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
Youth, keeping a heart, a soul and a body that are wide open to all the
rich opportunities of life—that is part of Amelia’s creed. How many
times I have heard her say that, to her, one of the biggest jobs of
the social worker in a settlement is just that—to give boys and girls
the experiences that will keep them young and that will develop a zest
for life. Last fall, she came to Denison House as a resident and as a
full-time staff worker. She has directed the work of girls from five
to fourteen years and has had general charge of the pre-kindergarten.
Jokingly we have sometimes called Amelia the “official secretary,” for
she is the secretary of the staff, of the Board of Directors (to which
she was elected this year) and to the House Committee of the board. She
has an unusual flair, in a meeting, for the gist of the thought and
expresses herself in writing with accuracy and originality. Last year
and this, Amelia has been a member of an inter-settlement committee
working on child-study records.
She herself made studies of children that show her keen insight
into child life. Here are sentences taken from her record of a
seven-year-old boy. “Ferris is fond of making experiments of various
kinds. How far can the pencil be moved before it falls? How high can
the chairs be piled before spilling? He conceived the idea on a cold
day of ‘warming’ his little sister’s beads on his father’s stove. That
the beads were hot enough to burn the child when she put them on was
not part of the experiment.”
“Where is Miss Earhart now?” “Is she still flying?” “Gee, I hope she
beats that other woman.” These and hundreds of other questions greeted
us on Tyler Street. “Is she coming back soon?” “I couldn’t sleep last
night thinking about her flying.”
The day she told me of the trans-Atlantic project, and swore me
to secrecy, she said, “And I’ll be back for summer school. I have
weighed the values and I want to stay in social work.” Her simplicity,
her honesty, her complete lack of any quality that makes for
sensationalism—this is Amelia Earhart. A few days after the flight
project was under way, a dinner guest at Denison House, who was
learning to fly at the East Boston Airport, told of the big Fokker
monoplane that Byrd was “to fly to the Antarctic”; just a quiet twinkle
across the room to me from Amelia’s eyes, and afterwards an infectious
chuckle as we enjoyed the incident together.
One day last year, after a discussion of L. P. Jacks’ lectures on The
Challenge of Life, she handed me some verses. Here they are, more
appropriate at this time than any words I can write:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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