Discovering YOU Magazine Draft October/ November Special 2024 Issue | Page 52

DID YOU KNOW?

You will find that Amelia Mary Earhart was born July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kansas, but disappeared July 2, 1937, near Howland Island, central Pacific Ocean. She was an American aviator and one of the world’s most celebrated and the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Her disappearance during a flight around the world in 1937 became an enduring mystery, fueling much speculation.

Anyway, Earhart’s father was a railroad lawyer, and her mother came from an affluent family. While still a child, Earhart displayed an adventurous and independent nature for which she would later become known. After the death of her grandparents, the family struggled financially amid her father’s alcoholism. The Earharts moved often, and she completed high school in Chicago in 1916.

Article by Michael Joseph Lynch

After her mother received her inheritance, Earhart could attend the Ogontz School in Rydal, Pennsylvania. However, during a visit to her sister in Canada, Amelia became interested in caring for soldiers wounded in World War I.

Now, in 1918 she left junior college to become a nurse’s aide in Toronto. After the war, Earhart entered the premed program at Columbia University in New York City but left in 1920 after her parents insisted that she live with them in California. There she went on her first airplane ride in 1920, an experience that prompted her to take flying lessons.

In 1921 she bought her first plane, a Kinner Airster, and two years later she earned her pilot’s license. In the mid-1920s Earhart moved to Massachusetts, where she became a