Amelia Lost: List 1

They were, wrote one aviation columnist, "as unerring as a bird dog sniffing a quail-scented breeze.”

“Highly independent and precocious — that’s our baby,” her mother wrote proudly.

The only problem was Grandmother Otis’s insistence on ladylike behavior. She fussed if Amelia got her clothes dirty and often corrected her table manners. But Grandmother Otis was especially particular about “ladylike deportment.”

“Ladies don’t climb fences,” admonished Grandmother Otis.

“Why bother to write out the steps if I can deduce the answer in my head?” she asked.

This was rare, remembered Muriel, "because [in those days] all nice little girls wore full-skirted dresses with ruffled pinafores over them.”

Twenty-five years later, Amelia remembered with "special glee” putting on her bloomers and heading outside "to shock all the nice little girls. It seems a trivial thing now, but it was tremendously daring in those strictly conventional days.”

Undaunted, Amelia returned to Atchison the following fall and decided to build her own roller coaster.

Their new affluence allowed them to hire a cook and a maid; to purchase season tickets to the symphony; to buy silk party dresses and fur-trimmed coats and a fine rosewood piano for the parlor.

Convinced he would squander the inheritance, she had changed her will just months before.

The girls were ecstatic.

Even though the school’s curriculum was rigorous and included subjects like chemistry, astronomy and logic, its administrators still believed that marriage was “the ideal vocation for women.”

Even though the school’s curriculum was rigorous and included subjects like chemistry, astronomy and logic, its administrators still believed that marriage was “the ideal vocation for women.”

"The airplane," reported one newspaper, "has arrived. No more is mankind tethered to earth.” But airplanes were still rudimentary.

Her time in Toronto had left her with “a yen for medicine,” and she enrolled in pre-med classes.