I joined the Boston chapter of the National Aeronautic Association as a reawakening of my active interest in aviation. Ultimately I was made Vice-President (perhaps to get rid of me) serving under Mr. Sewall. Subsequently his activities took him to New York and when I returned from the trans-Atlantic flight I found myself the first woman President of a body of the N. A. A. Several months later Mr. Kinner wrote again and said he himself had found an agent, who would communicate with me. The hand of Allah had thrown Harold T. Dennison, a young architect of Quincy, in Mr. Kinner’s way in California. Mr. Dennison came home determined to build an airport. He owned enough land for an emergency field on the marshes from which Beachey flew to Boston Light in 1910 to win $10,000. I gathered a few dollars together and became one of five incorporators of a commercial aeronautical concern. Today Dennison Aircraft Corporation is working to create a commercial airport adjoining the naval air base at Squantum. There is so much to be done in aviation and so much fun to be got from it, that I had become increasingly involved before the flight of the Friendship. I was busy, too, with Miss Ruth Nichols of Rye in trying to work out some means of gathering more women into the fold. The National Playground Association had asked me to be on their Boston committee and judge in the model airplane tournament they were sponsoring in September, 1928. The tournament combined my two greatest interests, aviation and social work, in an unusual way, and I was very glad to serve. Unfortunately the social worker became submerged in the aerial joy-rider and the latter has been too much occupied since her return to be of any use whatsoever. [Illustration: description: Photo medium shot outdoor of Earhart’s mother, Earhart, and Woolley; Earhart is holding large bouquet of flowers caption: AT BOSTON WITH HER MOTHER AND MAJOR WOOLLEY, WHOSE FLYING COAT MISS EARHART WORE ACROSS THE ATLANTIC © _Wide World Photos_ ] [Illustration: description: Photo wide profile shot outdoor of Earhart in car swarmed by children caption: “THE YELLOW PERIL” AND HER DRIVER BACK IN BOSTON, BEFORE DENISON HOUSE © _International Photos_ ] CHAPTER V PREPARATIONS When it was all over I read in the papers that I had been planning a trans-Atlantic flight for a year. I read much else that was equally imaginative. In fact, the press introduced me to an entirely new person. It appeared that I was a demi-orphan; my father, I learned, had been dead four years—I saved that clipping for him. One day I read that I was wealthy, the next that the sole purpose of my flight was to lift the mortgage from the old homestead—which there isn’t any—I mean homestead.