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East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart

Summary

The life and story of Amelia Earhart

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Key Takeaways
  1. The author spends a lot of time describing Amelia’s ancestors, their settlement in Kansas which was a hotbed for abolishment and pro-slavery tension and how this affected her desire for equality in opportunity
  2. Amelia was smart, healthy and independent from a very early age - singing herself to sleep by age 2. She was adventurous and would always love exploring and trying new things. Because of the restrictions placed on girls, her and her friends would often pretend to be boys and roughhouse with the  boys near them
  3. Her father, Edwin, eventually became an alcoholic and forced the family to move several times. He saw reality not as it was but how he wanted it to be and this often put him and his family in a difficult position. Amelia also had to take care of her mother for a while because of poor health. She didn’t have much time to simply be a teenager
  4. Amelia volunteered to help serve the wounded in Canada during WWI and this got her exposure to airplanes and flying. Her obsession grew with every air meet and once she moved out to California, her passion was stoked. She learned from some great teachers but she was able to recognize their flaws and limitations and either find someone else to learn from or went her own way. She soon became quite well known for her stunts and other flight tricks.
  5. Pasadena, Glendale and LA became the hotbed for everything related to avionics
  6. She went to Columbia but experienced some financial difficulty and health issues and at 28 was further away from a career than she was at 21
  7. A relative of steel baron Henry Phipps wanted to be the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic after Lindbergh accomplished the feat in 1927 but determined it was too risky. Instead, she wanted to choose an able women she thought could do it. She wanted someone young, educated, attractive and who had some flight experience. They chose Amelia
  8. Amelia was always a fan of poetry and had a tendency to retreat into it when uncomfortable or difficult situations arose
  9. Amelia received much attention and recognition after completing her first cross-Atlantic flight on the Friendship as a passenger. She gained incredible notoriety and was able to work at the Cosmopolitan magazine, fly and continue her social work
  10. Several years later she would fly transatlantic solo and be the first person to have flown over twice
  11. She married George Putnam of the famous publishing house. Though she was married, she made it clear that her career and ambitions would come first
  12. She used her name wealth and notoriety to get into many different new projects from helping start an airline (what would eventually become Northeastern Airlines) to designing her own line of flying clothes which were prominently displayed at Marshall Field’s stores
  13. Amelia got involved with Purdue to inspire women and as a technical advisor to the Department of Aeronautics
  14. Will Rogers, probably the most popular man in America, did more than anybody except Lindbergh to popularize flying
  15. Amelia began her round the world flight just before her 40th birthday. The trip was quite smooth until her leg from Papua New Guinea to Howland Island. The US Navy, her suspected lover Gene Vidal and her husband didn’t give up looking for her for nearly a year. Incredible conspiracy stories arose from the Japanese having captured and tortured her, to her being a spy for the Navy to study Japanese defenses and more but eventually it was agreed that she had crashed and her plane had sunk to the bottom of the Pacific in 1937
  16. Amelia was an inspiration in her generation and has been since her death. She set her mind and made her goals happen in a time when many of these goals were deemed inappropriate for women to pursue
What I got out of it
  1. Good biography on Amelia Earhart and her accomplishments - first solo female flight across the Atlantic, many other flight records and many successful ventures in business and academia

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