Mature Life Features

. . . with scooter and walker checks, yoga,

and billiards lessons

this morning,

and crafts in the afternoon making a relaxing

Thirsty Thursday look even more appealing.

= = = = =

T’other day,

a tablemate wistfully wished for a lobster tail,

so I said,

“Once upon a time,

there was this pretty little lobster. . .

= = = = =

Truth and Falsehood

About Legendary

Emelia Earhart

By Tom Morrow, Mature Life Features

Fables have had time to become confused with facts surrounding the life and loss of Amelia Earhart. So many myths surround the career of the famed flyer that the truth has become hidden in historical rewrites of her deeds leading up to her 1937 disappearance.

We know that she was born July 24, 1887, in Atchison, Kansas, where she apparently developed a passion for adventure at a young age and learned to fly.

In 1928, Earhart become the first woman to cross the Atlantic by airplane. She achieved celebrity status even though she wasn’t the pilot. She kept a log of the 20-hour-and-40-minute flight while a pilot and co-pilot handled the controls. Then, just four years later, Earhart piloted a Lockheed Vega 5B from Newfoundland to Ireland to become the first woman to make a solo non-stop transatlantic flight.

She set several other records, wrote best-selling books about her experiences, and was instrumental in forming The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots. It was during an attempt to fly around the world in 1937 in a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra that she and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared on July 2 Near Howland Island in the central Pacific Ocean.

In between all this, facts stumble over fiction.

Various theories, many of them flights of fancy, have been offered as to how she and her navigator disappeared without a trace. One of the most controversial stories about Earhart’s disappearance is the so-called survival theory. This version has her surviving World War II in Japanese custody and then somehow being repatriated back to the United States in 1945.

The idea that Earhart and Noonan were captured by the Japanese shortly after crash –landing in Saipan was chronicled in “Daughter of the Sky,” an Earhart biography by Paul Briand Jr. published in 1960. This prompted CBS newsman Fred Goerner to travel to Saipan four times to interview numerous native “eyewitnesses” and write his bestselling “The Search for Amelia Earhart” in 1966.

According to Goerner’s theory, Earhart made a forced landing on or near the Japanese-held Marshall Islands in the central Pacific. There reportedly is considerable evidence indicating the two might have been held as Japanese prisoners on Saipan in the Marianas Islands. In Donald M. Wilson’s “Lost Legend” (1993) as well as “With Our Own Eyes: Eyewitnesses to the Final Days of Amelia Earhart” by Mike Campbell (2002), other eye-witness accounts have been recorded.

However, no hard evidence exists to support any Earhart survival theory. Specifically, no evidence has been found that supports the idea that Earhart ever left Saipan, either documented or anecdotal. Earhart’s so-called “eye-witnessed” presence on Saipan remains a major area of contention. Some claim simply that Earhart and Noonan died at the hands of the Japanese and their bodies were buried secretly.

Still, post-war survival rumors continue. There was a bizarre story about her living in the Japanese Emperor’s Palace in Tokyo as Hirohito’s mistress. This story, combined with the theory of a government conspiracy to “repatriate” Amelia Earhart would have to have been an extremely secret matter.

Other questions survive. How could Amelia never connect with her family, especially her mother with whom she was extremely close? How could she never contact her sister Muriel, with whom she also was very close? Her secretary, Margot de Carie, said Amelia “would swim across the ocean to her home and family if she were alive.”

Contrary to popular belief, Amelia’s marriage to publisher George Putnam was not just a marriage of convenience. While their husband-and-wife business team was unusual for the time, the myth has been discredited in “Whistled Like a Bird,” (1997) by Sally Putnam Chapman (1997), Putnam’s granddaughter. She provides numerous letters and diary entries from Amelia and George that show the couple had a normal and loving marriage.