How Amelia Earhart became an aviation icon — and enduring mystery

Amelia Earhart had already established herself as an American icon when she vanished over the Pacific Ocean 87 years ago attempting to circumnavigate the globe at the height of her fame.

While her disappearance remains an unsolved riddle, potentially groundbreaking sonar images of a hazy plane-shaped mass in the Pacific has interest in the trailblazing girl from a tiny Kansas town soaring to new heights among experts and the public alike — including at her childhood home.

“We’ve had people calling in … I had someone come in yesterday who said the news motivated him to come in,” Mika Schrader, assistant director of the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum in Atchison, told The Post.

“Even people who have written books about her are getting in touch with us again. It’s interesting. It’s fun to talk about her legacy and all the things she did,” Museum Director Heather Roesch added.

“There’s a connection to Amelia here,” she said of the museum, which was Earhart’s maternal grandparents’ home and where she was born to Edwin Stanton Earhart and Amy Otis Earhart on July 24, 1897 — six years before the Wright Brothers made their first flight.

“But [we have people] also wanting to learn about her legacy, her career, her disappearance — there’s really something here for everyone.”

While finding Earhart’s plane would resolve one of the most enduring questions of the 20th century, it would have little impact on her legend status.

“It would definitely close a mystery that’s been here for 87-odd years. Her disappearance has confounded people for generations,” Schrader said. 

“But I think what we want to stress is that there’s so much more to her life as well. The disappearance is a very important part of her history but Amelia did so many other great things.”

Young Amelia Earhart

From a young age, Earhart and her younger sister Muriel showed a keen sense for adventure, playing outside constantly, climbing trees, exploring caves and sledding. 

“Amelia was very tomboy-ish … and kind of broke the mold of what was expected for girls at the time. Granted, she did come from a long line of women who broke the mold,” Schrader said, noting that Earhart’s mother was one of the first women to climb Colorado’s Pikes Peak.

While she would consider Atchison her true home, her family moved around the Midwest as her father, who worked for the railroads, found work. Earhart eventually graduated from Hyde Park High School in Chicago in 1916.

She developed her interest in aviation after World War I broke out.

“(Earhart) said as soon as she left the ground she knew she had to fly. She kept trying to fly and work it into her life.”

Mika Schrader

After visiting her sister in Toronto, Earhart became a nurse at an airfield hospital, meeting wounded pilots who told her stories about flying in the war.

“Was definitely a pivotal moment in her life. It was World War I, she was about 20 to 21 years old. She took that position and thought she would become a doctor,” Schrader said.

“She was able on her off time to see airplane pilots for the first time really doing these training maneuvers,” she continued. “There’s stories she tells in the books she wrote about [the pilots] trying to scare her and another nurse’s aide by flying low over them. 

“The other girl, it kinda spooked her a little bit, but Amelia took it in stride and was in awe of what the planes could do,” Scharder said.

“I did not understand it at the time, but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by,” Earhart would later recall.

After the war, she returned to live with her parents, who had relocated to California. At a state fair in Long Beach in 1920, she finally left the ground for the first time.

“Her father encouraged her to take a ride in a plane at a fair, and he paid $10 for that ticket,” Schrader said, noting that is roughly $140 today.

“She said as soon as she left the ground she knew she had to fly. She kept trying to fly and work it into her life,” Schrader said.

‘A name for herself’

Earhart began taking piloting lessons from another female aviation pioneer, Nita Snook, who was only about a year older than her, for about $1,000 per lesson. She paid for flying lessons by working as a truck driver and stenographer among other odd jobs — and became just the 16th woman in the US to receive her pilot’s license.

Earhart moved to Boston after falling on financial troubles — forcing her to sell her first plane — and worked at the women-run Denison House helping immigrants.

Word about this rising female pilot reached publicist George P. Putnam, who, after Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, was organizing another trip with a woman on board.

Earhart took the chance to accompany pilot Wilmer Stultz on the transatlantic 1928 Flight of Friendship from Newfoundland to Wales as a passenger, which thrust her into the limelight.

“She became the first woman in the air across the Atlantic Ocean and that in and of itself skyrocketed her to fame in a way that I don’t think anyone was quite prepared for — Amelia especially. But after that she didn’t leave the spotlight,” Schrader said.

In 1931 she married Putnam, who would become her life-long promoter.

She would solidify her place in history in 1934 becoming the first woman and second person ever to pilot a plane, her single-engine Lockheed Vega 5B, nonstop across the Atlantic by herself.

“There were a lot of other women at the same time seeking the same feat,” Schrader said.

“One reason that particularly motivated her was because Charles Lindbergh was the first person to do that in 1927… and she was often called ‘Lady Lindy’ based on her similar stature to him and she really wanted to show that she could make a name for herself,” she added.

Earhart was showered with awards — including the Distinguished Flying Cross — when she returned to the US, where she became a household name and a growing inspiration for young women.

“I think that made her feel so good that she could do that, as a woman, by herself. I think that the goal after [being a passenger on the 1928 flight] was to say ‘I can fly’ because she didn’t have the opportunity then,” Roesch said.

In her new celebrity, Earhart became close friends with first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The two women were among the most photographed women of the era.

Earhart continued breaking aviation records for speed and altitude, and became the first person to fly across any part of the Pacific from Honolulu to Oakland.

She toured the country giving speeches and later became a visiting professor at Purdue University, teaching women interested in careers in aviation and science.

“She was very well-known for her speaking abilities, for her ability to relate to audiences and individuals and we are really fortunate that she lived in a day where some of those things were recorded,” Schrader said.

Fateful flight

After months of press build-up and intensive organizing, Earhart would embark on her notoriously ill-fated flight across the world in 1937 — her second attempt.

Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan left Miami heading east in her specially made Lockheed 10-E Electra on June 1 and made several stops along the way in South America, Africa, India and Southeast Asia. Along the way, she sent information back to her husband to be compiled into her next book.

On July 2, Earhart and Noonan set off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, with plans to refuel on Howland Island in the middle of the Pacific before continuing their journey to Honolulu and their final destination of Oakland.

The pair faced a strong headwind in Lae, and were heading toward Howland when Earhart’s radio transmissions eventually went silent. The US Navy and Coast Guard conducted a 16-day search for the missing duo without success, and Earhart was officially declared dead on Jan. 5, 1939.

She was just 39 years old.

Her plane and remains have never been found, sparking decades of speculation about what went wrong and where her plane may have crashed.

The sonar images released by Deep Sea Vision last month from its $11 million expedition in the Pacific Ocean — which depicted a mass CEO Tony Romeo believes may be Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra — has offered a new lead the aviator’s family calls “promising.”

The 16-person venture launched in September from Tarawa, Kiribati, a port near Howland Island in September. Romeo and his brother Lloyd are planning another expedition to get better pictures of the wreckage.