A Tale of Two Sisters ｜ Episode 4 ｜ Amelia & Muriel Earhart ｜ Free Documentary History

The pursuit of aviation was a preoccupation which evaded humans until the early 20th century. But from the moment the Wright brothers made the first controlled flight in 1903, this new technology took off in an unimaginable way. Society was also changing. Women were beginning to demand more rights, and aeronautics was an area where women could flourish. They were by no means on an equal footing with men, but as flight was in its infancy, it didn't have a long history of male dominance. One pilot who embodied female aviation endeavor was Amelia Earhart. By the time Amelia came along, there were very few women flying, but she was just attracted to it as a career. It was very difficult for her to do what she wanted to do, because there was not a lot of money in it for women. Through sheer drive and determination, she would become the most recognizable aviator of her time. She was one of the most famous people in the world. People hung on her every word and followed her activities. She had a message about aviation. She had a message about women. The focus on her own career was mirrored by the man she would end up marrying. She liked him, and they worked together well. He was naturally drawn then to Amelia, and what she could represent, what the two of them could do together. And so she finally did realize, we have a good enough friendship here, and I think we can make this work. Amelia would leave a lasting legacy which would inspire determined female aviators of future generations. Amelia was able to reach people further from just being an aviator. She resonated with them as a courageous and very honest person. Amelia, known in her family as A.E., had a champion in her younger sister Muriel, who would be instrumental in keeping Amelia's memory alive, a role Muriel's daughter Amy Kleppner would continue after her death. People seemed to think she was around all the time, but she wasn't. I mean, she was very busy with her own life, and she only visited very rarely when she was on the East Coast for some other reason. She wrote the book because she did think she was in a unique position. She knew that she was the only one who really had had that close association with A.E. To this day, many are still trying to solve the puzzle of what actually happened to Amelia. Countless theories have been explored, but still, her disappearance is an open-ended mystery. On 2nd July 1937, the S.S. Itasca waited in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just off Howland Island, 2,000 miles from Papua New Guinea. The ship was supposed to supervise the landing and refuelling of a Lockheed Electra before it set off for Hawaii, on its penultimate journey in the circumnavigation of the globe. The pilot was Amelia Earhart, and the navigator Fred Noonan. They never arrived. The Coast Guard ship Itasca was waiting for her at Howland Island. They were going to wait and help her when she arrived, manage the fuelling of the aircraft and setting her off for the next leg of the flight, which would be to Hawaii. Unfortunately, the communications plan was not perfect. They could hear her, but she could not hear them. There's desperation on both sides. They know from the signal strength that she is coming, but they can't see her, and she can't find the island. It was a headline story for quite a while, and then gradually it died down. There have been many theories as to what happened to Amelia, but none have been able to give a definitive answer. The search for Amelia has been going on since her disappearance. After the war in the early 50s and then into the 60s, a lot of theories started to spin up again, and I think it was just kind of interest as to what happened to her. We know that she disappeared off the face of the earth, one of the most famous women of the 20th century. So what happened? How to figure this out? There are three main theories, that they just missed their objective, had to be somewhat off course, and that they ran out of fuel and crashed and sank, which seemed to most people the most plausible and was the most popular view for quite a while. Then there were some stories that suggested that she had been forced down somewhere and captured by the Japanese. There was never any really solid evidence for this. There were many contradictory views. And then there's a third theory. They flew on to Nick Maroro, which was at the time called Gardner Island, that they might have survived a few days. We started out investigating aviation mysteries, but avoiding the Amelia Earhart mystery. I reasoned that she probably just ran out of gas looking for a tiny island in a big ocean, and the whole thing just seemed like a media circus, and I didn't want any part of it. In 1988, two of our members approached me. They said, we have a theory about Amelia Earhart. And they pointed out that the last thing that Earhart said in flight over the radio, she said she was flying on a particular line and running north and south. And the first thing we found out is this was not a new Amelia Earhart theory. This is the oldest theory. This is what the U.S. Navy thought happened in 1937. And then there were all these radio distress calls that were heard for night after night after night after she disappeared, and radio bearings were taken on those calls. And the best ones cross near this island. Well, this is all making a lot of sense. I guess we need to go and check out that island. Well, there was no big silver airplane lurking in the bushes. But there were airplane parts in the abandoned village that was on the island. The events surrounding her disappearance have an almost mythic status, akin to the legend of the Loch Ness Monster. It's understandable that people really still want to know what happened to her. In that day and age, it really wasn't unusual for people to disappear in a flying accident. Well, I understand that people still want to know what happened. I think that they really just need to move on a bit and just be appreciative of who she was. What we're still missing is whatever one wants. That final piece, call it a smoking gun. Whether something like that still exists out there, I don't know. Behind all the mystery and fame were two sisters. One internationally famous and the other quietly supportive. Both were staunch advocates of equality in society. Amelia Mary Earhart, the eldest sister, was born on July 24th, 1897, in the small Kansas town of Atchison. Two and a half years later, her parents, Edwin and Amy, had a second daughter named Muriel, a younger sister for Amelia. Muriel was the future aviator's constant childhood companion. And from the beginning, the pair had adventure on the mind. Hours were spent climbing trees and riding horses. When the hot Kansas sun became too much, they would seek shelter in the library of their grandfather, losing themselves in the tales of Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas. I think my grandmother instilled in them a great love of reading. So reading was always very important to them. They didn't do a lot of the usual little girl activities. They were both tomboys and liked sports. They played baseball and at one point asked for a football for Christmas. They were very active. Growing up in Atchison was typical for middle America at that time. If you were in a small town, there's a little level of society. They were kind of in the upper level of that, but they were outside playing with all their friends, you know, doing the normal things that you do in a normal small town in the Midwest like that. This stable period in their lives would, however, come to an end. My grandfather was an alcoholic and that became more of a problem. He was a lawyer, but he had issues, he had problems, and eventually they all moved to Los Angeles. He couldn't hold a job, which was one of the reasons they moved around a lot. And I think finally my grandmother decided she couldn't deal with it. Amelia and Muriel's adolescent years were dominated by these new struggles. The sisters coped with the uncertainty by throwing themselves into their studies. Both were bright and determined students. In 1919, they left home and went to college. Women were excluded from the Ivy League schools, but women's colleges had developed as a result of that, so that there were alternatives. Well, Amelia was always interested in studying and going to school and finding something that she wanted to do. She was never the type of girl that was just waiting to get married and start the family life. She went to Columbia and took some pre-med classes and she decided, although she really was interested in medical research to some extent, that she would never want to practice medicine. She thought she'd be really bad at it, so she gave that up. She just realized this was not the profession for her. Amelia's parents briefly reconciled and asked their daughters to join them in California. Muriel was unwilling to abandon her studies and refused to go, but Amelia joined them out west. She was 23. She had no plans and no clear idea of what her future might hold, but if she was waiting for a spark to ignite her life, she would not have to do so for very long. The spark would cause an explosion, one which her sister Muriel would be instrumental in sustaining even after Amelia's death. At the time of Amelia's move to California, air shows were becoming popular attractions across the US. Pilots showed off their skills in the latest flying machines and there were even short trips on offer for braver visitors. It was at one such show that Amelia first formed the obsession that would consume her entire life. There was a lot of barnstorming, a lot of introducing people to flying. You know, it was past the experimental stage. There was no other real use for aircraft yet. There were no businesses really except for people flying airplanes, showing them at air shows, things like that. She went to a fair with my grandfather. Some flyer was taking people up on short rides and she did that and apparently that convinced her that that was what she really wanted to do. Amelia was now determined. She would learn how to fly. She began lessons at a small airfield in Los Angeles. Her tutor there was a woman named Netta Snook. Netta was just a year older than Amelia and the pair took to each other at once. By the time Amelia came along, there were very few women flying. Netta Snook was kind of a model for her. It seemed to me that they just hadn't figured how to keep women out and they would have if they could have but they really couldn't because there was nothing to prevent them from taking lessons and if they qualified for a license, they qualified for a license. They had a good relationship and they understood that there were few women in the business and they were both determined to be a part of it. By this stage Muriel had completed her studies and joined the family out west. She knew what flying meant to her sister. So in 1921, she lent Amelia her savings. With it, Amelia was able to buy her first aircraft, a Kinna Airster. After three years of flying the Airster, she was forced to sell it due to her parents' divorce. She and Muriel followed their mother back to Massachusetts. Sporadically flying when she could, it wasn't until April 1928 when her grounded career really took off. A year earlier, Charles Lindbergh had become the first person to fly non-stop across the Atlantic. The crossing in his plane, the Spirit of St Louis, had made Lindbergh an international sensation. Now it was Amelia's turn. There was a woman named Mrs Guest who had wanted to fly an aircraft across and be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. Her family objected and so the promoters started looking for another woman that might go in her stead. Amelia came down and was interviewed by G.P. Putnam. G.P. for some reason has had a really bad press and I think it's really been unfair because people have repeated stories and attitudes without ever having met him as far as I can tell. Putnam was from a family with a publishing business and he himself was a bit of an explorer and he had done a lot of traveling as a child. He'd gone out to Oregon, he ran a newspaper in Bend, he was elected mayor of the town. He can't have been such an awful person. He really loved promoting people that were going out and doing new and different things and trying different types of treks and flights and things like that. So he offered to become her publicist and help her make her way in aviation. More experienced men were to pilot the plane and Amelia would be little more than a passenger. Nevertheless, she quickly agreed. On the 17th of June 1928, her plane Friendship left Newfoundland and headed across the Atlantic. A little over 20 hours and 40 minutes later, Amelia's plane landed at Buryport, a small town in South Wales. Miss Earhart's aircraft, Friendship, taxis toward English Shore at Southampton after first landing in Wales. There's Miss Earhart in flying talks. Her life changed forever. It was a dramatic moment in history. It doesn't make a lot of sense because she was only a passenger but still she was the first woman to actually fly across the Atlantic and at this point in 1928, it was still very dangerous to do so. With long-distance flying, there's always anxiety and I think as far as the family goes, they knew it was dangerous but I think they'd accepted the fact that this is what she wanted to do. She toured in Europe there for a little while before she came back and that was the beginning of her way of learning how to make a career in aviation. She sensed right away that things had changed and she would be able to use this opportunity. Amelia enjoyed ticker-take parades in New York and Boston, which the proud Muriel attended too. But the crossing brought Amelia more than just fame. She and the handsome publisher G.P. Putnam had formed a deep bond during preparations for the flight. Their relationship blossomed in the months afterwards. Putnam was a business partner as much as a romantic one. He took every opportunity to spread Amelia's fame, even sidelining other pilots he thought might threaten her standing as the preeminent woman aviator. She was a strong woman. She would not have bought into that if that wasn't what she wanted to do. The fact is he was enormously helpful to her and she might not have had the career she had had she not had him take over the management and the publicity and arranging the lecture tours, all the things that were necessary for her to keep flying because it was expensive. Amelia and Putnam were determined to further her career in aviation, despite the majority of women at the time being expected to go down the more traditional route of raising a family. Amelia's sister Muriel had married in June 1929 and later had two children. I think she was not altogether happy in her marriage. My mother didn't have the same strong feeling about being independent. She married because she wanted to be married and have children and I think her marriage in some ways at that time was more typical that women did more or less give in and to some extent they took a servant's role when they served the meal and did all the child care and all the food preparation and the rest of it. That was what was expected. Perhaps it was these difficulties which put Amelia off marriage. For a long time she resisted Putnam's proposals. Finally she relented and on the 7th of February 1931 Amelia and Putnam were married in Connecticut. Unusually for the time she did not take his name. She remained Amelia Earhart. She really wasn't sold on marriage. She was sure that it would ruin her career in some way or another. This was what she had always felt. They really believed that marriage was a serious problem for a woman who wanted to accomplish anything on her own. I mean she thought of it as kind of a trap, kind of a cage and this is why she specified when she did marry that she was not going to give up her freedom completely. I think she didn't want to have children. Children would have interfered. She was a great advocate of birth control. In fact she gave some birth control advice to my mother which would have taken me out of the picture. Amelia again with Stolz and Gordon is given a big city welcome. This time it's New York who lauds Amelia as first woman to fly across Atlantic. Despite Amelia's fame and undeniable determination many in the aviation industry in fact had doubts about her abilities as a pilot. They thought she was far more adept at making the headlines than making a landing. For her part Amelia was well aware of her limited role in that famous flight across the Atlantic. She got zero from the friendship flight, nothing. The two men were paid, she was paid nothing. So that it was very difficult for her to do what she wanted to do because there was not a lot of money in it for women, probably for men either except the difference was men could get into commercial aviation. They could be commercial pilots whereas women were excluded from that. When Amelia landed in Wales in that 1928 flight as a passenger and started to receive all these accolades she really felt that she didn't deserve it. And she vowed then that she would have to make her own flight at some point so that she could actually deserve this kind of accolade and be respected as a pilot in her own right. Amelia's drive and ambition to fly across the Atlantic would not stop at this accomplishment. She would go on to break other speed and distance records constantly proving that being a woman was by no means a hindrance. Her thirst for bigger and more epic adventure would seal her name in history but it would also have tragic consequences. At Hatboro, Pennsylvania in 1930, Amelia becomes first woman to fly an auto gyro. Married to famed publisher here helping her into strange craft Amelia is Mrs. George Putnam now. But as far as planes are concerned she's still Amelia Earhart of the airlines who will give flight to anything with wings. This is sort of ship Lady Lindy has never flown before but she'll fly it just the same. Amelia was under pressure to maintain her status. She had little time for her family whose requests for financial help were just another unwanted burden. Muriel who had helped finance Amelia's first plane was deeply hurt. I think she did become more and more controlling. What she did to help my mother was to loan my parents the money they needed to buy their first house and she viewed this as a business transaction and I think she thought it was not properly acknowledged. My grandmother who was a really lovely person had a really serious problem with money. She had extravagant tastes and couldn't manage money properly. AE gave her money and provided for her support and resented the fact that my grandmother gave away some of that money so there was a little bit of resentment there. Financial matters were always secondary as Amelia's focus was on her career. She was only a passenger when she first crossed the Atlantic and her next goal was to be the pilot. With a keen sense of marketing GP Putnam fixed the departure to precisely five years after Lindbergh's flight. He also insisted the plane she flew was left nameless. Nothing would be allowed to distract from Amelia. As she set off from Canada it would be a leap into the unknown. There was probably anxiety in the family about all her flights because there was always a risk. Long distance flying was risky. During this intense flight she battled mechanical difficulties, strong winds and icy conditions. Her original destination was Paris but after 14 hours and 56 minutes of flying she landed in a field in Culmore, Northern Ireland. On May 20th 1932, just five years after Lindy had shocked the world with his famous flight, she successfully spanned the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Londonderry, Ireland. The first woman to make the flight solo. When asked if she had been scared she replied with warm good humor, it would sound more exciting if I only could admit being shockingly frightened but I honestly wasn't. She was always fighting the fuel fumes, that sort of thing and it was an ordeal, there's no doubt about it. The only other person to have done it was Charles Lindbergh so that put her in quite a high realm there. From that moment on she was well known, she had actually performed this flight on her own and she was taken seriously and then was able then to translate that into a career and it was just what her hopes had always been. Having safely landed in Ireland, Amelia travelled Europe where she was greeted by notable dignitaries and crowds of adoring fans and on her return home she was given a hero's welcome. Following this momentous flight Amelia would go on to conquer several more aviation feats. There would be no stopping her. Amelia Earhart, America's heroine in the days when aviation meant adventure, readied her plane for another challenging exploit. The only woman to fly the Atlantic alone, she now planned her first trans-pacific flight from Honolulu to California. Flying from Hawaii, Amelia would arrive safely in California where she was met with an eager press and a cheering crowd. The Atlantic flight I had ice conditions and general storm. On this flight, really no bad weather at all except a few little rain squalls. I saw the moon and stars most of the night. By 1935 her name was among the most recognised in the world. A still grander goal was in Amelia's sights however, a circumnavigation of the globe. She planned a gruelling route along the equator, the longest ever attempted. Her plane would be the Lockheed Electra, capable of flying up to 4,500 miles without refuelling. The Electra was a good airplane for the era. She thought it would be good to have two engines. It had room for her, it had room for her crew. She had an airplane that was far superior to the ones that she'd flown previously. Much more powerful, much more equipment than the earlier ones did. In March 1937, Amelia set off from California on the round-the-world record attempt. She flew to Hawaii and, after a rest day, planned to fly on across the Pacific. But as Amelia accelerated down the runway, she lost control. The landing gears snapped and the plane slid to a halt on its belly. It seemed at the time fortuitous that Amelia was unhurt. However, a more severe crash could have ultimately saved her life. After rapid repairs to the aircraft, Amelia took off again from California on the 21st of May 1937. This time, she headed east. Amelia Earhart, with her navigator Fred Noonan, said goodbye to George Palmer Putnam, her husband since 1931. The huge Lockheed Electra, dubbed by Amelia the Flying Laboratory, sailed off on a planned round-the-world trip. Her aim, ostensibly, was to gather weather information for use in a class she planned to teach in aeronautics at Purdue University. A month later, she had circled the world to reach Papua New Guinea. The great Pacific Ocean stretched out ahead of her, separating Amelia from the finish line by 7,000 miles. A reunion with her younger sister Muriel, with her husband G.P. Putnam, and with the rest of her family back home was almost in sight. The most difficult leg of the journey lay ahead. On the morning of the 2nd of July 1937, Amelia and her navigator Fred Noonan took off from Ley in Papua New Guinea. Their next stop was Howland Island, a barren dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just 2.5 miles long. Precise navigation and expert piloting would be needed to find it. They fuelled up the plane and they knew that they had a long, long trip, about 2,500 miles, that was going to take anywhere from, say, 16 to 20 some hours. The hard part of that trip was finding the island. You're out in the middle of nowhere in this part of the Pacific Ocean. There's just nothing out there. There's no shipping lanes. There's no one else flying. So you really have to be spot on to know where you're going and have everything right. After almost 20 hours of flying, they reached the point where they expected to find Howland Island, but they could not see their landing. Nor could they see the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca, which was stationed by the island and looking out for Amelia's plane. The Coast Guard ship Itasca was waiting for her at Howland Island. There was fuel waiting there for her. They were going to wait and help her when she arrived, manage the fuelling of the aircraft and setting her off for the next leg of the flight, which would be to Hawaii. They were listening on the radio to receive her messages and to communicate with her. Unfortunately, the communications plan was not perfect. They could hear her, but she could not hear them. A flurry of confused mist and half-distorted transmissions shot back and forth between ship and plane, but consistent two-way communication was never established. In the skies above the vast waters of the Pacific, Amelia was running out of fuel. 20 hours and 14 minutes after takeoff, one last confirmed radio message from Amelia was received on the Itasca. And then silence. After her last radio transmission, about 8.45 in the morning, they waited for a while and they kept trying to contact her. And then they signalled back to others back in Hawaii that they had lost her signal, they couldn't find her. And immediately after that, the Coast Guard and the Navy started gearing up for a search to try to see if she had come down somewhere. Now, there really aren't many places that she could have come down on land, but they searched waters, they searched some of the islands that were within a few hundred miles and did all they could. It was a massive sea air search. Of course, there was a lot of anxiety. My mother was certainly hopeful during the two weeks or so when the Navy was searching they would find her and that she would come back. Day by day, the hope would fade for the family of Amelia. The whole world, too, were waiting for news of her. The epic undertaking of her venture to circumnavigate the globe, along with the dramatic disappearance, would have far-reaching implications. The repercussions of which would transcend her physical endeavour and place Amelia in the realm of myth and legend. British freighter, the Coast Guard and the Navy sped to the search. The battleship Colorado steaming out from Honolulu under forced draft. The aircraft carrier Lexington, with 3,000 men and 72 planes aboard, races into the distant Pacific to join the greatest searching party in the history of aviation. On the 18th of July 1937, the search for Amelia Earhart was abandoned. The official conclusion was that her plane had run out of fuel and ditched in the ocean north of Howland. No wreckage or bodies were ever found. The years that followed would see Amelia disappear from public consciousness and as the theatre of World War II began, more pressing matters occupied the headlines. After the fallout from the war had settled, Amelia Earhart would re-enter public consciousness and speculation as to what became of her began to gain traction once again. There were some stories that emerged after the Second World War that suggested that she had been forced down somewhere and captured by the Japanese. There were many contradictory views. We know that she disappeared off the face of the earth. The search went on for about two weeks and it was called off in the middle of July. So at that point in time, it was fairly clear that she had not survived. She and Newman had not survived the flight. Not everybody accepted the official verdict that she simply crashed and sank. It's the intuitive theory. It's kind of the default explanation. If there's no evidence that something else happened, yeah, it's like I used to think. Tiny island, big ocean, limited fuel, what the heck? Of course, there's a ton of evidence that something else happened. Rick's theory was that Amelia Earhart did make land on that morning in 1937, that she lived as a castaway for a period of weeks or even months before finally succumbing to the elements on the exposed Gardner Island, known today as Nicomororo, hundreds of miles to the south of Howland Island. A plane did circle the reef-bound atoll during the 1937 search. Its crew even noted signs of recent habitation. These, however, were attributed to a local work party. The island was never investigated again. The efforts of Tiger have since established that no such group was active at the time, and more evidence was to emerge that Amelia had managed to reach land. As the search scoured the Pacific, there were reports of radio transmissions from Amelia's plane. Ships and islands in the region picked up new signals on her frequency. The airplane's manufacturer, Lockheed, said, wait, if you guys are hearing radio calls from this airplane night after night, that airplane's not floating around in the water. It's on land. Not only that, it's on its wheels because she's got to be able to run an engine to recharge the battery that the radio depends upon. Well, is there anything that had happened on Gardner Island at that time that could be attributable to Earhart? Well, as a matter of fact, three years after Earhart disappeared, when the British had gotten around to putting people on the island to set up a colony, the bones of a castaway were found. On a remote end of the island, the remains of a fire, dead birds, dead turtle. This is a campsite. Castaway had tried to survive and it ultimately failed. There are parts of a woman's shoe and parts of a man's shoe and a box that had once contained a sextant navigational instrument. It was the same kind of sextant that Fred Noonan used as a backup instrument. We know that. We haven't found anything yet that can be absolutely conclusively linked to Earhart. There's no one thing. The problem with that theory is that I don't believe she had enough fuel to get there. When she said she was out of fuel, to be able to fly that distance further down is nearly impossible. She does not say, I'm out of gas, I'm going down. Mayday, mayday, nothing like that. Those who are sure that she crashed at sea make the assumption that because nothing further was heard from her that she must have gone down. Immediately after that broadcast was made, an engine quit. She was so busy setting up for a landing at sea that she didn't have time to make a distress call. I have to believe that she and Fred Noonan got very close to the island based on the strength of her radio signals. However, they just couldn't find it. Unfortunately, I think that they ran out of fuel and had to ditch the airplane in the sea and that airplane would not have floated for very long. They would have gone down fairly quickly. The exact circumstances that led to Amelia's disappearance may never be confirmed. Any definitive answer would certainly come too late for her sister Muriel, who died in 1998. My mother found it very painful when people kept coming and saying they wanted to do searches. Probably four, five, six million dollars over the ocean searches around Howland and Nicamarara. I've always thought it's money that could be much better spent. Nothing is being gained by this. There's no... You're not going to learn anything useful to aviation or to anyone else by doing it. Rather than dwelling on her death, those closest to Amelia understood that looking at her life could give something back to society. Amelia's widower, G.P. Putnam, who had been instrumental in her career, would work closely with Amelia's sister Muriel on a series of biographies. He also took financial responsibility for Amelia's aging mother. G.P. took over the support of my grandmother and provided her with money and I think he showed great forbearance and great patience and really great generosity because he did support her for many years. Publishing her own book about Amelia, Muriel would also continue to speak publicly about the life and achievements of her elder sister. She knew that she was the only one who really had had that close association with A.E. I don't think she really got tired of it. She continued to feel love and admiration for A.E. as long as she lived. In writing about the life of the world's most famous aviator, Muriel has helped redress the balance in aviation, which quickly became another male-dominated industry. Men had the advantage that got their aviation training and service. That training allowed the men to get the job as commercial pilots and women were not able to do that. She went on to be able to use her presence to support women in college, taking engineering courses to suggest that women could have careers and maybe have an alternative to family life if they chose. The tale of these two sisters can be viewed as a story of the society they were living in. A society where women were slowly being allowed into different industries but at the sacrifice of family life. Well, I think they chose different lives because they had different ability. I think my mother was a really good teacher but she also wanted to have a family and she was happy with the choice she made. There isn't any way really to compare the one life with the other. One was relatively ordinary and one was quite spectacular.