The Deans' Bible. Angie Klink
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We followed preparations for the world flight. We followed all of the changes in plans and delays in planning the trip. Finally, in March 1937, Miss Earhart left Purdue for California and then on to Honolulu.”
One can visualize Dorothy and Helen, colleagues and friends, assembling their charges, young women standing in their sweater sets and wool skirts, as the Indiana March wind whipped the grassy fields surrounding hanger number one at the Purdue Airport. They would gaze, blinking, at the polished Lockheed Electra, a metallic condor of the sky, and watch the gentle woman who would settle into the cockpit and study her maps that were, to Amelia, like adventures in and of themselves.
Reporters and admirers asked Amelia why she decided to attempt an around-the-world flight. Her answer was always, “Because I want to.”
In Last Flight, she expounded upon her usual brief answer, perhaps because she could express her reasoning best with pen and paper: “Here was shining adventure, beckoning with new experiences, added knowledge of flying, of peoples—of myself. I felt that with the flight behind me I would be more useful to me and to the program we had planned at Purdue.”
Helen goes on to explain the ups and downs of Amelia’s start to her circumventing the globe “at its waistline”: “Again a change in plans—a tire blew and a strut collapsed and the plane had to come back to California for repairs. The route of the flight was reversed. In May the plane was flown to Miami for a ‘shakedown cruise.’ Finally, on June 1, 1937, the long flight began. As the flight progressed, we all followed whatever scraps of information came via radio and in the press with the intense personal interest and concern.”
The mood on the Purdue campus must have been eager and electric. It was, in a sense, Purdue’s plane. Purdue’s Amelia. Purdue’s world flight. It was March 20, when Amelia’s plane “ground looped” and she crashed taking off in Hawaii, headed for Howland Island. As Helen said, Amelia returned the plane to the Lockheed factory in California for repairs.
President Elliott sent a telegram of encouragement to Amelia. On March 25, he wrote a letter to George, who was at Union Air Terminal in Burbank, California. Evidently, to help buoy his wife, George had suggested the telegram idea to Elliott. By this time the two men had become close, as indicated by the salutation of familiarity:
My dear G.P.:
Thanks for the clippings and for the suggestion of a special message for A.E. when she lands today. This has gone and reads as follows:
YOU ARE COMMISSIONED AND CHARGED TO GIVE A.E. A SPECIAL PURDUE GREETING WHEN SHE LANDS TODAY STOP HER COURAGEOUS EXPLOIT HAS GIVEN THRILL TO EVERY MEMBER OF THE BOILERMAKERS GUILD STOP THEY ARE ALL WITH HER TO THE SUCCESSFUL END OF THE FLIGHT
I hope it contains pep for her.
Four months later, Lae, New Guinea, would be Amelia’s final stop, where she reveled in the native tongue. She wrote on July 1, 1937, in Last Flight:
My only purchase at Lae besides gasoline has been a dictionary of Pidgin English for two shillings. I was well worth the price to discover that all native women are called Mary. The natives have their own name for everything. For instance airplanes are called “balus,” or “birds.” … My plane has acquired special distinction over other metal ones here, which have corrugated surfaces. The Lockheed is smooth and to the native resembles tins in which certain biscuits are shipped from England. Therefore it is known as the “biscuit box.”
Amelia and her biscuit box would attempt to cross eastward over the Pacific to land on Howland Island, along a route never traveled before by airplane. She wrote before taking off, “Shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.”
Rather than behind her, the hazards would forever be Amelia’s mystery and legacy.
Decades later, Helen described hearing the news that Amelia was lost at sea: “On July 2, the final radio message came. It was picked up by a New Guinea radio station: ‘circling … cannot see island … gas running low.’ There was no more word.”
The Purdue community collectively displayed shock. Yet hope. There was always hope. Maybe Amelia would be found. Helen continued: “We were all sad and unbelieving. It did not seem possible that the vibrant, beautiful person we had known would not return. She will always be a symbol of high courage to those of us who were fortunate enough to know her.”
Until she passed away in 1992, Helen kept a newspaper clipping with the headline “Earhart’s Radio Mixed Bared.” Dorothy had scrawled a note at the top and evidently given it to Helen. She wrote, “Have you seen this explanation? Certainly tragic and apparently needless.”
The July 8, 1937 news story stated that the tragedy was due to a communication failure with a coast guard cutter, which cruised along one of the loneliest stretches of the earth’s surface to guide Amelia:
Far from the scene of the search for Amelia Earhart and her navigator on the coral reefs and watery wastes of the Pacific, maritime radio experts today piece together the story of a radio mixup which may spell the doom of the fliers.
Briefly the mixup was this:
The coast guard cutter Itasca stationed near Howland Island as a safety measure when the Earhart plane zoomed across the sea from New Guinea expected Amelia would broadcast in code on 500 kilocycles. The Itasca was equipped to take a directional bearing on the plane only if Miss Earhart was sending in code over 500 kilocycles.
But Amelia, before leaving on her globe-circling flight, had scrapped her 500-kilocycle equipment. She could send only on high frequencies.
Amelia was quoted regarding the scrapping of the 500-kilocycle equipment: “It means we would have to take along a 250-foot trailing antenna, which would have to be reeled out after every takeoff and reeled in before each landing.… The antenna would be one more thing to worry about, and we have enough things to think of already.”
The commander of the Itasca was unaware that Amelia’s cherished Lockheed Electra could not receive the signal sent from his ship.
On July 16, President Elliott sent a Western Union telegram to George, who was in Burbank, California, the text of which read:
SHE WOULD NOT WANT US TO GRIEVE AND WEEP YET WE ARE IN THE DEEPEST DEPTHS OF SADNESS STOP WE SHALL LONG MOURN THIS GALLANT ONE WHOSE LIFE WAS A COURAGEOUS ADVENTURE SHE WOULD HAVE A HEROINES PART IN ANY AGE STOP WHEN YOU ARE ABLE PLEASE LET ME KNOW YOUR PLANS SO THAT WE MAY MEET TO CONSIDER HOW TO CARRY ON
Nearly forty years later, Dorothy told her friend Sally Watlington where she was on July 2, 1937, a moment etched in time, just prior to America’s most patriotic of celebrations, Independence Day. Dorothy was at a meeting in the Purdue Memorial Union when word came—Amelia Earhart was lost at sea. Those in the meeting sat dazed, then mechanically and without a word, they gathered their papers. Still not speaking, Dorothy and the group left the room, walked down the terrazzo tiled hallways of the Union, where Amelia had once walked, and out into the summer sunshine.
When asked how she felt upon hearing Amelia was missing, Dorothy thought of her famous, fearless friend whom she had hosted in her home with waffles and talks of “cabbages and kings.” She gave a one-word answer: “Devastated.”
BEVERLEY STONE, A LOVELY LIGHT
AS DOROTHY STRATTON AND HELEN SCHLEMAN were spiriting women through their education and Purdue campus life amid the corn and hayfields of Indiana, Beverley (Bev) Stone, a woman they would come to know as a friend and colleague, was beginning her formative years at a woman’s college at the foot of the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains near the Appalachian Trail—Randolph-Macon.
At Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, Bev majored in chemistry. Years later, Bev recalled her girlhood visions of her professional goals. She said, “I had three dreams—to be a movie star, a doctor,