by Doris Rich; Smithsonian Institution Press; 309 pages.
Amelia Earhart was one of the leading aviators in the country when her plane went down over the Pacific Ocean in 1937. She was also one of the most famous women in the world, and Doris Rich explores the costs of that fame in this new biography of the woman known as Lady Lindy.
As a young woman, Earhart clipped newspaper articles about the professional achievements of career women. But after dropping out of college to nurse Canadian soldiers wounded in World War I, she traveled around the United States without a clear ambition of her own. All that changed on Christmas Day, 1920, when she attended an air show in Long Beach, California. Her first flying lesson (less than two weeks after the show) convinced her that “life was incomplete unless I owned my own plane.” She rose to fame as the first woman to fly the Atlantic, as a passenger in 1928 and as a solo pilot in 1932.
Earhart spent the last decade of her life breaking speed and distance records while engaged in an endless string of speeches, interviews, and magazine articles. At first she made public appearances in order to earn money for flying; by the late 1930s she was flying in order to keep up the demand for her lucrative appearances. Though Earhart hated the fame that made her career possible, writes Rich, she “played on it relentlessly as a platform on which to fight for her ideals of equality for women, international peace, and a world where flying would be a commonplace.” Though unwilling to call herself a feminist, she was driven to show that women could do anything men could.
In her career as an aviator, Rich writes, Earhart’s “courage was far greater than either her knowledge of aircraft or of navigation.” Her speaking schedule made it difficult for her to maintain the skills necessary to fly the newer airplanes. Some of her crash landings were so serious that she was lucky to have survived them. But the risks never deterred her. “As far as I know, I’ve got only one obsession—a small and probably feminine horror of growing old,” she said before her final flight, an attempt to circle the globe. “I won’t feel completely cheated if I fail to come back.” The strength of Rich’s book is that it defines Amelia Earhart by her courage, generosity, and determination, and not by the way her life ended.
Packard
The Pride
by J. M. Fenster, photographs by Roy D. Query; Automobile Quarterly Publications; 208 pages.
“Emil Fikar was not exactly a gangster,” J. M. Fenster begins her essay on the 1929 Packard Speedster 626 Runabout, “but he did live in Chicago in the Twenties. And he did sell a prohibited beverage.” What Fikar sold was near beer, that dispiriting concoction whose other name, 3.2 beer, reflects its meager alcohol content. But near beer was just as illegal as whiskey during Prohibition, and Fikar “did require a car that would outrun anything a sheriff might drive.” To this end Fikar went to Buresch Motor Sales on Ogden Avenue one day in 1928 and asked about the new 626 Speedster, the one Packard’s publicity people were offering to “the select few who frankly love the hum of racing car power throbbing to be unleashed at a toe-touch.”
“This may or may not recall the essential Emil Fikar,” writes Fenster, but he certainly was happy with his automobile. These Speedsters were built to order—none ever saw the inside of a showroom—and Fikar picked up his new car that autumn at the Packard Proving Grounds outside Detroit. At Fikar’s toe-touch the car hit 110 miles per hour (10 mph above the promised top end), and the new owner paid out the five-thousand-dollar base price and an extra ten for the deluxe hood ornament.
Eugene Fikar fades from history now, thirty years go by, and a car enthusiast named Montgomery Young comes across a Packard roadster derelict in a Lake Forest, Illinois, garage. Knowledgeable friends told Young to beware: the company had never built a car that had so large an engine compartment over such a small wheelbase (the car’s regal snout took up fully half of the 126.5-inch wheelbase). But Young bought it anyway, although he, too, had his doubts about the car’s authenticity. Then one day he spotted the dealer’s name on the identification plate on the fire wall. Buresch Motor Sales was still in business, and Mr. Buresch immediately remembered the car. In fact, he still had the bill of sale.
What Young had, it turned out, was one of just seventy-four speedsters sold on the 626 chassis. Today it’s the only survivor. Five thousand manhours of work have brought it back to a condition that Fikar would approve of, and it has come to rest at the Henry Ford Museum, not far from where the original owner pushed it to a screaming 110 miles per hour sixty years ago. This Packard is one of thirty-two in Packard: The Pride; it appears both in the photograph a proud Fikar took the moment he got it home and in Roy D. Query’s modern views. In an age when good color photography is commonplace, Query’s pictures are spectacular. The cars have all been driven to sympathetic settings, and they more than hold their own against sunsets and seascapes and great big country houses.
The first Packard in the book is the first Packard: the Model A Single-Seat Roadster that James Packard drove out of his shop on November 6, 1899. The 1,610,000 Packard cars that followed set a standard of quality—subdued, powerful, sculpturally superb—that even the great, flashy contenders like Duesenberg couldn’t eclipse. The example in this book mirror the history of the company from its birth until its failure in the 1950s, but what distinguishes this volume from other good automotive books is the care the author has taken to pay attention not only to the cars but to the people who drove them.
In her brisk, amusing text Fenster tells of Packard owners ranging from George Patton to King Faisal II of Iraq. Fenster is perfectly at home with technical matters—of Fikar’s Speedster, for instance, she tells us “the Custorm Eight engine was fitted with a highcompression cylinder head and a highlift camshaft, which raised the output from 106 bhp at 3200 rpm to 130 bhp”—but we learn at least as much about what kind of car the Packard was from the glimpses of the likes of Mrs. Glenn Stewart, who had her serenely majestic 1926 LeBaron Landaulet equipped with a safe. When Mrs. Stewart stopped by the bank, the tellers came to her.
Great American Lighthouses
by F. Ross Holland, Jr. ; The Preservation Press; 346 pages.
There is no such thing as an ugly lighthouse. One of the editors here saw his first—the “Little Red Lighthouse” under the George Washington Bridge in New York City—at the age of six, returning from an afternoon of grandmothers and holiday turkey. It was a particularly beautiful day, one of those fall afternoons when the sun falling over New Jersey turns the Hudson River into a shimmering golden plate, and since then he has never been able to pass a lighthouse without stopping to admire it.
It may well be the same for other Americans. In the National Trust’s new guide to our nation’s greatest lighthouses, Ross Holland, a retired historian for the National Park Service, takes the reader on a tour through thirty-three states and more than three hundred sites. We learn, for example, that the first permanent lighthouse in America was built in Boston Harbor in 1716, after merchantmen petitioned the General Court of Massachusetts for a “Light Hous and Lanthorn on some Head Land at the Entrance of the Harbor of Boston for the Direction of Ships and Vessels in the Night Time bound into the said Harbor.” When the keeper there drowned in a boating accident, the young Benjamin Franklin mourned the loss in a poem.
The book is divided geographically, with listings of lighthouses for New England, the South, the Gulf Coast, the Great Lakes, and the West. Pictures are included to identify the beacons, but the story behind the lighthouses and the people who kept them is the author’s principal concern. We are told of Kate Walker, who managed the Robbins Reef Lighthouse in New York Harbor from 1886 until 1919, saved the lives of some fifty sailors, rowed her children to school every day, and didn’t retire until she was seventythree. We read the story of the USS George M. Cox, which ran aground near the Rock of Ages Lighthouse in Isle Royale, Michigan, in 1933. The keepers there braved darkness and fog to get all 125 passengers and crew off the sinking ship and into the lighthouse, where they lined its 130-foot spiral staircase until the foul weather abated and they could be evacuated.
And we find out that the lighthouses themselves have had a hard time of it. The Aransas Pass Lighthouse, built in 1857 to guide ships into Corpus Christi Bay, was badly damaged during the Civil War and its top twenty feet had to be replaced. During the repairs the usually balmy Texas coast was assaulted with a cold front so severe that “fish, thrown ashore by the hundreds, were frozen, and birds of all sorts sought refuge in the tower … where they perished.” Though the repairs were effected, time and erosion shifted the opening of the bay so that by 1952 the station had to be moved to a new location.
Lighthouses aren’t as common today as they once were—they’ve been displaced by smaller, less expensive sea buoys—but there are still hundreds of them dotting our coastline. For those who stop to look at them, this book will add immeasurably to the visit.
