Heart of Action: Amelia Earhart

Heart of Action

Amelia Earhart

“The path to success is to take massive, determined action.”

Tony Robbins

When I was in high school I dreamed of leaving my hometown of Robertsdale, Alabama. I felt the only thing for me in Robertsdale was trouble and a long life of construction work. I joined the army in 1988 and was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for boot camp and advanced training. After boot camp, I received my orders to go to Germany. I arrived in Germany in January 1989. It was cold and beautiful. I was not scared but I was lonely, having just left my family and friends for the foreseeable future. Yet what I had done was act. I was bound and determined to live a life that was not confined to Robertsdale or controlled by others but was dictated by my desires and dreams.  I acted!  

As we grow older we sometimes lose our heart to take action. I know through my own personal transformation that I had lost my heart of action for a while. Now that I have regained it, I am doing more, becoming more, and experiencing more adventures than I have in years. My life is more enjoyable and fulfilling all because I have taken action.

Amelia Earhart was a person of action. She lived her life to the very end owning her dreams and desires. Amelia defied the perceived notions of the day. She wanted to fly even though there were not many licensed female pilots in the 1920s. One study stated there may have been as few as sixteen. Flying and piloting were for men. Amelia had other plans though. As history showed, she was a woman of action.

Amelia had a sense of adventure early on. As a child, she and her sister often set out on adventures catching bugs, running through the neighborhood, and even shooting rats. Amelia was the ringleader, talking her younger sister into these crazy adventures. Amelia was the quintessential tomboy before the word tomboy was used. Ever the adventurer, she wanted to add flying to her growing list of exploits.

With the help of her uncle, in 1904, Amelia put together a homemade ramp fashioned after a roller coaster she had seen on a trip to St. Louis. She secured the ramp to the roof of the family toolshed. This was her well-documented first flight and it ended in dramatic fashion. Amelia emerged from the broken wooden box that had served as a sled, exhilarated, with a bruised lip and a torn dress. She told her sister Pidge it was just like flying.

At the Iowa State, Fair Amelia saw her first airplane, though she later described it as a rust bucket that seemed to be falling apart. Her father offered to have her and her sister take a flight, but they wisely chose to go back to the merry-go-round.

For Amelia, life was grand except for the turmoil her father put the family through. He was an alcoholic who lost his job at the railroad in 1914.  Under duress at home and with an adventurer’s spirit, she began her call to action. Throughout her troubled childhood, Amelia aspired to something more, keeping a scrapbook of successful women working in male-dominated fields, including law, film production, mechanical engineering, advertising, and management. She even left one high school to attend another because the chemistry department was better. Amelia graduated high-school in 1916 from Chicago’s Hyde Park High School.

During a trip to visit her sister in Toronto in 1917, Amelia was dramatically affected by the wounded soldiers returning from World War I. These men did not just return with physical injuries, they also returned with what was then known as shell shock. Amelia felt compelled to help and trained to become a nurse’s aide with the Red Cross. Amelia began her work with the voluntary aid detachment at a military hospital.

In 1918, an outbreak of the Spanish Flu decimated the hospital staff, so Amelia worked extremely hard, working extra shifts and taking on additional duties. She contracted pneumonia, which was compounded by serious sinus issues. She spent the next year recovering and living with her sister.

When her strength returned, she began pursuing her dreams and living her call to action. She began her studies at Columbia University as a pre-med student but dropped out after just a year.  In December of 1920, she took her first airplane ride in California with the famous World War I pilot Frank Hawks. She was forever hooked.

Amelia began taking flying lessons in 1921 from a female flight instructor named Neta Snook. To pay for these lessons she worked as a filing clerk at the Los Angeles Telephone Company. Amelia passed her flight test in December 1921, earning her National Aeronautics Association License. She then bought her first plane a second-hand Kinner-Airster, which she nicknamed, The Canary. Two days after the purchase she participated in her first flight exhibition at the Sierra Airdrome in Pasadena, California.

 Amelia’s heart of action led her to set many aviation records. Her first flying record was in 1922 when she became the first woman to fly solo above 14,000 feet.

In 1931, Amelia married American publisher George Putnam, who helped promote her amazing feats. A year later, Amelia became the first woman and only the second person after Charles Lindbergh to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Amelia flew out of Newfoundland, Canada on May 20th in a Lockheed Vega 5B and landed in a cow field near Londonderry, Ireland.

When Amelia returned from her transatlantic flight, Congress awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross. a military decoration awarded for extraordinary achievement while participating in an aerial flight. Amelia was in the boy’s club and was being recognized for her daring spirit. Flight was still in its infancy in those days, so every time she left the ground in her yellow airplane she was in a position to set records or do something few had done. Because of her transatlantic trip and newly found fame, she spent a lot of time on speaking tours and raising money for her next big goal of circumnavigating the globe.

Amelia began her preparations for her global trip in 1937. After a failed first attempt, she and navigator Fred Noonan departed from Oakland, California.   After 40 days and more than 20 stops, they arrived in Papua New Guinea. On July 2, they began their hardest leg of their journey, a 2,500-mile trip to Howland Island, their next refueling stop. They never made it. 

Amelia was never heard from again. Her legend, however, has never been silenced and over 80 years later, her story still captures our imagination. Her passion for flying helped popularize aviation while in its infancy and opened doors for women. Amelia challenged the status quo and got to live her dreams of flying. She was singularly focused on a dream and pursued it with a relentless heart of action.    

Questions:

1.    Is there an action you are afraid to take right now?

2.    What’s the worst thing that would happen if you took that action?

3.    Have you ever been a first in anything you’ve done?