Amelia Mary Earhart

Amelia Mary Earhart was last heard from over the central Pacific on July 2, 1937, running low on fuel and looking for Howland Island. She was thirty-nine. A Los Angeles court declared her dead on January 5, 1939. This memorial keeps the date the Lockheed Electra went silent. She was born in Atchison, Kansas, on July 24, 1897, in a bluff-top house that still looks down on the Missouri. She learned to fly when the war was over and the fields were still grass. In 1928 she crossed the Atlantic as a passenger; in 1932 she crossed it alone — the first woman to do so — and then kept taking records the way a mechanic takes measurements. She wrote for people who would never leave the ground and treated a cockpit as a job women were entitled to hold. She married George Palmer Putnam in 1931 and signed her name like a girl from Atchison even on letterhead from both coasts. The search ships came back with the sea. Atchison kept the rooms. The flight log ends in weather and radio static, not in a myth she asked anyone to tell.