She crossed the Atlantic alone—then vanished mid-world attempt
Amelia Earhart, born 24 July 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, rode as the first woman passenger across the Atlantic in 1928 and, in 1932, flew the ocean solo nonstop—winning the Distinguished Flying Cross. On 2 July 1937 she disappeared over the Pacific chasing a global circumnavigation.
She was born in the house of her grandfather Alfred Otis, a former Kansas judge and bank president, and grew up climbing trees, hunting rats and collecting insects with her younger sister Muriel. At seven she rode a homemade roller-coaster ramp off the family tool shed. Yet the first aeroplane she saw, at the 1908 Iowa State Fair, bored her: she dismissed it as rusty wire and wood and went back to the merry-go-round.
Her teenage years were unsettled. Her father’s drinking cost him his railway post in 1914, and the family moved between Des Moines, St. Paul and Chicago, where she finished at Hyde Park High in 1916. She kept a scrapbook of women who had broken into law, film and engineering. Visiting Toronto at Christmas 1917, she trained as a Red Cross aide at Spadina Military Hospital, where pilots’ stories stuck with her; the 1918 flu then left her with pneumonia and a chronic sinus infection.
A ten-dollar, ten-minute ride with Frank Hawks at Long Beach on 28 December 1920 convinced her she had to fly. She hired Neta Snook, who taught her on a rebuilt Curtiss JN-4, paying for lessons by working as a photographer, truck driver and telephone stenographer. On 22 October 1922 she took her Airster to 14,000 feet, a record for women, and on 16 May 1923 became only the sixteenth American woman to hold an FAI licence.
Money ran out after a failed gypsum-mine investment, so she sold her planes for a yellow roadster nicknamed the Yellow Peril and drove her mother to Boston in 1924. Fame came later: the 1928 passenger crossing, the 1932 solo flight, bestselling books, advocacy for airline travel and the founding of the Ninety-Nines for women pilots. She was declared dead on 5 January 1939.
Source: Amelia Earhart
