Landing Amelia: Amelia Earhart at Purdue University

In his more than twenty years as Purdue University’s president, Doctor Edward Charles Elliott made many changes to the West Lafayette campus, making it one of the country’s leading technical and engineering institutions. As the university’s leader, Elliott operated under what he called “a doctrine of chance.” He noted that “chance meetings, unexpected conversations, all play a more important part of an individual’s life than do most planned and carefully executed experiences.”

  

One of the “chance meetings” Elliott described resulted in a major coup for Purdue when, in June 1935, the president announced the appointment of a visiting faculty member as a career counselor for the university’s female students. The new addition to the staff had already achieved worldwide fame but passed into legend following her stint at the Hoosier school. Purdue had landed Amelia Earhart.

  

Although Earhart, dubbed “Lady Lindy” for both her resemblance to Charles Lindbergh and her accomplishments both as a flier in the 1920s and 1930s, spent only a short time at Purdue, both she and the university benefited from the relationship. Along with the mountains of publicity garnered from her presence on the faculty, Purdue also became the beneficiary of Earhart’s person-to-person talents as she encouraged female students to embark on careers normally reserved for men.

  

In Earhart’s case, her husband, George P. Putnam, convinced Elliott and the university to help fund a “flying laboratory” for his wife’s use. Through the Purdue University Research Foundation, and donations from Hoosier businessmen David Ross, J. K. Lilly Sr., and others, the university established in April 1936 an Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research that aided the aviatrix in purchasing the twin-motored Lockheed Electra airplane Earhart used on her ill-fated “Round-the-World” flight, from which she vanished in July 1937.

  

Already famous for her daring aerial exploits, including being the first woman passenger on a transatlantic flight and the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Earhart and Purdue’s paths first crossed in September 1934 when she addressed the fourth annual “Women and the Changing World” conference sponsored by the New York Herald Tribune. Present at the conference to speak about “New Frontiers for Youth,” Elliott stayed to hear Earhart’s remarks on aviation’s future and the role women might play in its advancement.

 

Intrigued by the flier’s speech, Elliott arranged a meeting with Earhart and Putnam. A born promoter and a person who regularly hobnobbed with America’s elite, Putnam was immediately impressed with Elliott’s style. “He is a lean, powerful man who combines the brisk attributes of a dynamo with the important qualities of scholarship and human vision. He has a habit of referring to himself with humorous depreciation, as just a Hoosier schoolmaster, but not gentleman from Indiana ever knew his way about more competently than he,” said Putnam.

  

After the trio dined at the Coffee House Club in New York, Elliott came straight to the point. According to Putnam’s version of the meeting, Elliott told Earhart: “We want you at Purdue.” Earhart expressed little surprise at the offer, merely replying, “I’d like that if it can be arranged. What would you think I should do?” The university president replied that he envisioned Earhart’s role as passing along to Purdue’s approximately eight hundred female students “the inspirational opportunities” open to them in America’s changing society. “I think you could supply some spark which would help to take up the lag between the swift eddying of the world around modern women and the tardier echoes of the schoolroom,” Elliott remarked to Earhart.

  

With the offer made the three spent the next two hours developing the idea into a workable plan. With her busy schedule, Earhart could not be a full-time faculty member at Purdue but would attempt to spend at least a month at the university during the school year as a career consultant for women. For her efforts she received from Purdue a $2,000 salary. Along with guiding women students toward new careers she also served as a technical adviser in aeronautics to Purdue, which was, at that time, the only university in the country equipped with its own airport.

   

To Earhart, however, the “problems and opportunities of these girls [at Purdue] were quite as much my concern as aviation matters” when she agreed to take the job. Writing about her time at the university in her posthumously published book Last Flight, Earhart admitted that she had “something of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to modern feminine education.” She noted that women, especially those whose tastes are outside the normal routine, often did not get a fair chance to develop their talents. “I have known girls who should be tinkering with mechanical things instead of making dresses, and boys who would do better at cooking than engineering.” Purdue, which she called “my kind of school, a technical school where all instruction has practicality,” offered her a chance to test those beliefs.

  

In announcing Earhart’s appointment on June 2, 1935, Elliott termed her acceptance as “gratifying to the university and significant to education.” Emphasizing the flier’s interest in educating women for the future, he added that Earhart represented “better than any young woman of this generation the spirit and the courageous skill of what may be called the new pioneering. At no other point in our educational system is there greater need for courageous pioneering and constructive planning than woman’s education.” Earhart, the Purdue scholar believed, as what he called “a creative artist in the great art of human adventure,” could help the university successfully attack the “most important modern unsolved problem of higher education—the effective education of young women.”

  

Earhart, fresh from a lecture tour that saw her give twenty-nine speeches in one month, arrived on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus to assume her duties on November 6, 1935. The Lafayette Journal and Courier heralded the famous flier’s arrival in Indiana with a page-one headlines declaring “Amelia Earhart Leaves Air to Guide Purdue Girls in Careers.” With Earhart scheduled to be at the university only three weeks, the newspaper noted that she would “have little opportunity for leisure during her sojourn on the campus.”

  

The reporter’s prediction quickly came to pass. In her first few days at Purdue, Earhart attended a luncheon for the home economics department, served as guest of honor at a Mortar Board luncheon, met the student body at an afternoon tea in the Memorial Union building, and spoke at a special convocation at the Memorial gymnasium.

  

Given workspace in the dean of women’s office and living in South Hall, Earhart became a familiar sight on campus. Students flocked to the flier’s side, especially at dinnertime, and tried not only to imitate her style of dress (which was casual, to say the least), but her mannerisms as well. “These were the days when table manners were considered somewhat important,” noted Helen Schleman, in charge of the dormitory where Earhart stayed. “Amelia’s posture at table, when she was deep in conversation, was apt to be sitting forward on the edge of her chair—both elbows on the table—and chin cupped in hands. Naturally, the question was ‘If Miss Earhart can do it why can’t we?’ The stock reply was ‘As soon as you fly the Atlantic, you may!’”

  

Earhart managed to fit in well with dormitory life at Purdue. Marian Frazier, who lived in the same dorm as the flier, remembered that it seemed as though Earhart was always “terribly busy,” noting that she heard Earhart working away at her typewriter as late as midnight. Frazier also recalled studying one night when Earhart suddenly appeared and asked to borrow a pen for a short time. The excited Frazier could not keep the news to herself so, when her celebrity neighbor returned the borrowed pen, she was greeted by a roomful of female students, all wanting to catch a glimpse of the celebrated pilot.

  

The flyer’s casual style and dress (slacks instead of skirts) became the envy of Purdue’s young women and raised others’ eyebrows. Robert Topping, in his history of the university, reported that some faculty wives—the “local guardians of mores and morals in the conservative 1930s atmosphere of West Lafayette”—were scandalized by one incident when Earhart, dressed in her usual slacks, went into town one afternoon and visited Bartlett’s Drug Store. Not only did Earhart have the temerity to wear improper clothing, she further shocked the wives by sitting (unescorted by a man) at a stool, ordering a soda and smoking a cigarette. “Such hussy behavior was barely tolerable in a conservative campus town,” Topping wrote.

  

Along with facing the faculty wives’ wrath, Earhart also had to endure questions from some faculty members about whether she was qualified for her job. A. A. Potter, Purdue’s dean of engineering, said that he did not think Earhart belonged at the university because she lacked the proper education (although she had enrolled at Columbia University as a premed student, she never graduated). Acknowledging Earhart’s courage, Potter nevertheless told a reporter that the flier “had too poor an educational foundation to utilize her courage and that was her disadvantage.” Another faculty member, a woman, had an answer ready for Potter: “The dean is a scholar and he doesn’t understand that you have to motivate kids before you can get them to be scholars.”

  

Despite these challenges, Earhart stuck to her main task—counseling Purdue’s women students about potential careers. Toward that end, she prepared a questionnaire seeking answers from them about such issues as why they were in college, if they wanted a career, how marriage might affect their choices, and what part a husband might play in their life. Of those responding to the questionnaire, Earhart found that approximately 92 percent indicated that they wanted a career. According to Putnam, his wife wanted to find out about the student’s after-college plans to help university officials in reconstructing courses so that they might be more beneficial. “She thought too that such exploration might help the students themselves to clarify their own thinking, to agree with themselves on a general objective, perhaps even a specific one,” Putnam noted.

  

Earhart discussed with Purdue administrators the possibility of creating a “household engineering” course for those women who wanted to remain homemakers. “Many a stay-at-home girl,” said Earhart, “would welcome practical training in what to do when the doorbell fails to function, the plumbing clogs . . . and the thousand-and-one other mechanical indispositions that can occur about the house, often easily enough fixed if one has rudimentary knowledge how to fix them.” Disliking discrimination between men’s work and women’s work, she also pointed out the need for male students to gather some experience in homemaking, noting that most men “enter into marriage with little training in domestic economy, know little about food and how it should be prepared, little about child training and their duties as parents. What, I wonder, is going to be done about all that.”

  

In her personal dealings with student, Earhart, using her own experiences as a trendsetter, painted no rosy picture of instant acceptance for women entering new careers. Marguerite Coll, who studied electrical engineering at Purdue, recalled Earhart clearly explaining to her and two other female students “what some of the obstacles are in the way of women who want to go into what’s always been known as a man’s field. She was encouraging though. She didn’t see why, if a woman had special talents along that line, she couldn’t gout and show ’em!” 

  

That kind of advice worried some people. According to Putnam, one Purdue professor declared that if Earhart kept on encouraging the university’s female students to pursue careers they “won’t be willing to get married and lead the quiet life for which Nature intended them.” In one regard the male professor might have been right. As an unidentified female student proclaimed after Earhart’s stay at the university had ended: “No one every pepped us up so.”

  

Talking with students, Earhart developed what she called “surface impressions” about the university that she shared with the school’s administrators. She noted that there appeared to exist at Purdue rigid boundary lines between different disciplines. “It seems to me there should be much more interchange of instructors and subjects between these, which would lead to the education of people rather than to the selected specimens numbered and tagged Home Ec[onomics] or EE [Electrical Engineering] or what-not,” said Earhart. She added that lowering the walls between schools might help eliminate the “condescending attitude” on the part of male students toward their female counterparts. “Today,” said Earhart, “it is almost as if the subjects themselves had sex so firm is the line drawn between what girls and boys should study.”

  

Although she only spent a short time at the university, Earhart’s ties to Purdue played a key role in securing for her the money and equipment necessary for attempting what became her final flight. On April 19, 1936, the university announced the establishment of the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research, made possible by the Purdue Research Foundation. With contributions totaling $50,000 from such philanthropists as J. K. Lilly Sr. and David Ross, and later donations of cash and equipment from such companies as Western Electric, Goodyear, and Goodrich, Earhart purchased a “flying laboratory”—a twin-motored, ten-passenger Lockheed Electra aircraft. The plane, built in Burbank, California, included such special features as extra gasoline tanks for extended flight, an automatic pilot, and a two-way radio.

  

The announcement received nationwide attention, as newspapers from New York to Los Angeles trumpeted Earhart’s “flying laboratory” to their readers. Noting that “aviation is a business to me and my ambition is that the project shall provide practical results,” Earhart first planned to use the plane for a year to gather research material on such areas as speed and fuel consumption, oxygen use, radio communication and navigation, and the effect of prolonged flight on humans. After completing her research, Earhart then hoped to make an “interesting” flight in the all-metal Electra. “But circumstances,” she noted, “made it appear wise to postpone the research and attempt the flight first.”

  

The flight Earhart so offhandedly mentioned turned into a monumental undertaking—an attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world. Once that feat had been accomplished, the plane would become the Purdue Research Foundation’s property. Royalties from a book Earhart expected to write about the experience and moneys from exhibiting the aircraft were to have been used by the foundation to further pure and applied scientific research in aeronautics. As preparations for the flight were being made, Earhart was asked time and time again why she had decided to attempt the flight. Her answer came right to the point: “Because I want to.” She called the trip a “shining adventure, beckoning with new experiences, added knowledge of flying, of peoples—of myself.” Also, Earhart noted that with the flight behind her, she would become more useful to herself and to the aeronautical program at Purdue. 

  

On June 1, 1937, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from Miami, Florida, in the Electra on the first leg of a planned around-the-world flight. The trip proceeded smoothly until the difficult 2,570-mile flight from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island. The two never reached their destination. In spite of a massive search, no trace could then be found of the plane and its crew. On the day she disappeared Earhart had been scheduled to deliver a lecture at Purdue on the subject, “What Next in the Air?” Two weeks after Earhart disappeared, Elliott telegraphed Putnam the following message: “George, she would not want us to grieve or weep; she would have been a heroine in any age.”

  

Although Purdue’s investment had crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, the university received tangible benefits from its association with Earhart, including nationwide publicity. Also, Purdue’s female students had a unique opportunity to interact with a person who typified women’s changing role in modern society. As for Earhart, her time at the Hoosier university offered her a chance to test both her skills as a pilot and educator. Looking back at that short period in his wife’s career, Putnam said that Earhart’s job at Purdue provided her with “one of the most satisfying adventures of her life.”