.

A Sycamore tree is growing from a seed flown to the moon and back on a space shuttle flight. In a circle surrounding the moon tree are granite markers honoring the memory of the astronauts who have died in space-age accidents.

More than 400 living and dead aviation notables are honored with granite markers embedded in a milelong walkway that winds through the forest.

Women Pilots Honored

The majority of those honored are women pilots, women like Amelia Earhart, Jacqueline Cochran, Alice Hammond, Neta Snook Southern, Shirley Chapfield, Louise Thaden, Lucille Wright, Tiny Broadwick, many of the original Ninety-Nines and Sally Ride, the first woman astronaut.

Also honored are many famous men, including Charles Lindbergh, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Wylie Post, Jimmy Doolittle, the astronauts and Dwight Eisenhower, the only President with a private pilot’s license.

Today there are 6,700 women pilots who are members of the Ninety-Nines in all 50 states, in 33 countries including Yugoslavia and Iceland. California, with more than 800 Ninety-Nines, has more than any other state. Barbara Sestito of Fair Oaks, Calif., is the group’s current president.

The Ninety-Nines are headquartered in their own building at Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City. To be a member a woman must be a certificated pilot. Dues are $40 a year.

To this day Amelia Earhart is remembered as the premier woman pilot in the world as far as her influence in aviation.

She was the first woman to solo across the Atlantic on May 20-21, 1932, the first woman to solo across the Pacific from Honolulu to Oakland Jan. 11, 1935, the first woman to fly solo round trip from the United States to Mexico City, the first woman to make a transcontinental non-stop flight, the first woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross, and much more.

Her last flight began from Miami with her navigator Noonan as they attempted to fly around the world. They were last heard from searching for tiny Holland Island in the mid-Pacific when Earhart radioed: “Position uncertain.”

Earhart was a multifaceted woman. She was a fashion designer for leading women’s magazines, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, Woman’s Home Companion. She was aviation editor for Cosmopolitan magazine.

She authored three books. She took a course in photography at the University of Southern California and was a professional photographer. She was a poet, a painter.

She was a vocal pacifist and had a favorite saying: “Let there be peace on Earth and let it begin with me.” She was a nurse in World War I, a social worker at Denison House in Boston, a premed student at Columbia. Her husband, George Palmer Putnam, a publisher, died in 1950. They were childless.

Popular Songs

Over the years numerous books, poems and songs have been written about Amelia Earhart. “Lady Lindy” and “Amelia, Queen of the Air” were popular songs in the 1930s. A fox trot called the Earhart hop was named after her. She loved to dance.

Schools carry her name. Postage stamps in the United States and foreign nations have featured her. A street in Los Angeles and streets in other cities and towns are named after her. So is a mountain in Yosemite National Park.

Speculation over her death has persisted and given rise to all sorts of stories, such as: Earhart and Noonan did not perish at sea. They were captured by the Japanese, held prisoners and later executed. Amelia Earhart is alive and well and living today in America under another name.

“We’ve heard all the stories all these years and consider them ridiculous,” insists Muriel Morrissey, 86, Earhart’s sister who lives in Medford, Mass. “Amelia went down in the ocean near Holland Island.”

Morrissey, who received her master’s degree from Harvard, taught high school English in Massachusetts until her retirement. Never a pilot herself, she often flew with her sister. They were the only children of Ed Earhart, a railroad lawyer, and Amy Otis Earhart. Their grandfather, Alfred G. Otis, was an Atchison judge.

Morrissey wrote a biography of her sister, “Courage Is the Price,” published in 1963. A frequent lecturer about her sister before women’s clubs, she is guest of honor each year at the Ninety-Nines Fly-In to Atchison.

From 1928 until her death, Amelia Earhart took great pride in her membership in Zonta Inc., the service club for executive women founded in 1919. Headquartered in Chicago, Zonta has 35,000 members in 48 countries and each year since 1938 has granted graduate study Amelia Earhart fellowships in aviation (now aerospace) science and engineering. This year the $6,000 one-year Amelia Earhart fellowships were awarded to 32 women. Since its inception, 444 recipients have received $1.8 million in fellowship grants under the program.

It was the Zonta Club and the Jaycees of North Hollywood, Calif., who placed the Ernest Shelton statue of Amelia Earhart outside the entrance to the North Hollywood Library.

A special tribute is planned in memory of Amelia Earhart next July 2 by Ninety-Nines pilots throughout the United States and in the 33 nations where chapters exist.

“Ninety-Nines will take to the air at 1 p.m. that day in hundreds of airplanes,” said Marie Christensen, of North Brook, Ill., the organization’s secretary. “The plan is to have them all broadcast an identical message on the same line of frequency band during the hour they will remain aloft. The message will be: The search for Amelia’s dream for excellence in aviation continues. . . .

“Amelia Earhart is the legend of aviation. Her name still rings bells. The magic is still there.”