Amelia Earhart's Private Side

   In July 1937, a gallant and skillful pilot vanished over Howland Island in the Pacific. Her name was Amelia Earhart, perhaps the best known aviatrix in the history of flight. If her public thought that she was the epitome of determination, they ought to have seen her private side. The woman had icewater running through her veins.
   Earhart had only been flying for two years when she set an altitude record for women by soaring to 14,000 feet, and she did it in a little open-cockpit plane powered by a three-cylinder air-cooled engine. Later she became the first woman passenger to cross the Atlantic by plane, and in 1932 she made history by being the first woman to actually fly solo across the Atlantic. The year before, she shocked the world by getting married. Would this be the end to America's dare-devil darling? Would some man tame her? Not a chance. The same iron will that she exhibited in public also reigned in her private life.
   Amelia's intended was George Palmer Putnam, and while they were waiting in his mother's home for the justice of the peace to arrive, the bride handed the groom a letter. In it, Amelia let George know just what she expected out of the marriage.
   At the outset. Amelia, although she did love George, expressed some reluctance to marry. She was afraid that it would interfere with her own ambitions. "In our life together," she wrote, "I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. Please let us not interfere with each other's work or play. In this connection," she continued, "I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinements of even an attractive cage." In closing, Amelia exacted what she called a cruel promise. "You must let me go in a year if we find no happiness together."
   Nobody knows how Amelia's marriage to George Putnam really worked privately, but one suspects that she charted her own course in the air and on the ground. She always had and she always would.
In public or in private, Amelia Earhart apparently loved her independence more than life itself.