See how it looked in 1932

Earhart Flight Is Epic of Girl Who Had Job to Do and Did It

Long and Quiet Preparation Preceded Great Effort That Was to Answer All Questions as to Flier's Ability to Conquer Atlantic Alone

By Janet Mabie | Staff Writer of The Christian Science Monitor

The story of Amelia Earhart is the story of a girl who early meant to amount to something in the world and set about doing so.

She took good schooling and chose social service for an avocation before she had the training which would give her a high place in it now as a profession if she wanted it. Such people as Dr. Mary Simkhovich, the resident at Greenwich House in New York and Miss Lillian Wald of Neighborhood House, and Miss Julia Stimson in Washington, would testify that she possesses a remarkable and sensitive insight into the needs and dreams of those we lump together under the somehow inept label of the under-privileged.

Miss Earhart is endowed with a calm, even, optimistic temperament. Her low-pitched voice is an index to a great poise. She makes small neat gestures and she gets things done after the manner of the person who saves energy of exclamation and clamor for the energy of applied thought and effort.

In her own inscrutable way this flight has been made Amelia Earhart’s calm, measured and good-natured answer to a lot of things.

When she flew the Atlantic before with Stultz and Gordon a lot of people sniffed and minimized her effort. They said she gathered garlands she did not earn. They said she was not a flier at all.

When she wrote magazine articles about aviation, people said idly that the magazines bought her name and that someone wrote the copy.

When she crashed twice people laughed, saying: “There, you see?”

Amelia Earhart never takes tantrums over criticism. She knows how to bide her time.

This flight has been in prospect for a long time.

She and her husband, George Palmer Putnam, New York publisher meant, in the early stages of preparation that there should be no tumult and shouting before the flight was made. If the flight succeeded, well and good. But no dividends of approbation would be expected or received until the venture was an accomplished fact.

Those who know her, will know that Amelia Earhart made this flight for herself. Not for an ephemeral fame or for the whispering tickle of ticker tape thrown down on her as she comes back up Broadway some day not long hence, not for money, not for anything but to do something she believed could be done, and by her as well as by anyone else, something no woman has done before, something it would be forever a personal satisfaction to have done and done well.