20 hrs., 40 min.

In re-reading the manuscript of this book I find I didn’t allow myself to be born. May I apologize for this unconventional oversight as well as for other more serious ones—and some not so serious?

I myself am disappointed not to have been able to write a “work”—(you know, Dickens’ Works, Thackeray’s Works), but my dignity wouldn’t stand the strain. I can only hope, therefore, that some of the fun of flying the Atlantic has sifted into my pages and that some of the charm and romance of old ships may be seen to cling similarly to the ships of the air.

A. E.

INTRODUCTION

By Marion Perkins

Miss Perkins is Head Worker at Denison House, Boston’s second oldest settlement, with which Amelia Earhart has been identified for two years.

A tall, slender, boyish-looking young woman walked into my office in the early fall of 1926. She wanted a job and a part-time one would do, for she was giving courses in English under the university extension. Most of her classes were in factories in Lynn and other industrial towns near Boston. She had had no real experience in social work but she wanted to try it, and before I knew it I had engaged her for half-time work at Denison House. She had poise and charm. I liked her quiet sense of humor, the frank direct look in her grey eyes.

It was some time before any of us at Denison House knew that Amelia Earhart had flown. After driving with her in the “Yellow Peril,” her own Kissel roadster, I knew that she was an expert driver, handling her car with ease, yes more than that, with an artistic touch. She has always seemed to me an unusual mixture of the artist and the practical person.

Her first year at Denison House she had general direction of the evening school for foreign-born men and women. She did little teaching herself, but did follow-up work in the homes, so necessary to the success of such an undertaking. In her report of her year’s work after we had planned her next year’s program, which did not include the evening school, she wrote: “I shall try to keep my contact with the women who have come to class; Mrs. S. and her drunken husband, Mrs. F.’s struggle to get her husband here, Mrs. Z.’s to get her papers in the face of odds, all are problems that are hard to relinquish after a year’s friendship.”

In the spring of 1927, Denison House was giving a country carnival for the benefit of the house. For such a good cause, Amelia consented to fly over Boston and drop publicity dodgers. She first said that she would do this if her name could be kept out of the papers! We had to use some persuasion to keep her from flying incognito. The first day of the carnival, the Boston police up and down Boylston and Tremont Streets were perhaps too amazed to try to arrest a man and woman, apparently Italian peasants just landed, who drove back and forth in a queer yellow car, stopping now and then to grind a tune on a battered hand-organ and to distribute handbills.

The organ grinder was Amelia Earhart.

Youth, keeping a heart, a soul and a body that are wide open to all the rich opportunities of life—that is part of Amelia’s creed. How many times I have heard her say that, to her, one of the biggest jobs of the social worker in a settlement is just that—to give boys and girls the experiences that will keep them young and that will develop a zest for life. Last fall, she came to Denison House as a resident and as a full-time staff worker. She has directed the work of girls from five to fourteen years and has had general charge of the pre-kindergarten. Jokingly we have sometimes called Amelia the “official secretary,” for she is the secretary of the staff, of the Board of Directors (to which she was elected this year) and to the House Committee of the board. She has an unusual flair, in a meeting, for the gist of the thought and expresses herself in writing with accuracy and originality. Last year and this, Amelia has been a member of an inter-settlement committee working on child-study records.