ENCOUNTERS WITH EARHART
My sojourn to find the real story of Amelia Earhart is rooted in the arrival of an innocuous package at the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada in Winnipeg. Inside was an unlabelled videotape. Nothing special, I recall someone saying. A silent black-andwhite image flickered on the screen, and for less than a minute a giant flying boat was seen in a harbour setting. I immediately wrote down, “Dornier Do X” and knew when and where the film was shot: May 19, 1932, in Newfoundland. Just then, the scene shifted to a high-wing monoplane revving up. Spectators were gathered around the mechanics who were at work on the aircraft. Then I saw her.
Amelia Earhart, a lithe thirty-four-year-old, looked much younger in her short hair, silk scarf, and large flight jacket. For a second, she turned to the camera and smiled — a gap-toothed grin that her husband and relentless promoter had coached her to avoid. She quickly turned back to the tasks at hand, moving through a throng of onlookers and picking up a thermos, likely the one she would reportedly fill with tomato juice, her sustenance for a long flight.A newspaper tucked under her arm, Earhart next appeared with the aircraft at the Harbour Grace field, and then the aircraft wheeled around and took to the sky. The screen flickered again and went to black.
That videotape spurred a long odyssey to find Earhart in Canada that took me to Toronto and to Trepassey and Harbour Grace in Newfoundland and Labrador, along with other locations. At Harbour Grace, I presented a copy of the original videotape to the curators of the Conception Bay Museum, and later, I gave a copy to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. While at Harbour Grace, I walked the grass strip of the airfield where Earhart had once flown. I thought about her tremendous and ultimately tragic flying career, and I reflected on this line in a poem she wrote at high school: “Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.” — Bill Zuk