could have been with a statement that rings true today, Helen replied: “One can’t help wondering what would have been the final outcome if the liberal science curriculum could have continued and could have expanded. It was ahead of its time; there’s no doubt about it. If we had in this country now great numbers of women who had the kind of background in science that that curriculum provided, we might not be in the difficulty that we’re in, in terms of our environment.”
The original intent of the liberal science degree—to answer the varied interests of women—had been lost to the winds of time. In the 1950s and into the 1960s, most Purdue female students would be enrolled in the School of Home Economics, and Dorothy’s dean of women successor, Helen, would carry the torch, ever vigilant in her attempt to break women out of the traditional mold.
In 1988, Dorothy Stratton, then age eighty-nine, spoke to a group of Mortar Board National College Senior Honor Society members. At that time, liberal arts at Purdue had been given a mouthful of a name: Humanities, Social Science, and Education (HSSE, pronounced “hissy”). It seems the University still feared repercussions if they called the offering “liberal arts.” Dorothy told the students in the audience her tale of liberal arts at Purdue and ended on a high note, saying, “I’m told … [our liberal science program] was the acorn into which the great school HSSE has grown. I think it’s great that Purdue now can give to its students the bachelor of arts degree.”
Purdue has walked a long and crooked path to a liberal arts degree since Amelia Earhart and Lillian Gilbreth encouraged its establishment, and Dorothy Stratton took on the initiative to beckon more women. Today, this field of study is available through Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts.
PART OF PURDUE’S ATTRACTION for Amelia was the school’s airport, the first to be owned and operated by a university. The campus airfield was made possible with land donated by Purdue Trustee David Ross. He believed that, along with the theory of aeronautics, Purdue should provide practical flight training. Amelia admired Purdue for offering reasonably priced flying instruction for students. In Soaring Wings, George Palmer Putnam wrote of his wife: “The matter of flying-lesson expense worried her. Whereas most girls were not able to earn as much money as boys—no one wanted feminine grease-monkeys around hangars to do the odd jobs which often pay a good part of a young man’s rudimentary training—they had to pay the same price as the boys for their lessons.”
Amelia especially valued how conclusions from laboratory tests conducted in the aeronautics department at Purdue could be immediately put into practice at the airfield southwest of campus. In George’s Soaring Wings, Amelia is quoted: “You see, my interest in aviation goes into every part of the industry. It isn’t flying alone. To be interested exclusively in pilots would be like being interested solely in the engineer in the railroad industry. It takes from forty to a hundred men on the ground to keep one plane in the air. That is from forty to a hundred jobs per plane—and I don’t think all those jobs need forever be held by men!”
It was George who first planted the idea of a “Purdue flying laboratory” in President Elliott’s mind. In the early part of 1935, Elliott asked George what he thought Amelia desired most in the field of research and education beyond the classroom. George recounted, “I told him she was hankering for a bigger and better plane, not only one in which she could go to far places farther and faster and more safely, but to use as a laboratory for research in aviation education and for technical experimentation.”
Amelia said of her husband, “Mr. Putnam, a practicing believer in wives doing what they do best, is an approving and helpful partner in all my projects.”
The January before Amelia came to Purdue, she flew from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California, in her Lockheed Vega in eighteen hours and fifteen minutes, the first person to make this flight. A few months later, she flew from Burbank to Mexico City in thirteen hours and thirty-two minutes for a new record. That fall, Amelia unassumingly drove her steel gray Cord onto Purdue’s campus with her neck scarf billowing and two newly acquired world records under her belt, the belt that held up her avant-garde slacks.
Amelia yearned to pilot the longest flight of her aviation career, a world flight. While on the expedition, she wanted to test human reactions to flying—responses involving diet and altitude, fatigue, the effect of the stratosphere on people conditioned to lower altitudes, and the differences in the reactions of men and women to air travel, if any.
In the autumn of 1935, Elliott held a dinner party at the University-owned president’s home, a gray stucco, Spanish eclectic-style house with arched windows and entrance canopy, located many blocks from campus on South Seventh Street in Lafayette. At the party with several Purdue-connected guests, Amelia talked of her dreams for women and aviation. Before the evening was over, David Ross offered to donate fifty thousand dollars toward the cost of a plane that would be Amelia’s flying laboratory.
Additional donations in cash and equipment were received from J. K. Lilly of Eli Lilly Drug Company, Vincent Bendix, and manufacturers Western Electric, Goodrich, and Goodyear. A total of eighty thousand dollars comprised the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research. The manufacturers hoped Amelia’s female example of flight would help their cause in promoting aviation to women, who at that time displayed “sales resistance” to air travel.
Last Flight is a book published in 1937 and written nearly entirely by Amelia from an accumulation of journals, logbooks, and letters scribbled in the cockpit as she flew her last flight over four continents. The narrative of her journey was also compiled from cables and telephone conversations. Originally, the book was to be named World Flight. Because she had promised her publishers that she would produce the manuscript promptly, Amelia mailed her written documentations to her husband from along her route as she traversed the globe. Amid the clouds, Amelia recalled her quest for the very airplane from which she wrote: “Where to find the tree on which costly airplanes grow, I did not know. But I did know the kind I wanted—an Electra Lockheed, big brother of my Vegas, with, of course, Wasp engines.… Such is the trusting simplicity of a pilot’s mind, it seemed ordained that somehow the dream would materialize. Once the prize was in hand, obviously there was one flight which I most wanted to attempt—a circumnavigation of the globe as near its waistline as could be.”
In the sky, her ship’s twin engines a droning backdrop, Amelia poetically penned her dream for girls: “I have harbored a very special ambition. The imaginary file card reads, ‘Tinkering For Girls Only.’ The plan is to endow a catch-as-catch-can machine shop, where girls may tinker to their heart’s content with motors, lathes, jigsaws, gadgets, and diverse hickies of their own creation. Where they may sprawl on their back, peering up into the innards of engines, and likely as not get oil in their hair.… And emerge somewhere in the scale between grease monkeys and inventors.”
Amelia’s thoughts were also on Purdue. While in the midst of her world-circling project cultivated by Elliott and Ross, she wrote, “The flight was to be the forerunner of activities at Purdue, where miraculously, there exists a real comprehension of the quaint viewpoint I have tried to indicate. Practical mechanical training, engineering and the like, is available without discouragement to women students there.… Which perhaps explains my enthusiasm for Purdue, womanwise as well as aviation-wise.”
Amelia took formal delivery of her Lockheed Electra on July 24, 1936, her thirty-ninth birthday. It was a standard commercial plane that Amelia had modified to her specifications. “It’s simply elegant,” Amelia said to mechanics who crowded around the gleaming all-metal craft, with its smooth curvatures and duel propellers poised to add sway like anticipant, graceful butter knives. “I could write poetry about this ship.”
President Elliott traveled to Los Angeles for a scheduled inspection of the flying laboratory in August. The “twin-motored ship” had been repainted in Purdue’s colors, gold and black.
Years later when Helen was in her eighties, she would give talks about Amelia and what it was like to know her and have her at Purdue. In 1984, Helen said, “When plans were announced for what turned out to be Miss Earhart’s last flight, there was tremendous interest