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Excerpts from Amelia Earhart: The Thrill of It

• Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE	The Girl in Brown Who Walks Alone
  CHAPTER TWO	Vagabonding
  CHAPTER THREE	Taking Off
  CHAPTER FOUR	The Hero Business
  CHAPTER FIVE	High Flyer
  CHAPTER SIX	The Last Grand Adventure
  CHAPTER SEVEN	Amelia’s Wake

• Chapter 1 excerpt

  The Girl in Brown Who Walks Alone

  “On a clear day in January 1921, a tall, slender young woman—wearing brown breeches, high laced boots, and a brown jacket—walked miles down a dusty highway to a weedy airfield surrounded by vegetable farms south of Los Angeles. Amelia Earhart—well groomed, with a library book on aerodynamics tucked under her arm—would have stood out in any crowd, according to her flying instructor. She was a loner—her high school yearbook dubbed her “the girl in brown who walks alone”—but she was also a leader, a bookish tomboy who was more fun and adventurous than anyone else and who threw herself at experience, especially the wildly exciting kind. She also had her inner “deeps,” private wells of emotion and sharp sensitivities that she felt profoundly but seldom shared.”

• Chapter 3 excerpt

  Taking Off

  “For Amelia Earhart, the unexpected, as she put it, became the inevitable. On an afternoon in April, as children were swarming into Denison House after school, she was busy steering them to classes and activities and making sure that game leaders and teachers were all present and ready. In the middle of all the commotion, a youngster came up to her, saying she was wanted on the telephone. Amelia said she was too busy, and that whoever it was should phone back later. The caller, the child insisted, said it was important, so Amelia dropped what she was doing and reluctantly went over to the phone. On the line, she heard a male voice introducing himself as Hilton Railey and asking her, enigmatically, if she would like to participate in “an important but hazardous flight.” At first, Amelia thought it was a joke—and said so—but the frank admission of risk, she later said, thrilled her
  beyond words.”

• Chapter 4 excerpt

  The Hero Business

  “Amelia Earhart made her decision. Married life with G. P., she realized, would not be easy. Ten years older than she was and set in his ways, he could be exasperating—irascible and moody, with an ungenerous streak4while Amelia was quiet and calm and shunned confrontation. But she had always been attracted to risk—and besides, G. P. would handle all the ‘grubby’ details of her public career and make sure she earned enough money to fund her passion for flying. Amelia also knew that he respected her need for autonomy and independence—he was ‘the one person,’ she judged, ‘who could put up with me’—and theirs could be an amiable, even affectionate partnership.”