First Names: Amelia (Earhart) E-Book

Andrew Prentice

• Herausgeber: David Fickling Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: First Names
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 101

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

True life stories of the most amazing people EVER! Meet AMELIA EARHART, the world-famous daredevil pilot who was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.Find out:- How she tricked her dad into letting her fly,- What she had in common with a sack of potatoes- And how she became a fashion icon and all-time legend.Get to know AMELIA on First Name terms.

Leseprobe

For Lottie

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONINTRODUCTION – KANSAS, WINTER 19071 – AMELIA ARRIVES2 – AMELIA GETS A CHANCE3 – AMELIA TAKES TO THE SKY4 – AMELIA EARNS HER WINGS5 – AMELIA TAKES THE PLUNGE6 – AMELIA FINDS FAME7 – AMELIA GOES SOLO8 – AMELIA SOARS EVEN HIGHER9 – AMELIA FLIES THE WORLD10 – AMELIA’S FINAL FLIGHTINDEXCOPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION – KANSAS, WINTER 1907

It hadn’t been this cold since eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death, but that didn’t stop Amelia. She crouched over her sled and went through her pre-jump routine. Check the runners were free of ice. Check the snow was good. Check there weren’t no lollygagging slowpokes clogging up her run.

Check. Check. Check.

‘Tally-hoooo!’ Amelia jumped, landed hard on her belly and shot down the hill like a comet.

When it snowed – and in Kansas, snow meant deep, glorious, school-obliterating blizzards – all the children in town knew there was only one place to be. The hill that ran from the top of North Second Street was perfect for sledding.

Traditionally, only the boys ‘belly-slammed’. This meant they rode down the hill on their stomachs, head first. All the girls sat upright for a more ladylike trip.

Except for Amelia. She loved speed more than anything and didn’t care a fig for what anyone thought. Amelia had always been different – and she never got scared.

A cart pootled out into the middle of the road. The hill was so icy that Amelia couldn’t turn or stop. And she was going much too fast anyway. The horse had enormous blinkers, so it couldn’t see her coming. The driver couldn’t hear everyone’s screams of warning. Amelia had about three seconds to save her own life. Plunging towards certain death, Amelia didn’t blink. Instead she went faster, steering with her toes as she aimed for the only gap she could see.

Whoosh! Her sled zipped between the front and back legs of the horse so fast that the driver didn’t even notice.

Soon, plenty of people would take notice of Amelia Earhart. In fact within thirty years she’d become the most famous woman in the world. She was bigger than the biggest movie stars. Hotter than the sun itself.

Amelia, you see, moved on from sleds to planes. She became a pilot – and back then, in the great golden age of flying, pilots were top of the tops. They soared across the heavens like heroes from legends. Adventure, danger and death were never far away.

Amelia became the most famous pilot of them all. She broke records, crossed oceans and achieved things that no one – man or woman – had ever achieved before.

She stayed different – and she never got scared.

Well, that’s how it seemed to everyone who knew you.

So you worried when you were packing your suitcase?

But when your instruments gave out, your engine was on fire, your plane was iced up and you started tumbling towards the hungry waves … you weren’t scared at all then?

But why did you put yourself in all that danger, Amelia?

1 AMELIA ARRIVES

Amelia Mary Earhart zipped into the world on 24th July 1897. Her parents, Amy and Edwin Earhart, were delighted with their cheerful, fat little baby. They wrapped her up in white starched dresses and nicknamed her Millie. A couple of years later they gave her a sister, Muriel. No one ever called her Muriel, though. The youngest Earhart was soon much better known as Pidge.

Millie’s early years in Kansas and Iowa were happy ones. Her dad, Edwin, had a good job as a lawyer for the railways, though he dreamed of bigger things. In his spare time he tried to come up with an invention that would make his family’s fortune. He squandered hundreds of dollars to make a new signal flag for trains, but sadly his flag never fluttered. As hard as Edwin tried, he never really got anywhere, which must have been frustrating.

There were some advantages to having a father who was a bit out of the ordinary. Take Christmas for instance. Millie never wanted the girly presents she was expected to ask for. She wasn’t interested in dolls, or pretty dresses; instead she went for baseballs and fishing rods and sleds. And her father gave them to her. He believed a girl should have what she wanted, no matter what anyone else said. And one Christmas, Millie received a very unusual present.

It was a 0.22 calibre Hamilton rifle, to go with the packet of bullets she’d found in her stocking!

Not everyone was happy. Millie’s grandparents were rich and grand and they’d never approved of Edwin and his strange ways (they thought their daughter was too good for him). Grandma almost fainted with surprise.

Millie and Pidge had cleaned out the barn by Boxing Day.

Millie’s dad wasn’t just generous at Christmas. He took his family on amazing adventures as well.

The World’s Fair was not really like any fair that Millie (or even you) might have visited or seen before. It was more like a gigantic, crazy, newly built city, crammed with rides and shows and people from all over the world. You could go every day for a month and still never see the same thing twice.

You could visit the actual cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born, have your photo taken with Geronimo, the famous Apache war chief, or watch a real sea battle fought on the lake. You could ride double-dipping log chutes, visit a fake cloud that was someone’s idea of what Heaven is actually like and swoop about on the greatest merry-go-round ever built.

Even the food was mind-blowing. Some say the hot dog bun, the cheeseburger and the ice-cream cone were all invented at the fair.

When Millie came back home she was so excited about the rides that she made her uncle help her build a rollercoaster in their back yard.

Millie was always good at planning, but even more importantly for someone with big dreams, she didn’t just have ideas, she finished them off too. Her rollercoaster was greased with lard and in their test runs without a rider it ran pretty fast.

Amelia insisted on being the first person to try it. She climbed up high, sat herself inside the crate, took a deep breath and plunged.

It worked even better than she’d hoped. When she reached that little dip at the bottom, she didn’t just coast to a stop, she actually took off, zooming through the air!

She came to rest metres away, covered in dust, cackling with laughter.

‘Oh, Pidge!’ Millie said. ‘It’s just like flying. I’m going again.’

This was too much for Millie’s mum, who insisted that they take the coaster apart at once.

Dad’s Sickness

In a way, that famous trip to the fair was too much for Edwin too. To fund the holiday, he’d squandered money they didn’t have – just another bad decision in the series of bad decisions that he’d made and would keep on making. Soon, despite a promising career and a happy family, Edwin started drinking heavily.

Of course no one realized he had a problem, at first. To the children he was still their dad, as jolly and generous as ever. But the boozing was getting worse. He started making mistakes at work and drinking in bars all afternoon. He broke promises and lied. He quarrelled with his wife.

Edwin’s life spiralled quickly out of control and soon he was fired from his job. Millie and Pidge went away with their mum while he tried to sort himself out, but the family ran out of money and one winter they couldn’t even pay for firewood.

‘Dad’s sickness’ was awful for the girls. Not just because they lost their father, but because they’d lost their way of life too. Back then, the American Midwest was ruled by a strict moral code. You did the right thing. You went to church. You kept your head down and worked hard. You got married, and had children. You certainly didn’t lose all your money and have a drunk for a father.

The Earharts were shamed and shunned. Suddenly Millie was an outcast. She lost all her friends. The family moved to a different town and her father disgraced himself again, so she lost her new friends too. Fed up, Amy sent Edwin away again, and they moved to another house. Amelia ended up changing schools four times as a teenager.

Those years must have been very tough. But, funnily enough, Millie didn’t react to her troubles the way you might think. Instead of trying to fit in and be like all the other girls in the new towns she moved to, she stubbornly insisted on doing things her own way.

Not Fair For Girls

Millie must have stuck out like a sore thumb. The other girls all wore skirts, but Millie wore trousers whenever she could – they felt more comfortable. She tried to play basketball with the boys. She complained that her teachers weren’t teaching her properly. People always noticed how different she was, but she didn’t care. Look at her high-school yearbook:

The thing was, Millie was always different.

2 AMELIA GETS A CHANCE

Amelia turned eighteen in 1915. She’d nearly grown up – she didn’t call herself Millie any more – and she had big dreams. She didn’t want to just get married and have children, like most girls of the time. She wanted something else, though she wasn’t quite sure what it was. But with no money and a disgraced family it was hard to see how she’d ever escape to a better world.

Then, out of the blue, everything changed. Amelia’s upright, uptight granny died, and Amy Earhart inherited a bit of money. Suddenly she could afford to send Amelia and Muriel to a finishing school that would prepare them for college.

Amelia was over the moon – suddenly a bigger and better world had opened up for her just like that.

Even at her posh new school in Philadelphia, Amelia didn’t change her ways, and by the end of her first year she’d managed to turn the place upside down. One story says she got the school’s sorority system – a nasty, back-stabbing popularity contest – banned. She campaigned to have modern subjects like science taught to the girls. She played the ukulele at midnight feasts. She was elected class vice-president.

After years of struggle Amelia was flourishing; so it was a bit of a shock to everyone when she didn’t finish her second year at the school.

Amelia’s sister Muriel (hardly anyone called her Pidge these days) was at a different school, in Toronto, and during the Christmas holidays Amelia went to visit her. In Toronto train station, she was horrified when she noticed four one-legged soldiers helping each other down the platform. As soon as she left the station she saw there were many more terribly wounded soldiers – it was the first real evidence she’d seen of the First World War that was still raging in 1917. The soldiers’ pain and sacrifice shocked Amelia and stirred something inside her.

Back at school her easy life seemed like a sideshow. Amelia knew she had to do something, anything, to help those soldiers. Before long she’d quit school for ever.