Day 3817: Amelia and art.

    

"Constant worry": Ukraine: photo, marker, digital.

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Amelia Earhart still fascinate us?

The missing aviator embraced the modern world—in technology, women's rights, and celebrity culture.

Amelia Earhart after her first flight as a passenger.

 
When the Friendship landed in the United Kingdom in 1928, Amelia Earhart  captured the public's attention, although she'd only been a passenger on the trans-Atlantic flight. Earhart wasn’t the only daredevil female pilot breaking records during the early days of aviation. Ruth Nichols flew faster. Louise Thaden flew higher. Earhart is the one who still captures our imagination?

 

 Earhart was determined to earn her adulation and prove—to men and women—that women could accomplish what men could. The more aviation feats performed by women, she wrote, “the more forcefully it is demonstrated that they can and do fly.” Four years after the flight of the Friendship, she flew solo across the Atlantic, becoming the second person to do so.
  

Earhart landed near Derry, Northern Ireland, where her arrival left a mark that was felt beyond aviation, according to the city’s Amelia Earhart Legacy Association. “Women didn’t drive then, but Amelia arrived in a plane,” explained Nicole McElhinney.

 

 

“Women didn’t wear trousers, yet she was wearing a flying suit.” (Indeed, the farmers who first encountered her thought she was a boy.) Instead, at a time when women’s suffrage was still new, she demonstrated what women could do.

“She wanted equal marriages and she wanted equal opportunity in all occupations and she wanted equal pay for equal work,” says Amy Kleppner.

That may be why she seems so modern. She was a pioneer—in the fight for women’s equality, in the world-changing development of aviation, and in crafting a public image during a new era of celebrity culture. And she did it all with an aw-shucks modesty that suggested that anyone could accomplish what she did, as long as they were doing it for “the fun of it.” (Follow how Earhart navigated both the skies and society in this book excerpt.) “She embodied many good values for people in general and Americans in particular,” says Mandel.

 

But perhaps the reason Amelia Earhart is still with us as an icon is that she vanished without a trace just short of a historic achievement. “She doesn’t die of old age, she doesn’t die of disease, she doesn’t die in front of our eyes even in an explosion,” says Boisseau. “She dies in the way most conducive to legend building—out of sight and somewhat mysteriously.”

 

On July 2, 1937, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared while attempting to become the first aviators to circumnavigate the globe at the equator. They were aiming for Howland Island, a speck in the Pacific, and couldn’t find it. They only had two more legs of their record-breaking journey to go.
  

Generations have puzzled over what really happened to her. Did she crash the plane and sink to the bottom of the ocean? Did she land on a deserted island and die a castaway? Was she captured by the Japanese? They’ve searched underwater and on deserted islands, in colonial archives and the New Jersey suburbs, and even in the basement of her childhood home for clues to the fate of the missing aviator—so far without any definitive answers.

“The mystery is part of why, anytime you talk about important women, she’s always in the conversation,” says Jacque Pregont, who coordinates the festival in Atchison. “I hope they never find her.”

 

For more information & a video, click here.

 

My connection to Amelia Earhart is in knowing that she taught my Mom to fly at Purdue University. She has always been a hero to me, and so I have used her in my artwork ... 

twice. 

In the fall of 1935, Earhart joined the faculty of Purdue University, teaching flight and serving as a from the autumn of 1935 until her disappearance in July 1937 as Consultant in the Department for the Study of Careers for Women and Technical Advisor in the Department of Aeronautics for Purdue.

 

 

 

A 5-minute video, Amelia Earhart, here.

 

Just because ...

 

Ballerina? little ringed plover Thanks Rad Nana!

 

 

Smiles for Monday ...

 

 

 

                             Thanks for coming by today ...