Loss of a dashing feminist still painful
Imay never know for certain what happened to Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, on their round-the-world flight that disappeared in the South Pacific in July 1937. But, I have been in love with her forever, and it’s painful to have no resolution. I like to think Amelia was rescued by Howard Hughes and lived with him secretly at the Royal Flush in Las Vegas, had a child, and gave him up for adoption to my parents, John and Grace Keillor, in Anoka, Minn.
A recent TV documentary tries to prove she crashed and was captured by the Japanese, offering a blurry photograph of a dock on Jaluit Atoll in the Marshall Islands and a slight woman with short-cropped hair sitting, her back to the camera, who is purportedly Amelia. But, a Japanese gentleman says he spotted that photograph in a book published in 1935, two years before the flight.
I can live with the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance. I don’t care about the identity of Jack the Ripper. It matters little if Edward de Vere or Christopher Marlowe or the Duke of Earl wrote Shakespeare’s plays. My faith in the Resurrection does not depend on the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. But I need to know about Amelia. She was a sweetheart, a Kansas tomboy who was not out to make a statement so much as she simply loved to fly and feel the wind in her hair. In newsreels, she grins as she climbs out of cockpits, a dashing feminist in the Age of Dowagers. She wore pants. She was lithe and limber. She enjoyed her fame. She flew solo across the Atlantic, solo from Hawaii to California, she was the forerunner of the spirited feminists we’ve known and loved, who bore no grudge against men, but prevailed thanks to wit and smarts and perseverance and a terrific smile.
She wasn’t a great pilot. She was careless at times. She was a self-promoter who married her publicity guy and agent. She used her fame to pitch Lucky Strike cigarettes, Beech-Nut chewing gum, Longines watches, Mobil Oil and her own line of women’s clothing. I forgive her all of that for her gumption, her ebullient spirit in the midst of the Great Depression, and also for the fact that, in 1913, when she was 17, she lived in St. Paul, a few blocks from where I live, and attended Central High, as her alcoholic father struggled to hold on to his job at the Great Northern Railroad.
In fact, 1913 was the year my dad was born. I am not putting forth the theory that the 17-year-old Amelia moved to St. Paul to hide her pregnancy and that she gave up the boy to my grandparents, Dora and James Keillor of Anoka, but the truth is that Dad was more glamorous than anyone else in his family, obviously an import. He had a big romance with my mother and they eloped in 1937, the year the plane went down. Mere coincidence? We may never know for sure. The past is wreathed in shadows as we fly on into the mists, looking for an island that according to our maps is somewhere out ahead, and, if not, we will be swallowed up by history. May it be kind to us all.