20 hrs., 40 min. : $b our flight in the Friendship : the American girl, first across the Atlantic by air, tells her story — John Shaqi
20 hrs., 40 min. : $b our flight in the Friendship : the American girl, first across the Atlantic by air, tells her storyEarhart, Amelia
History
20 hrs., 40 min. : $b our flight in the Friendship : the American girl, first across the Atlantic by air, tells her story
Earhart, Amelia
Earhart, Amelia, 1897-1937; Transatlantic flights; Women air pilots -- United States -- Biography
A tall, slender, boyish-looking young woman walked into my office in
the early fall of 1926. She wanted a job and a part-time one would do,
for she was giving courses in English under the university extension.
Most of her classes were in factories in Lynn and other industrial
towns near Boston. She had had no real experience in social work but
she wanted to try it, and before I knew it I had engaged her for
half-time work at Denison House. She had poise and charm. I liked her
quiet sense of humor, the frank direct look in her grey eyes.
It was some time before any of us at Denison House knew that Amelia
Earhart had flown. After driving with her in the “Yellow Peril,” her
own Kissel roadster, I knew that she was an expert driver, handling
her car with ease, yes more than that, with an artistic touch. She has
always seemed to me an unusual mixture of the artist and the practical
person.
Her first year at Denison House she had general direction of the
evening school for foreign-born men and women. She did little teaching
herself, but did follow-up work in the homes, so necessary to the
success of such an undertaking. In her report of her year’s work after
we had planned her next year’s program, which did not include the
evening school, she wrote: “I shall try to keep my contact with the
women who have come to class; Mrs. S. and her drunken husband, Mrs.
F.’s struggle to get her husband here, Mrs. Z.’s to get her papers
in the face of odds, all are problems that are hard to relinquish after
a year’s friendship.”
In the spring of 1927, Denison House was giving a country carnival for
the benefit of the house. For such a good cause, Amelia consented to
fly over Boston and drop publicity dodgers. She first said that she
would do this if her name could be kept out of the papers! We had to
use some persuasion to keep her from flying incognito. The first day
of the carnival, the Boston police up and down Boylston and Tremont
Streets were perhaps too amazed to try to arrest a man and woman,
apparently Italian peasants just landed, who drove back and forth in a
queer yellow car, stopping now and then to grind a tune on a battered
hand-organ and to distribute handbills.
The organ grinder was Amelia Earhart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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