Reviving Amelia

In July, artist Ernest Shelton hopes to douse the torch he has carried for aviator Amelia Earhart for 34 years.

His strange odyssey began in the 1960s when several women’s groups--the North Hollywood Jaycees (now the Universal City-North Hollywood Jaycees) and area chapters of Zonta--commissioned a statue of Earhart, who disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 while attempting to circle the globe at the equator.

By way of preparation, he contacted the Earhart family’s former secretary, Margot de Carie. “She had a scrapbook at least a foot thick,” Shelton recalls. “It had pictures of Amelia in casual settings. She had a kind of unusual way of standing, not posing. She’d put the weight on one leg and her left knee turned. She looked taller than she really was. She was thin and her hair was short. She wore baggy men’s clothes and worked on her own planes. I wanted to keep [the artwork] mysterious. I wanted it to vibrate like it was ethereal.”

Shelton, who studied art at USC, made a plaster mold and waited during numerous delays, including a change of officers at the Jaycees. “I had the mold in my backyard for almost two years,” he says. Shelton cast what was to be a temporary Earhart in fiberglass, and the Jaycees collected about $500 to cover some costs. Shelton gilded the 8-foot sculpture with gold leaf to make it shine, but from the beginning he intended for the statue to eventually be cast in bronze.

In 1971, the fiberglass statue was placed in North Hollywood Park at Tujunga Avenue and Magnolia Boulevard, adjacent to the North Hollywood (Amelia M. Earhart) branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. But that’s where the project stalled. “The mystery’s [gone] on and on and so has the project,” says the sculptor of his beloved statue. “In my mind, it has never been completed.”

Shelton went on to sculpt toys, movie props and art commissions, including life-size bronzes of Lucille Ball, Jack Benny and Johnny Carson for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Plaza in North Hollywood, and the Our Lady of Angels sculpture in front of St. Basil’s Church on Wilshire Boulevard. Through it all, his temporary statue stood in the Valley heat that Earhart knew so well.

In the radiant years when she was breaking aviation records and making it look easy, Earhart lived with her husband, George Putnam, in Toluca Lake on Valley Spring Lane. She worked a day job as a telephone operator. In 1932, Earhart was the first woman to make a transcontinental flight, in a Burbank-built Lockheed Vega. She was a regular at Lockheed Air Terminal, now the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport.

As it happens, the statue isn’t Shelton’s only bond with Earhart. When she disappeared, he was a child living among aviation enthusiasts in Kansas. His father and brother flew, and his father, who worked for a Los Angeles plane factory during WWII, once built a biplane in the family’s garage. “He tied the thing to a tree and blew oil all over the house,” says Shelton, who himself has a pilot’s license.

In 1988, Shelton was summoned from his Cambria home to patch cracks in the statue. But a year ago, with the fiberglass disintegrating, he made an urgent plea to the Universal City-North Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to recast the statue in bronze per his original intent. The chamber agreed to help, a coalition of organizations (including the Jaycees, Zonta and the San Fernando Valley chapter of the women’s pilot group the 99s) mobilized a fund-raising effort, and the statue was moved to Decker Studios, a North Hollywood fine-art foundry, where Shelton is supervising prep work. Of a projected $170,000 needed, $72,000 has been secured. If the balance arrives, Shelton will cast Earhart in bronze at last. “Every time they dedicate it, it has more plaques.”

Today Shelton, 70, is philosophical about Earhart’s disappearance. “There’s a different story about every 10 years,” he says. “She’s developed into an icon with a mystery. It was a dream project. The mystery, the aviation, everything was there.”

*

The Save Amelia Bronzing Project committee hopes to raise the final $98,000 for the July 24, 2003 rededication, which is the 106th anniversary of Earhart’s birth. For information, call (818) 763-4142.