2024-08-17 - Daughter of the Sky by Paul L Briand, Jr. ====================================================== The Story of Amelia Earhart > Courage > > Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace. > The soul that knows it not > Knows no release from little things: > Knows not the livid loneliness of fear, > Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear > The sound of wings. > How can life grant us boon of living, compensate > For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate > Unless we dare > The soul's dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay > With courage to behold the resistless day, > And count it fair. > --Amelia Earhart I loved how Amelia Earhart defied stereotypes in all dimensions. She "colored outside the lines" so to say. Amelia Earhart experienced a lot of "push back," and yet became a national and global hero supported by a great number of people. She lived free even though not on a level field, or should i say level runway... This book has a lot of crunchy details for aviation nerds. What stood out to me was the unbelievable count of aircraft failures over the course of Amelia Earhart's life. It seems to me that the aircraft were spectacularly dangerous and unreliable. Perhaps it was not as mature a technology in that historical period. What follows are interesting quotes from the book. ... she had an insatiable curiosity about everything in life--ideas, books, people, places, mechanical things; she loved all kinds of sports and games, especially those "only for boys"; she fidgeted with an implacable unrest to experiment, to try new things; she teemed with a zest for living, paradoxically entwined with a gnawing and pervasive longing to be alone... "... Perhaps the fact that I was exceedingly fond of reading made me endurable. With a large library to browse in, I spent many hours not bothering anyone after I once learned to read." * * * Railey thought Amelia looked dissatisfied. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Aren't you excited?" Her answer came slowly. "Excited? No." Amelia took her leg off from the arm of the chair and sat up straight. "It was a wonderful experience, but all I did was lie on the floor of the fuselage and take pictures of the clouds. We didn't see much of the ocean. Bill did all the flying--had to. I was just baggage," she said, "like a sack of potatoes." "What of it?" Railey replied quickly. "You're still the first woman to fly the Atlantic, and, what's more, the first woman pilot to do it." Amelia was not convinced. "Oh, well," she said, "maybe someday I'll try it alone." * * * Amelia looked out over the waves; then she swung around quickly. "But someday," she said strongly, "I will have to do it alone, if only to vindicate myself. I'm a false heroine now, and that makes me feel very guilty. Someday I will redeem my self-respect. I can't live without it." * * * At the luncheons and dinners Amelia chuckled at some of the names the speakers used for the women fliers: "sweethearts of the air," "flying flappers," "angels," "sunburned derbyists." All they wanted to be called, AE insisted in vain, were "fliers," and, if necessary, "women fliers." The press called the race "Lipstick Derby," "Petticoat Derby," "Powder Puff Derby." The last one stuck and has continued to the present time. * * * Twenty-three years old, and with three hundred dollars in his pockets, GP [AE's husband] settled in the valley of the Deschutes River at Bend [, Oregon]. He was soon elected mayor of the town. * * * "If you follow the inner desire of your heart," she had said in a magazine article, "the incidentals will take care of themselves." * * * The restless urge. Better than any college education was it to experiment, to meet new people, to find out what made them tick. Adapt, please, anger, study: these were better than any classroom. The unexpected by adventure became the inevitable. Even the small things, if they were an invitation to hop out of the rut, meant just as much--as flying the Atlantic. * * * "I, for one," she wrote of the experience, "hope for the day when women will know no restrictions because of sex but will be individuals free to live their lives as men are free--irrespective of the continent or country where they happen to live." * * * The communications equipment, however, was at once delightfully modern and frustratingly primitive. Pilot and navigator had voice radio; but only the navigator had telegraphic key. Both could transmit and receive with ground stations, but not with each other. For intercommunications the navigator would have to use a cut-down bamboo fishing pole, with an office clip nailed to the end of it, to send messages written on cards up to the pilot; if he wanted to talk to the pilot, or if he wanted to dial the radio behind the pilot to a new frequency, he would have to crawl along the catwalk over the two big tanks between the cockpit and the passenger compartment. * * * "Hamlet would have been a bad aviator," Amelia once said. "He worried too much. The time to worry," she added, "is three months before a flight. Decide then whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying. To worry is to add another hazard. It retards reactions, makes one unfit." title: Daughter of the Sky author: Briand, Paul L., Jr., 1920-1986 detail: LOC: TL540.E3 B7 source: tags: biography,ebook,gender,non-fiction,travel Tags ==== biography ebook gender non-fiction travel