Amelia Takes Flight
Have you ever dreamed of piloting an airplane? As a young woman in the early 1900s, Amelia Earhart’s imagination was captured by flying. At the time, airplanes were new, and only men were pilots.
Earhart’s dreams of flying eventually took her almost all the way around the world. But on July 2, 1937, as she neared the end of a historic journey, her plane disappeared. She was never found.
The Mini Page looks back at Earhart’s adventurous life and her final flight, which ended 80 years ago.
A young girl takes off
Amelia Earhart was born on July 24, 1897, at her grandparents’ house in Atchison, Kansas. Her dad, Edwin, traveled as part of his job as a lawyer for a railroad. Her mom, Amy, often went with him.
During the school year, Amelia and her sister, Muriel, lived with their grandparents. They sometimes traveled with their parents during the summer.
The girls played tennis, basketball and football, and fished. At that time, most little girls did not do those kinds of things. Amelia’s mother made
bloomers, a kind of loose pants, for the girls to play in. Girls back then usually wore long skirts, even when playing.
When she was 8 years old, Amelia built a roller coaster that ran off the side of the barn, and it worked. She said it was “just like flying.”
Really flying
After World War I, Amelia went with her dad to an air meet (a demonstration of plane races, wing-walking and stunt flying) in California. She took her first ride in an airplane the next day.
Soon she was taking flying lessons with Neta Snook, the only female pilot in Southern California. Before the year was out, she had bought a plane.
Setting records
From then on, Amelia Earhart kept busy setting records and coming up with new challenges as a pilot. She set more than a dozen flying records, including:
• She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean alone.
• She was the first woman to fly nonstop across the United States.
• She was the first person to fly alone from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland.
Mini Quote: “I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried.”