SPEAKER_04 0:14

Welcome to the Pan Am Podcast, brought to you by the Pan Am Museum in Garden City, New York. This podcast and our museum are dedicated to celebrating the legacy of the world's most iconic airline, Pan American World Airways. My name is Tom Betty, and I'm the host of this program. Thank you for joining us. The Pan Am Museum Foundation is a nonprofit organization. Please visit our website for more information at the Pan Ammuseum.org. Again, our website is the Panamuseum.org. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. If you are using Apple Podcasts, please consider leaving a review. It will help others discover this program. This podcast is sponsored by the generous personal support of Mr. Adam Aaron, the CEO and chairman of AMC Theaters. He is also president of our sister organization, the Pan Am Historical Foundation. If you're not familiar with Pan Am, welcome. We are honored to have you here and for you to learn about what we're all about. If you already know of Pan Am, worked for or flown on the airline, or just love our history, it's good to be with you again. So with that, let's get this episode in the air, so to speak. Welcome aboard your Pan American jet clipper. Her new book, The Aviator in the Showman, Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and The Marriage That Made an American Icon, published by Viking in 2025, has been named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, and The New York Post, and was a New York Times editor's choice. Drawing from a trove of new sources, including previously undiscovered audio interviews, Shapiro strips away nearly a century of mythology to reveal the real woman behind the legend and the complicated marriage that shaped her fate right up to her final flight. But before our interview with Lori, let's set the stage because the Amelia Earhart story provides important context to what was going on in this time period. Her story unfolds squarely in the middle of one of the most consequential decades in history, both in terms of the rise of aviation and the Great Depression. To understand why the Amelia Earhart story belongs in a Pan Am podcast, you have to understand what was happening in American aviation in the late 1920s. Because Earhart and Pan Am didn't just exist in the same era, they were orbiting each other from nearly the beginning. Juan Tripp founded Pan American Airways in 1927, the same year Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic solo and rewrote the world's imagination about what flight could be. Tripp was a Yale-educated former Navy flyer and one of the most audacious businessmen of the 20th century. His vision was simple to state and nearly impossible to execute. He wanted to fly the oceans commercially, not as a stunt, but as a scheduled passenger service on time every week. Pan Am's first route was modest, a mail run between Key West and Havana. But Trope was already thinking bigger. By January 1929, Pan Am had opened a gleaming new international terminal in Miami and was inaugurating passenger service to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Havana, Cuba. It was one of the most defining moments of early American commercial aviation. Standing on that new Miami tarmac on January 9th, 1929, was a who's who of the aviation world. Charles Lindbergh, now serving as Pan Am's technical advisor, Wantrip himself, and a young aviator who had become an overnight celebrity just seven months earlier after crossing the Atlantic as a passenger aboard a plane named Friendship. And that person was Amelia Earhart. According to accounts drawn from Cuban period sources, including the Havana magazine Bohemia, Tripp saw Earhart as the ideal celebrity passenger to help launch his Caribbean expansion, and invited her aboard Pan Am's flagship aircraft, the Christopher Columbus, a Falker F-10A captained that day by Pan Am's chief pilot Ed Music for the inaugural flight from Miami to Havana. Think of it for a moment. The most famous woman in aviation on the first Pan Am passenger flight to Cuba from Pan Am's new terminal in Miami as Tripp's invited guest representing a symbol of what commercial aviation could be. What is remarkable is that Tripp, Lindbergh, and Earhart were all on that Miami tarmac together that January morning, three of the defining figures of the aviation age, watching Pan Am's next chapter take flight. This was not a coincidence. Tripp understood something that Earhart's future husband and manager George Putnam also understood. That aviation in the late 1920s was as much about narrative as it was about technology. You didn't just build the routes, you built the story around the routes. And Amelia Earhart was the best story in aviation at this time, outside of Limberg, the most famous man in the world. Throughout the 1930s, Earhart and Pan Am continued to move in parallel, both in the business of making aviation seem not just possible, but compelling to an American public still learning to trust the idea of leaving the ground. Earhart promoted commercial aviation to women, an audience airlines desperately wanted to reach. Pan Am provided the infrastructure, expertise, and institutional credibility that no individual aviator could replicate alone. The relationship grew more practical as the decade went on. When AirHarp began planning her round-the-world attempt, Tripp personally instructed his company to extend whatever assistance her team needed. Pan Am's Pacific infrastructure by 1937 was among the most sophisticated aviation support apparatus on Earth. Tripp was putting it at her disposal. And when Earhart was ready to depart on her final flight, she chose to launch from Miami deliberately so that Pan Am's mechanics, considered the best in the business, could spend a week going over her Lockheed Electra before she left the continental United States. Think about what that tells us for a moment. In 1937, at the height of her fame, preparing for the most dangerous flight of her career, Amelia Earhart chose to put herself in Pan Am's hands, a relationship that had begun on a Miami tarmac nearly a decade earlier. That trust was built over a decade. And it ran more than anyone else through one man, a navigator who had learned the Pacific serving for Pan Am on Pan Am's most important missions alongside Pan Am's finest crew. A man whose expertise Earhart would come to depend on, and whose fate would become forever tangled with hers. His name was Fred Noonan. Noonan had come up the hard way, more than two decades at sea as a merchant mariner, sailing around Cape Horn seven times, working his way from deckhand to ship's captain before he turned his skills to the air. He was not a glamour figure, he was a technician, a craftsman of navigation in an era when getting lost over open ocean meant not coming home. By the early 1930s, Noonan had joined Pan American Airways, and Tripp put him to work on the assignment that mattered most, charting the Trans-Pacific routes. The Pacific Ocean is not forgiving of error. From San Francisco to Manila, the Clippers would hop from island to island across thousands of miles of open water, Honolulu, Midway, Wake, Guam, miss one, and there is simply nothing else out there. Noonan didn't miss them. He not only navigated those routes himself, he trained the navigators who would fly them after him. He did it alongside Pan Am's best people. The crew assembled for the Crucial Pacific Survey flights beginning in April 1935 were handpicked. Captain Edward Music commanding, First Officer Rod Sullivan, Radio Officer Wilson Jarbo, Engineer Victor Wright, and two names that matter for our story today Navigator Fred Noonan and a young junior flight officer named Harry Canaday. We'll get to Harry's story a little bit later, and I have a special treat for you before our interview with Lori. But Edwin Music deserves a moment of his own here first. Music was Pan Am's first hired pilot, the company's chief pilot, and by the mid-1930s, arguably the most celebrated aviator in America after Lindbergh himself. He was the kind of pilot other pilots studied, meticulous, demanding, quietly authoritative, and calm. His colleagues called him Meticulous Music. He made the cover of Time magazine in December 1935 after commanding the China Clipper on its inaugural flight to Manila. He held more world flying records than any other pilot of his era, records for speed, distance, payload, and endurance. One historian put it precisely: Juan Tripp was the definitive airline executive, brilliant, savvy, and ruthless. But Ed Music was the classic chief pilot, concise, hard-nosed, and utterly competent. And Fred Noonan was the navigational wizard who made the whole Pacific operation possible. Musick was also the man who repeatedly put Fred Noonan in the navigator's seat on Pan Am's most consequential missions. That endorsement mattered. When questions arose later about Noonan's reliability, and they did, it was Musik's judgment that sat behind him. Tragically, neither men would survive for very much longer. Noonan vanished over the Pacific on July 2nd, 1937 with Earhart. Just six months later, on January 11, 1938, Musik and his crew of six were killed when the Sikorsky S-42 Samoan Clipper exploded in mid-air near Pago Pago, American Samoa during a survey flight to New Zealand. Within the span of a single year, Pan Am had lost its greatest navigator and its greatest pilot. Two giants of the Pacific Age gone. Now let's chat a bit about Harry Canaday, who arrived at Pan Am in October 1933 as part of the airline's first class of college-educated military-trained pilots, a new generation Pan Am was deliberately building to fly the oceans. As one of his crewmates would later recall of that group, quote, there had never been a flying group like ours, end quote. Canaday flew alongside Noonan repeatedly during the 1935 Pacific Survey Program, first the survey to Honolulu in April, the first time a commercial aircraft had ever made that crossing. Then further west, midway, wake, all the way to Guam by October. These were the flights that made Fred Noonan's name. Fred Noonan had navigated the Pacific repeatedly, successfully, to islands so small they barely appeared on a chart. And when the China Clipper lifted off from Alameda on November 22nd, 1935, passing beneath the still under construction Bay Bridge and pointing west toward Manila, Fred Noonan was in the navigator seat and Music was in command. Harry Canada watched it all happen from the ground. And two weeks later, on December 9th, he was back in the navigator seat aboard the Philippine Clipper, a Martin M130, Pan Am's second Trans-Pacific flight, helping prove that what Music and Noonan had done wasn't a one-time miracle. It was now a route. When Amelia Earhart began assembling her team for the Round the World attempt in 1937, Noonan was the navigator that kept coming up in every conversation because he had done what no one else had done and was recently out of a job at Pan Am and looking for work. Noonan had left Pan Am. The exact circumstances remain a subject of debate among historians. But what the record shows clearly is that Pan Am's own chief pilot had trusted him with the airline's most important missions, and Earhart's husband, George Putnam, recommended him as simply the best available. The exact reasons why Noonan left Pan Am has never been made clear through surviving documentation thus far. There are no termination records to turn to, nor the known existence of any correspondence that could provide clues. Some claim he left over pay disputes and rigorous demands of the airline on its employees. Others claim he was fired. But what should not be in dispute through many primary source accounts is that Noonan was known for his drinking. So it is reasonable to assume that this may have been a factor with his departure from Pan Am. Although history is not crystal clear on the subject, and people that worked with him are on the record saying that they thought he left voluntarily. But Pan Am's connections to the Earhart flight ran deeper than just their former navigator. Tripp had extended the airline's full cooperation. Pan Am's Pacific radio stations were part of the communications plan. The direction finding network Noonan knew intimately from his years flying the Clippers, the Adcock DF system, stretching from Alameda across to Hawaii, Midway, Wake, and Guam, was on standby to help guide the Electra across the Pacific. On July 2nd, 1937, Earhart and Noonan departed Leh New Guinea, bound for Holand Island, 2,556 miles of open ocean to a coral strip barely a mile wide. There was a Coast Guard cutter there waiting with fuel and radio. What followed became one of the most analyzed failures of communication in aviation history, and one of the most enduring mysteries of the 20th century. It is also, in ways that history has not always recognized, a Pan Am story built on Pan Am's routes, enabled by Pan Am's infrastructure, navigated by Pan Am's finest. I'd like to go back to a gentleman I mentioned earlier named Harry Canaday, who retired from Pan Am in the late 1960s. Harry Canaday was not a household name, but he was one of a remarkable generation of pilots who did extraordinary things and relative anonymity. Born in 1909, he was among the first six pilots hired under Pan Am's new ocean flying training program in October 1933. A class that many describe simply as unlike any other group of aviators that had ever existed. They were young men with college degrees, military commissions, and hundreds of flight hours already behind them, being shaped into something that the world had never quite seen before: professional long-haul ocean pilots. Within two years of being hired, Canada had flown all four Pacific survey flights through the spring and summer of 1935, each one pressing further west than the last in a stripped-down Sikorsky S-42 with the passenger seats ripped out and replaced with fuel tanks, navigating to islands so small they barely registered on a chart. Those survey flights paved the way for the China Clippers' Noggal run to Manila on November 22nd, 1935, one of the most celebrated moments in aviation history. Canada is not wildly known today until now with this podcast. But what he witnessed and what he knew about Fred Noonan, about the Pacific, and about the world of aviation that produced the Earhart flight is extraordinary. And remarkably, some of it was captured on tape. Which brings us to a gentleman named Elgin Marion Long. Beginning in 1971, after completing his own solo round the world flight over both poles, a feat that earned him 15 world records, Long turned his attention to the mystery that had haunted him since his own years flying patrol missions over Howland Island during World War II. He couldn't understand why Earhart hadn't found the island, and he was determined to find out by going to the people that were actually involved or closely associated with the flight and the lives of Earhart and Noonan. What followed was one of the most dedicated research efforts in aviation history. Elgin and his wife Marie spent more than 25 years interviewing more than a hundred witnesses and traveling more than a hundred thousand miles in pursuit of the truth about Earhart's final flight. Marie, a former public relations professional with the Western Aerospace Museum in Oakland, was Elgin's essential partner in the work, not just a collaborator, but the organizational mind behind the entire archive. Elgin always said he could tell you any detail about the Earhart case from memory, but Marie could find you the reference in the collection. Together they built what became the most comprehensive oral history of the Earhart disappearance ever assembled, conducting recorded interviews with witnesses, Pan Am employees, Coast Guard radiomen, mechanics, navigators, and anyone who had touched the story. People who were there, people who flew alongside Noonan, people who heard Earhart's voice on that last morning and never forgot it. Marie Long passed away in 2003. Elgin Long followed in January 2022 at the age of 94. But their work endures. The recordings they made, more than 220 hours of audio across 156 interviews, were donated to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where they are preserved as the Amelia Earhart Project recordings. The donation came through David Jordan, founder of Nauticus, the deep sea exploration company that partnered with Long on three expeditions to locate the wreck of Earhart's Lockheed Electra on the ocean floor. These recordings represent a primary source archive of extraordinary depth, and they were among the materials drawn upon by researchers, including Lori Gwyn Shapiro, in the preparation of her book, The Aviator and the Showman. Voices that might otherwise have been lost entirely, preserved. Because two people spent decades donating their time and passion making sure they weren't. Among those voices is Harry Canaday. Now remember, Harry knew Fred Noonan and flew with him on all the four landmark survey flights across the Pacific. When El Jin Long sat down with Harry Canaday for an interview, Canada was 76 years old, a man looking back across half a century at events that had shaped aviation history. The year was 1985, nearly 50 years had passed since Fred Noonan vanished over the Pacific. And yet there was one of the men who had flown alongside him, who had navigated those same routes, who had stood on those same docks and shared those same cockpits, still sharp, still precise, still carrying the memory of it all. What you're about to hear are recordings from the Elgin and Marie Long collection that are being aired publicly for the first time. They are presented here courtesy of David Jordan of Nauticus and the Smithsonian Institution's Amelia Earhart Project. If I can make a quick editorial comment, to listen to these tapes is simply incredible. Let's start by taking a listen to Harry talking about his first job interview with Pan Am's Andre Priester. You will hear Harry with Elgin interviewing.

SPEAKER_12 23:35

And this must have been the latter part of 33, then or the 12?

SPEAKER_11 23:38

Later part of 33, because I went to work on January the 16th, 1934 for Pan Am down here.

SPEAKER_12 23:47

And they hired you in New York. Do you remember where you went for your interview?

SPEAKER_11 23:50

Yeah, you were in the Chrysler building. And uh chief engineer, later vice president of engineering, Andre Priester, he's a Dutchman. And uh uh good friend of Sikorsky. Um he hired me and I reported here in Miami in uh January 1934.

SPEAKER_12 24:15

And were you hired as a flight officer?

SPEAKER_11 24:17

Uh as an they called him apprentice pilots, huh? Apprentice pilot. And uh of course the primary job was uh co-pilot. But before we ever got an airplane, we had to uh go through all of the maintenance training. The hangar, we had to get a an aircraft and engine mechanics license. And uh this was done during the first few months, and then you started uh well it's along there somewhere, you started radio training too, that is uh CW training, and uh you had to get a second-class radio telegraph operator's license. And they didn't have navigators licenses then, of course uh navigating was pretty much just uh follow the coast and dead reckoning, you know. And uh so then then you started flying. Actually, I think my first flight was made as as a radio operator. Did you get some navigational training, even though that would be redundant from no, no, you didn't that came along later uh when we started flying the oceans, you really needed navigation.

SPEAKER_12 25:26

So it must have been around April or May again when you made your first flight for Pan America, finally earning money instead of getting training from him. Yeah. And see, at this point in time, you would have been 25 years old. Twenty-five years old, that's hard.

SPEAKER_04 25:43

Next, we're going to hear Harry talk about the first four survey flights he flew across the Pacific with music and noonan in S-42 flying boats. You will also hear Harry's wife Lucille.

SPEAKER_12 25:58

By 1934, now they were selecting the crew for the uh Pacific survey flight. At the end of 34, you found yourself had about eight months of flight experience by then. Almost all of it is co-pilot.

SPEAKER_11 26:14

Yeah, well, and co-pilot, and uh they had we had some combination jobs. That is the S-38, where I had only the two pilots. And the copilot handled the radio and uh the mechanics, flight mechanics duties, that is, fueling the airplane cell. So it was called a combination man. Copilot, radio operator, flight mechanic. Okay.

SPEAKER_12 26:38

And by now, they had ordered the S-42s, and in fact, by the latter part of the 34, they'd already ordered the Martins. They ordered this, they ordered the the airplanes, I think, about 1931. On the 42s. They must have known when they hired you where you were going. Well, I don't know about that. They were they were they were hoping, well, I mean, they were looking for s you know someone with the the background that you had, the the navigational background and the naval training.

SPEAKER_11 27:10

They hired a lot of people, you know. They were mostly Navy and mostly military train, Navy and uh Army.

SPEAKER_12 27:18

And the S-42 has been delivered, and uh Captain Music in conjunction with other people in management have selected a crew, I guess, for the Pacific uh survey flights. Right. And uh the first officer, I guess, that was selected is R.O.D. Sullivan. Right. Now this comes to the relief pilot. Why do you think Mr. Kennedy was selected? You said that. Okay. I don't know. All right. Now you were selected and you knew that you were going to be transferred out to Alameda, and Captain Music, I guess, was um uh chief pilot.

SPEAKER_11 28:03

He was chief pilot in uh the Eastern Division, which is uh Miami. They call it the Eastern Division then.

SPEAKER_12 28:10

Did you call him Captain Music?

SPEAKER_11 28:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_12 28:13

Captain was the proper uh never called him Ed in my life to his face.

SPEAKER_11 28:19

And I don't think any of the rest of the crew did either. He was a very low-key individual. He was uh slow, methodical, very uh meticulous in everything he did. He'd get in the cockpit, he would uh take his handkerchief and and dust off the instruments, if you can imagine. Yeah.

SPEAKER_12 28:45

We have some pilots who still do that to this day.

SPEAKER_11 28:47

Uh he would uh check everything in the cockpit, and then he would make sure that the crease in his trousers was exactly in the middle, like so, and uh and he was ready to go. Uh likeable? Very nice, very very likable. Was he f seen to be fair? Extremely fair, and uh never had any complaints. He was always interested in uh in all of his crew and what they were doing and so on.

SPEAKER_12 29:20

Uh was on a first name basis with with with the crew members, and he didn't a stick for him.

SPEAKER_11 29:27

No, no, he called me Harry. He he was considerate, extremely considerate. Everything he did. His relations with you were very uh considerate.

SPEAKER_12 29:43

Okay, now when you got back, you were uh all celebrities now. All six of you. Yeah. And no doubt about that. All I do is read the newspapers and you've been following. Did he call you from uh on Little?

SPEAKER_07 30:01

Are you kidding? Oh hundred and fifty dollars a month.

SPEAKER_12 30:07

I guess I could holy those.

SPEAKER_07 30:12

You make him pay for that.

SPEAKER_12 30:16

When you arrived back, you were you were all really celebrities. You really were. You were all the front pages of all the newspapers, and you must have started a scrapbook. Come on, CL, you must have.

SPEAKER_07 30:27

Yeah, but she was never scrapbook.

SPEAKER_12 30:29

She's not that kind of person.

SPEAKER_11 30:31

We still have all kinds of clippings.

SPEAKER_07 30:34

I have paper frames pictures and whatnot, all that stuff. And I bought a big old book, and even I remember I bought blue paper to put in because that was Catameric color, so I thought that was great. And it's still just about the way I bought the thing.

SPEAKER_12 30:51

Well, now Newton had a scrapbook. Of course. He had a complete scrapbook. He had big pictures of the Sikorsky around and diamond head that'd been colored. All you guys had autographed it.

SPEAKER_11 31:01

I've seen his scrapbook when I uh I had a lot of pictures too, and uh probably had a good wife. Joe probably, uh uh maybe Fred did a lot of it, I don't know, but I never did have time to do it. And uh Lucille is is is is not bent that way.

SPEAKER_12 31:21

And uh Well, um of course once the flight was completed, they you had uh all new ideas now about just exactly how that and of course you must you first thing you did was put in an extra fuel tank. And uh you were ready to uh uh guess as soon as Midway gave the okay signal and they were ready for you, start out again. The flights came at two month intervals.

SPEAKER_11 31:48

Midway in June.

SPEAKER_12 31:52

Wake in August, calm in October. Uh which one was the first one with the mark? That was Manila. That was that was the fifth one, yeah. Fifth leg. Okay, and you made uh so then in June, you again, same crew, no changes, made the uh honolutal and then the midway. Alameda, honolut, midway. Alameda, honolutal, midway. And return. And return. Uh was this how was this flight? Routine? Did you solve any or pumping problems with the fuel, or was that a forever thing?

SPEAKER_11 32:28

No, it was a forever thing, but uh it makes it sound like we did most of it by hand. We really didn't. We got a lot of help from that wind driven pump, but we did a lot by hand, did it.

SPEAKER_12 32:40

Did did all crew members bend the hand, or was that up to Mr. Wright and Mr.

SPEAKER_11 32:46

Oh I I I don't really remember Cap Music calling it, but uh but it very likely he did something. You know, his offie says, let me have a hand on that thing, you know, relieve somebody for a few turns.

SPEAKER_12 33:01

Was it a wobble pump or a rotary?

SPEAKER_11 33:03

Well, let's see. The uh it seems to me it was Rotary. Yeah, rotary.

SPEAKER_12 33:10

Well, steel pumps were yeah.

SPEAKER_04 33:14

Harry was the only crew member of the four survey flights that was not on the Martin M130 China Clipper when it made history on November 22nd, 1935. Harry would be promoted to chief navigator on the second commercial flight across the Pacific a couple weeks later in December 1935. Let's take a listen to him and his wife talk about this time.

SPEAKER_12 33:39

I'm tired of having you underput. You're on your own. Or of course it was all planned because they knew they were going to have two Martins right behind you, one behind the other. And they wouldn't get back in time for the second one to depart. So you were gonna be navigation officer on the second flight. Uh second Martin flight. Philippine Clipper, yeah. Yeah. The Philippine Clipper. Now it's it's November. And November, the first flight goes to uh Manila, and you're feeling kind of bad because it's taken off and you're not on board. Don't even remember. Uh do you remember my being feeling bad about it?

SPEAKER_11 34:18

I don't.

SPEAKER_07 34:19

No. I remember we went down for the big ceremony.

SPEAKER_11 34:24

Yeah, but we we were down there, but I don't remember feeling bad. I don't know. I don't think it really we thought of it as this is a piece of history and so on. No, not uh don't think realize that we I don't think we really thought about it. Because I don't remember that I felt bad about getting taken off. I had to do it because we had another flight to operate and and who else could do it. That's the reason I was taken off.

SPEAKER_12 34:56

Well, all right, now you're going to go, you're going to go on your uh first flight alone, which you you you you feel a little apprehensive about it, you must. No, I didn't.

SPEAKER_11 35:08

You felt it again. I'd done it and I know I could I'd done it and I know I can do it.

SPEAKER_12 35:13

Who was the captain you went with? I was uh Tilton. Jack Tilton. Then you took the second flight, which was right behind the first flight into Manila, and you were a navigation officer. But up until that point in time, uh you'd never been on the Martin, and this was your first trip alone, but you had every confidence, your training was good, and your knowledge was good, and you had no qualms about it. No, like when you make your verified that, Lucia.

SPEAKER_07 35:42

Yeah, because I was too dumb to be terribly worried. Sheldower did a fabulous thing, I don't know, the smartest thing later, looking back on it. The night they went the first flight to Honolulu, he invited all the wives that wanted to come down to the base to spend the night. And he would come out or he'd send someone out and give us a report on this thing. So you didn't have a bunch of wives calling in Frank.

SPEAKER_12 36:17

He was out for manager. Who who was the man what was his name?

SPEAKER_11 36:22

Dutch Schildauer. Schildauer, he was the operations manager of the Pacific Division. Okay. Later the operations manager of the Lightning Division when it first started. Yeah, his navy.

SPEAKER_12 36:32

Yeah, that was good thinking on his part.

SPEAKER_07 36:35

It was, it was smart. It really was.

SPEAKER_12 36:38

Did you know that was happening?

SPEAKER_11 36:40

Well, I didn't know it before. Oh, maybe I knew you were gonna do it.

SPEAKER_04 36:45

Um maybe didn't know until I came back, but anyway. Now let's hear Harry and his wife Lucille discuss Fred Noonan, the rumors about his drinking, and his departure from Pan Ann. The other female voice you'll hear is Elgin's wife Marie. Oh, navigation.

SPEAKER_11 37:01

That's the reason I was the first one to check out in navigation, the only one besides Fred Noonan, because I already knew navigation. That was all celestial, you see, that uh we're talking about now. And of course, naturally all navigation combined with the reckoning, but uh but he must have been about 15 years older than you then.

SPEAKER_12 37:22

That's right. At that rate, he must have been just about 40 at that point in time. He must have seemed like a fairly elderly gentleman to you. Yeah, uh middle-aged. Well, what was Noonan? What'd he look like?

SPEAKER_11 37:37

Uh he was tall, slender, very slender. Yeah, very slender, yeah.

SPEAKER_07 37:43

Not very good looking. Wonderful dance. Smooth of the ladies.

SPEAKER_11 37:50

Yeah. Always ready for a party.

SPEAKER_10 37:52

According to everything they knew, Noonan left voluntarily. And they were all surprised when he left, is that correct?

SPEAKER_11 38:02

Well, I I suppose we were, yeah, but we knew he wanted to do that.

SPEAKER_12 38:08

Well, then in in all of uh and it was a small group and everybody knew everybody and everything, and all the time that you crews were flying out there, um it never came to be knowledge that Fred uh had been drinking while flying on duty. Never did, well uh all the time I flew with him. Or that he was reprimanded or going to be fired for drinking. And that as far as you people had all known, he had left Pan Am to go about his own business.

SPEAKER_11 38:40

And and we were close enough to him with him on all these flights and all that we're bound to have known anything off color.

SPEAKER_09 38:48

Now did everybody seem to get along pretty well under your crew.

SPEAKER_11 38:51

Oh, yeah, we never had any trouble of any kind with the crew.

SPEAKER_08 38:58

Where did the rumors come around then about me being a drinker?

SPEAKER_11 39:05

Well, I mean, uh everybody knew that he liked he liked to drink. But uh he was always he was always there duty time came along and uh skipper never had any complaint about him. Of course he kept his eye on him pretty closely when we were ashore overnight and so on. I mean, not that he restricted him in any way, but he he wanted to know where he was all the time so he wouldn't get in any trouble.

SPEAKER_12 39:35

In all these four flights that you made spending up to two weeks at a time with Noonan, did you did did you ever know him to uh uh not be ready for the flight when the time comes to be ready for the flight? No.

SPEAKER_11 39:52

He almost missed one in s in uh Acapulco. Music's ordinary greeting to any of us, and when he saw us the first time in the morning, he said, Has anybody seen Fred? He's always looking to keep his eye on Fred, see? And uh so the as I said, Vic and I stayed aboard the barge and fueled the airplane, and the rest of the crew went ashore at Capuco. And uh so uh we as I said it started to get tried to get some sleep and uh the crew came aboard. Well, Fred came aboard, looked like a drown rat. And uh the story went that uh music had greeted the rest of the crew as usual. Has anybody seen Fred? Well, nobody had seen Fred. And they waited around as long as the hotel as long as they could, and finally had to leave to to go down to the dock, and they got down to the dock and were boarding the boat, and uh a taxi came racing up, and Fred stepped out of the taxi and walked over and promptly stepped off the dock into the water.

SPEAKER_08 41:05

I heard that story about it.

SPEAKER_11 41:08

And uh and he said that the shadow of the dock in the water looked like the boat. And well, Fred had been out, and uh he was not uh too sharp. I mean, he couldn't navigate the ship, I just followed the coast, DR up the coast. But uh I I'd been out on the lake. I navigated that lake. He'd been out on the town, yeah. But he made the he made the and he could have done it himself.

SPEAKER_12 41:34

I mean he April uh uh 19 uh that was the original S-42 perry quite decision.

SPEAKER_11 41:41

That's right, that's what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_12 41:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_11 41:43

So I asked if he ever missed a flight. I said, that's the nearest he came, but I never knew of it. But as far as I say, as far as as we knew, he left voluntarily and uh left Pan Americans all of a sudden for some reason or other, and it had been rumored that it was for drinking. Well, no, that could have been, you know. But you know, these things can take place when people around you don't know anything about it, if they don't particularly if they want to keep it quiet.

SPEAKER_04 42:14

This last clip is of Harry talking about seeing Fred Noonan in March 1937 for the last time after Earhart ground looped the heavily loaded Electra on takeoff from Luke Field on Ford Island, right in the heart of Pearl Harbor, collapsing the landing gear and sending the plane skidding across the runway in a shower of sparks, ending her first round-the-world attempt before it ever reached the Pacific.

SPEAKER_11 42:44

But the night that we flew from Alameda to Honolulu was the same night that uh Fred and Amelia left Oakland Airport and flew to Honolulu, Pearl Harbor. And uh because they passed us.

SPEAKER_09 42:59

Okay, that picture that you have of this clipper and uh Amelia's airplane.

SPEAKER_11 43:06

They took a picture of you out of their cockpit window. Oh well, yeah, we I I know that they they passed us all right around sunset, or just before sunset.

SPEAKER_03 43:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_11 43:16

And uh they were a couple thousand feet or so below us, but uh practically right on the track. I remember they were off a little to the right, and uh I say a little below us, and uh they arrived nationally before we did, quite a bit faster. And uh so then I saw Fred in in uh in Honolulu there, as the Alexander Young. The next day, they took off from Fort Island, Pearl Harbor, and cracked up on the takeoff. I don't remember exactly what happened, but a wash out the airplane, neither one of them was injured. And back to the hotel, I said, Well, Fred, have you had enough? He said, No, we're going back to Miami and we're gonna get another airplane. Plane and start out again eastbound this time. That's the last time I ever saw Fred across that.

SPEAKER_04 44:06

I want you to take a moment before we continue and reflect. What we just heard is not something you find every day. Harry Canaday did not just know Fred Noonan and music as names in a logbook. He flew with them. He sat beside them on flights that had never been attempted before, to islands that barely appeared on a chart, and aircraft stripped down to their bones and filled with fuel. He was part of it, and in 1985, at age 76, he still carried all of it with him. That is what a primary source sounds like. That is why this work matters. Now on to our interview with Lori Gwyn Shapiro. Lori Gwyn Shapiro is a best-selling author, journalist, documentary filmmaker, and adjunct professor in the graduate journalism program at NYU's Author L. Carter Journalism Institute. A member of the Explorers Club, her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, work that has earned her the Damned History Award and a gold medal from the Silurians Press Club, one of the oldest and most prestigious journalism organizations in the country. She has spent her career finding the stories history almost forgot. Her previous book, The Stowaway, told the remarkable true story of a scrappy teenager from New York's Lower East Side who hid aboard a ship bound for Antarctica during the Jazz Age. Her newest book, The Aviator and the Showman, Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and The Marriage That Made an American Icon, published by Viking in 2025, is a New York Times editor's choice. Lori, welcome to the Pan Am Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 46:15

Thank you for having me on. I'm a bit of a known Pan Am geek myself.

SPEAKER_04 46:22

Well, there you go. We're going to be talking about lots of aviation stuff. Amelia Earhart, Dorothy and George Putnam, and Juan Tripp, and a whole bunch of other people.

SPEAKER_00 46:33

A lot of juicy stuff.

SPEAKER_04 46:36

Why did you decide to write a book about Amelia Earhart?

SPEAKER_00 46:42

I actually came to Amelia Earhart uh via George Putnam, believe it or not, her husband. The name of my book is The Aviator and the Showman, and the Aviator is obviously Amelia Earhart. But the showman is a man who was her first her manager and her lover while he was married, and then her husband. And he was also very prominent at the end of the Jazz Age as a publisher. He wasn't the head of Putnam Books, he was the nephew of the head of Putnam Books. There's a lot of George Putnams in the Putnam family. So this is George Palmer Putnam. His the head of Putnam Books was George Haven Putnam. But well, that's a digression. What's interesting, though, is that he really wanted to stand out. There was a game of secession, so to speak. There were five nephews trying to become the next head of Putnam Books. And George Palmer Putnam started to make a name with pilots and with adventurers. He was the vice president of the Explorers Club in New York. So he had proximity to explorers and even led a couple of expeditions to up his credibility. But he had most tremendous success in 1927 when he beat out everybody else to get to Charles Lindbergh. And he published a book called We, which was one of the great sellers of the jazz age. Now We has quotations around it, and it was what Charles Lindbergh called The Spirit in St. Louis and himself together. They were we. A movie called Wings that starred Clara Bow, who was the it girl. So in 1928, uh when we when Amelia Earhart comes on the scene, he's also uh Richard Byrd's publisher who was not a pilot, but he was a navigator. Um and he led expeditions to the North Pole and to the South Pole that year. And what was left to promote was really not a man going across the Atlantic because he was in the business of books. What was left to promote was a woman. And I was very aware of Richard Byrd because my last book was called The Stowaway. And I even went to Antarctica to research it. And so my time was 1928 to 1932. And I knew that on uh his uh the Byrd expedition, he signed up um a contest uh to get a Boy Scout to go to Antarctica. And having gone to Antarctica, I knew how dangerous that was. And I had a moment when I was talking to my book agent who was wondering what I might be doing next. And I said, I just wonder, I mean, it was so dangerous to go to the area of the Antarctic and he sent a kid to go there. Would he have been involved with Amelia Earhart's death in any way? Could that possibly be cut be because it was dangerous afoot? And that was really the beginning. And I will tell you also that, like many people who grew up in America, my hero as a child was Amelia Earhart, and I had a scholastic book uh that I, you know, I got it out of those scholastic book fair. My mom's hero was Amelia Earhart, and even my father really greatly admired her. But I don't think that any of the details I started to learn were in that scholastic book. To begin with, that by um a few weeks after Amelia Earhart got back from um her first flight as a passenger across the Atlantic, that's how she first became famous, not as a pilot, she was having an affair with a married man. And I just thought, that's not in my scholastic book. And I just thought this is the way to begin research. And I want to say at the very beginning of this uh podcast is that what I'm talking about is an Amelia Earhart book for adults. This is not the book that you give your eight-year-old kid, but I really wanted to know the truth. And that's um, I'm a journalist. I write for the New York Times. My book was excerted in the New Yorker, and I'm also a professor of journalism at NYU in the graduate program, and I teach fact-checking. So I didn't have, I'm not a pilot. I did not come in wanting to prove that Amelia Earhart was the best pilot of all time. I came in just purely to find the truth. What is the real story? And that's what journalism is about if you do it right.

SPEAKER_04 51:30

So let's talk about the late 1920s. So Pan American World Airways was founded in 1927. We have Charles Lindbergh in the mix, we have Amelia Earhart. Let's talk about all these characters. Uh, you you Lori, you mentioned George Putnam. Let's talk about Dorothy Putnam. Let's just let's get into it.

SPEAKER_00 51:51

Well, let's let's start by saying that when you think of the jazz age, many people think of the flapper era and Zelda, and this is not what's going on at the end of the 20s. That's sort of passe already. What's being promoted in in the media is the end of the flapper. The flapper is dead, the New York Times announced. And what is being promoted is are aviators. Um, the movie Wings that I mentioned before was one of the biggest box office hits. It won the first Academy Award. Um, it was portraying World War I in the 20s. So this is the top topic matter. And the aviators who started to have incredible achievements, also, planes were getting better, not as great as it would they would get later on, but they were still biplanes, but they were getting stronger and they were brave. And anyone could die at any time, and they did uh often. But anyone that made it across, even a passenger, um, would get fame overnight. Imagine being an uh uh, you know, an Instagram influencer. If you wanted to get famous, you could be part of a stunt. I mean, people think of like um, you know, flagpole sitting, it's the same kind of thing. But being a passenger could make you famous. You can even get a side of the movie deal. And one aviator named Ruth Elder was very beautiful before Amelia Earhart, she tried to go across and she was rescued at sea, and she was a film star the next day. So, but you should know that after Charles Lindbergh went across, Byrd had meant to win this prize called the Ortier Prize, which was offered by a French restaurateur in Greenwich Village to better relations between France and the US after the war. And he offered money, and Charles Lindbergh was watching a newsreel in the 20s, and it people were dying attempting. He thought, I can do that. And he did. And Byrd was the the the the favorite, and his plane had a bit of a mechanical breakdown, and Lindbergh took the weather when it was working for him, and he went across and he became the most famous person in the world. One-fifth of New York City came out to see him when he returned. He saw most of the United States flying on a triumph uh tour. And he was also promoting the Putnam book, um, We. And in 1928, when Amelia Earhart would become famous, again, I hinted at it, she doesn't fly across the Atlantic by herself until 1932, which we know her for. Um, if we if we don't think about how she died, if we think about her greatest achievement. But she became famous almost like a reality star. She was not intending to go across the Atlantic. Putnam had gotten wind through bird of a very wealthy lady named Amy Phipps Guest, who was the Phipps steel heiress, and she wanted to be a passenger across. A lot of seven women had tried to go across. Six of them died. It was dangerous just to be a passenger. And she wanted her life to count. And her children, who were very wealthy, had a bit of an intervention and said, Ma, you're not going across the Atlantic. You're coming to my wedding, you're not gonna die. And they came up with a plan to get a wholesome replacement. And Byrd was telling this to Putnam because Phipps' guests was renting Byrd's plane that he was originally going to take to the South Pole and he got a different plane. And so he came up with an idea that if we can help find this woman, we'll have an inside track on the first woman to go across. And it was almost like a casting call. And there was a man that he was in cahoots with, a publicist named Hilton Rayleigh, who was uh in the office that day, but he had an office in New York and he was based in Boston. And he found out about a wholesome social worker who had a pilot's license named Amelia Earhart. And so he visited her uh in Boston at the job, and much to her shock, um, he was saying something about her flying across the Atlantic. And that's how Amelia Earhart comes on the scene. She's not burning to do this, and she is picked and she is a passenger. She doesn't really do anything on the flight. She gets a ticker tape parade for doing nothing on the flight, but sitting on her tush. And she's very ashamed of this because nobody cared about the men going across. They just cared that a woman made it across. And right away, George Putnam, who was in a very dead marriage, he was um 10 years older than Amelia Earhart, decided he wanted to have an affair with Amelia Earhart. And that was a struggle at first. But um, to be fair, Dorothy Binnie Putnam was having her own affairs. I mean, it was the jazz age and anything else. Dorothy has one thing that's very appealing to George Putnam, which is uh we failed to mention before that she was the Crayola Crayon heiress. She was extraordinarily wealthy. And Putnam is a famous name. You know, it goes all the way back to General Putnam, and before that, the Putnams were the people wagging their fingers at the witches at the Salem trial. Um it was an old American name, but the Binnies were new money, Crayola Crayon, if you remember Smith and Binny, but that's what Putnam wanted. He wanted that money. So that was his first wife, and that was his major goal. Although he very shortly after they got married, the sexual passion just ended right away. She was pretty miserable from the very first months after the marriage began because he got what he wanted. And what he next wanted was Amelia Earhart.

SPEAKER_04 57:51

So where was Juan Tripp at this time? We are in the late 20s. So we know that Juan Tripp met Charles Lindbergh when he came back from Paris.

SPEAKER_00 58:02

Yes, and one of the the the I mean Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh soon were at the same events. They were being they were even involved with TAT airlines to go across events uh together. But she was also very much involved as a passenger on a Pan Am flight to Cuba very early on, because remember, he becomes famous in 1927 overnight, and she becomes famous in 1928 overnight.

SPEAKER_04 58:31

A quick editorial note to our listeners: the Pan American flight Lori just mentioned was part of a grand dedication celebration, marking the official opening of the new terminal where Earhart, Tripp, and Lindbergh stood together on January 9th, 1929, at the 36th Street Airport, also known as Pan American Field, located a few miles north of downtown Miami. Note Pan American Airways began flying out of Miami on September 15, 1928, when the 36th Street Airport actually opened. But these early Miami flights were primarily mail-only, connecting to Key West, where passengers were then transferred. The January flight to Havana that Amelia was on was considered the first official flight by the airline and the press, but technically there were a handful before. The 36th Street Airport was Pan Am's first proper international terminal, and in fact, the first U.S. port of entry for international air travel built on the American mainland. The famous Dinner Key Terminal that most people associate with Pan Am's golden age of flying boats came later. Pan Am began seaplane operations at Dinner Key in December 1930, and the iconic Art Deco Terminal building opened in 1934. In 1954, the building became Miami City Hall, which it remains today. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. And I'm pleased to share with you an update that was announced after our interview is recorded. On March 12, 2026, the Pan American Airways Historic District at the original 36th Street site was also listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which is the official record of the United States of America. Florida's Secretary of State announced the listing, noting that the district represents Florida's leadership role in the history of aviation and innovation in the industry. The airport, where Earhart, Tripp, and Lindbergh stood together in January 1929, is now officially recognized as part of the American historic record. When Earhart chose Miami as her departure point for her final round-the-world attempt in 1937, it was Dinner Key, where Pan Am's mechanic spent that week going over her Lockheed Electra. That was eight years after that first meeting on the 36th Street Tarmac, and the Pan Am connection to Earhart's story was still strong. Now back to our interview. So Lori, Amelia Earhart was at this grand opening party of this new terminal. She was on the first flight out of this new terminal to Havana in January of 1929 as one trip's guest, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:30

Yes. And she was not flying a plane. She was promotional flying. She was all she was not a good pilot in 1920. She would get a little bit better, but she was being promoted above her level. Um in 1929, George would fake that she had the fourth transport license for a pilot, which if many pilots might be listening to this, they know that's really for the top pilots, but it wasn't true. She would not get it for another 18 months. She was doing secret life uh lessons to try to catch up to the way she was being promoted. What her biggest use was was for lectures. She would make a lot of money going around the country, giving lectures, and also would do things like christenings. Uh you know, it was during the prohibition. So technically, you're not allowed to throw a champagne bottle again, but you know, big grapes juice. Um, but she was very, very kind. I want to say that very upfront. She was a phenomenal feminist. She was someone that everyone really adored. I mean, I've been through hundreds of hours of archives and thousands of, you know, audio archives and I mean years. I just took five years to write an incredible amount of archival research. I never really saw a bad word about Amelia Earhart. I mean, George had his designs on Amelia right away. One of the witnesses to this is Hilton Rayleigh, whose archives uh off-the-record conversations about everything happening in 28 and 29. And eventually, um, what happens that is that Amelia, a lot of what we know about Amelia Earhart is not true. There's a lot of wonderful things about Amelia Earhart. Again, she's the first president of the 99. She's a tremendous organizer, a feminist, and a big booster of aviation. And Lindbergh is not the most likable person in the world. And Amelia Earhart, her real use in the late 20s is to boost aviation, especially after the stock market crashed. Aviation at that time, the the economy of it was based in New York City. Her offices were in Midtown, as she was always complaining that she was always a vice president of aviation companies, but she was really the person that was supposed to do PR. Um, people loved Amelia Earhart. Um, people didn't love Lindbergh, they were in awe of him. But when they met him, they didn't like him so much. Um, among the many tapes that I listened to, that anyone who's listening to this can listen to the Amelia Earhart project at the Smithsonian, which are 200 hours of tapes taken in the 70s that no one, no biographer had listened to besides me until I got them on day one. And that's why I like raced to down to Virginia to listen to them. But they're actually online. Anyone can listen to them from their home. Um, but Dorothy Binny Putnam had been recorded by an aviation investigator, uh, a pilot named Elgin Long. He also um recorded uh George Putnam's two other wives, there were four altogether. He also recorded Amelia's stepchildren. And people don't think of Amelia Earhart as a mother. She was very close to George Putnam, the younger tapes are from the 70s, and they can't say a bad word about their stepmother. I mean, one of the things that is in uh the diaries, Dorothy's diaries, is that George was a very vindictive person and was going through her journals. She files a Reno divorce in September of 29. Remember, she's got the money. She's caught Amelia Earhart in a sexual affair with George Putnam. Again, she's having her own affair with another man named George, who's 10 years younger than her. But she wants out of this marriage. She has a new lover and she files, and George Putnam is okay with it. But what happens in October of 1929? There's a stock market crash. And suddenly he's having second thoughts about having his wealthy wife. And he tries to woo Dorothy back. He's also then she's not having it. He tries to blackmail her. So my belief, and I can't prove it. Is one of the reasons why the house that Binny uh and uh Dorothy Benny and George Putnam have in Rye, New York, uh which I've been inside for hours. It's a it's a big mansion. Dorothy will move to Florida and start over, but she is leaving the house that her money paid for with George. And Amelia Earhart eventually will get married to uh George Putnam and move into this mansion of her former friend and have inherit her staff, including chauffeurs and uh her garden. I mean, this is again, I want to, I don't know if this is my refrain, but this is not an Amelia Earhart book for your eight-year-old daughter.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:48

It's like a reality TV show today.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:50

Oh, it's a soap opera for sure. But you have to understand that that the world changes and the story of Amelia Earhart and George Putnam change, and also for Lindbergh and also for Pan Am, also for everyone with the stock market crash, um, because the aviation industry was booming. At that time, um, people were just millionaires overnight in aviation, and then whole industries and companies just were bankrupt overnight. And Amelia Earhart became very useful because she became an ambassador for the air. And one of the things that she would do, not as a pilot, but she would go with planes and take women up in the air because people didn't want to spend their money. And she would say, Look, you would get an advantage by flying, and she would only have women going up in the air with her, and she would walk around while someone else was flying and say, Are you enjoying it? And they would land and maybe they would let their husbands go on their next flight. And she would say, Your husbands can get to the job quicker, and this is better than driving. And so in 1932, Amelia Earhart will go across the Atlantic by herself. It was supposed to be promoted by her new husband, George, who was Dorothy's ex-husband, if we're keeping trap. And she has a red vega, which is now hanging in the Smithsonian. After seven years, it's been put back. Brand new reopened early aviation hall, which is fantastic. I visited, I wrote about it for Smithsonian magazine this summer. And it her plane is right next to the spirit of St. Louis. These are the real planes, these are not reproductions. And you can see how tiny this plane is. The plane that she disappeared in is obviously not in the Smithsonian. I know that people can figure that out, but just in case you're wondering, because it's gone. But there is a twin to that plane that is in um Kansas at the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum in Atchison, Kansas, where Amelia was born. And it is the only other Lockheed 10E in existence. And you can really get a sense of what the size of the plane is and how much more sophisticated it was from 1932 to 1937. If we think about technology now, like we can't even keep up. It was the same way back then. And you had to keep your flying skills up. And that's one thing that Amelia Earhart was not doing because she was now, she had made a million dollars uh in promotions and sponsorships in 1928 before, and she was a millionaire by the time of the stock market crash. She would lose all her money. Putnam, who was up to no good all the time, like faking that Putnam books was going to be blown up by fascists. Later on, he would fake his own kidnapping and write the ransom letters. This is not normal behavior, by the way. His uncle was not loving this, as you can imagine. And when the will was read, he was not the new, he did not win the game of secession. He was pushed out of his family firm and he joined a very small firm. And one of the few people that would go with him was Amelia Earhart because she was being loyal. And this is where you start to see how important this new relationship becomes. Putnam is taking 10% of everything that she makes, even when they're married, by that's Amelia's choice, by the way. Um, but they need each other. So people can say, did George exploit Amelia? But Amelia was very much in a relationship with a man that she knew was often making up stories and even making up uh uh her own flying experience. She did not have hundreds of hours of flight, which was how she was being promoted. But they come upon a way to keep things afloat. And remember, they're house rich, cash poor. They have that house, but they don't have any money. And she goes on the lecture circuit, and she's charging pretty good money to do a lecture. And to keep in the news, you have to do a stunt, and then she would lecture on it. Now, a lot of women pilots at this time, like Louise Thayden, uh like uh Eleanor Smith, even uh Laura Engels, uh not Laura Engels Wilder, by the way, a different Laura Engels. These are all phenomenal women pilots, much better pilots than Amelia Earhart, but they are not married to George Putnam. They are not being promoted as the Queen of Aviation, and they're not on the lecture circuit. And Amelia Earhart is crisscrossing the country, but she's not getting hours in in flight time, which you need to be a really good pilot.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:54

We're gonna take a quick break and listen to a 1935 Universal Newsreel featuring the actual voice of Amelia Earhart.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:08

Roaring into the Oakland airport, she brings to a triumphant finish her 2,400-mile hop from Hawaii after 18 hours in the air. 10,000 cheer the end of the epical flight as the Lady Lindy slides into a perfect landing with two records. The first woman to fly the Pacific and the first person to fly the solo. Roses to Amelia and the plummets of the world to a veteran of flights that have shown the way for aviation's progress. It's her most brilliant chapter in a 16-year aviation career. How does it feel to fly both oceans, Miss Hamart?

SPEAKER_05 1:12:41

Well, it was very interesting to me to fly in southern waters rather than in the north. On the Atlantic flight, I had ice conditions and general storm. On this flight, really no bad weather at all except a few little rain squalls. I saw the moon and stars most of the night. Of course, in both flights, I was very glad to see Land.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:09

Welcome back to our interview with Lori Gwyn Shapiro, author of the award-winning book The Aviator and the Showman. What was the relationship between Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart? Did they get along? Were they friends?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:24

She wasn't so crazy about him, if you want to know the truth. She was pretty good friends with his wife, who, by you know, Ann Marl Lindbergh. I understand there's, I actually just got an early look at a book about the marriage of Anne and Charles. Now he's very they have very complicated history, as let's not let that get erased because it's very important to we talk about truth. We have to make sure that our heroes are fully described. I mean, um uh George Charles Lindbergh was an incredible pilot. He had other children that were hidden, he had other wives in Europe, and his biographer missed this. So things come out after you, I mean, things can come out after my biography can comes out. And a good journalist says, hey, I missed it. Scott Berg, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his book on Charles Lindbergh, acknowledges he missed that he had three other wives. So the thing that I wanted to tell you though is that Ann Morrow was very close to Amelia when they they put in the um new airline uh TAT, uh, which is I believe the summer of 1929, they um Amelia takes one of the flights going towards Los Angeles. This is a a cross-country flight, and it also involves train travel.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:42

This is not our kind of and one of the stops is in Columbus, Ohio.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:47

Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:48

To open up the new airport terminal.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:50

Yeah, this is the fastest way across, but you also had to take a few trains to get there. Um, but that's when Ann and Um uh Amelia really meet. Dorothy Binnie Putnam is involved, by the way, on that that flight. Yeah, it's like uh as I said, it's a soap opera. She's uh doesn't want to miss out, you know. Um, and Charles Lindbergh um makes fun of Amelia Earhart, uh, of the amount of luggage that she's taking on this trip. But I think what's really interesting is that she sees Lindbergh up close and often up close and doesn't particularly like him. And Ann Morrow was a terrific writer, but she was pretty close to uh Amelia Earhart. And one scene that I have in the aviator in the show, man, is when they're over, uh Charles Lindbergh is invited over to Rye, and somebody is secretly taking notes and sells it to the paper. And uh Charles Lindbergh is very upset at Amelia and George, and she swears she writes a note to Ann that this is this this we didn't know this was happening. You know, it was just someone who decided they were gonna get a scoop. Because you could if you could get a scoop on Charles Lindbergh, and remember, Charles Lindbergh is in the news in the 1930s for another reason. His son was kidnapped. And I always felt that the attention that he got on that, George must have taken mental notes because he fakes his own kidnapping right after Amelia Earhart disappears. And I think, what did the Lindberghs think of that? Because they weren't that close to George. Charles Lindbergh um didn't like the book We. He didn't like the ghost-written version that he was given. He rewrote it himself. It wasn't a great rewrite, but it sold well. Later on, perhaps with Ann's help, he would rewrite the story of Crossing the Atlantic, a spirit of St. Louis that was made into a movie with of all people Jimmy Stewart, not looking that young as Charles Lindbergh. But he won the Pulder Prize for his retelling. He just felt that George Putnam was in the business of sausage, which he was. He he you have to give some credit to Putnam for one thing. He was a master at new innovations, like an instant book, like using ghostwriters. You know, somebody is in the news, nobody cares in a few months. So let's get a book out quick. And that is how Amelia and George got into an affair because he embedded her in Rye. Dorothy Binny Putnam was living there, living together, and that's where the affair really, really begins. And she's embedded with ghostwriters. She's not writing her own book. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you in New York. She's embedded with a man named Fitzhugh Green and a little tidbit. This is not in my book, this is just a special for the podcast. Amelia Earhart's ghostwriter, uh, Fitzhugh Green, is the grandfather of New York Times writer Penelope Green.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:53

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:54

I found that out uh after my book came out. Um she confirmed it. Um, so I had seen records, but that was confirmed by her. And so it's really interesting. But you know what? He also does things like puts a record on the back of a book of like when Amelia crosses the Atlantic in 32. There's a an a little record that's that's a very collectible item. If any aviation uh book collectors listening, try to with the the record at the back. I have an Amelia Earhart book. I'm not gonna give you my address. I did a down payment plan on it over four years, and I own it, and it's worth a few thousand dollars. Oh wow, and that's because it doesn't even have the cover on it, and it's just her signature alone. Imagine what the a signed copy of her book with the with the record intact would be.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:48

And where's Juan and Betty Tripp in all of this? Early 1930s.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:54

Well, they are I I think they're much more. I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna guess that they're much more connected to Lindbergh. Um, Pan Am, we're gonna get to Fred Noonan, I hope.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:06

Pan Am, I mean that's a big part of the Pan Am connection to Amelia Earhart, but Pan Am is developing something um called the is it called the flying ships?

SPEAKER_04 1:19:16

Uh uh the flying boats.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:18

The flying boats, that's it. And and and these are have um uh pontoons, I believe, on it, so that they can fly the Sikorskis. Right? Because it flies safely over. That's why they're crossing. I mean, that first trip is to Cuba, where they're crossing water, and later on they start to to basically you know envision the world as a market and go across oceans and go across the Atlantic Ocean and across the Pacific Ocean. And there are very, very brave aviators that are involved with this expansion, right? And one of them is a man, a celestial navigator named Fred Noonan, who is, and if um, I'm assuming that everyone listening to this podcast knows what a celestial navigator is. But for anyone who doesn't, I'm gonna tell you they use the skies to navigate. And Fred Noonan was really good at this. He was considered at Pan Am their top navigator. He is a man that will become very synonymous with Amelia Earhart's name as we continue with the story.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:31

So early 1930s, Noonan is working for Pan Am and Pan Am is expanding all over the globe with the flying boats. Amelia Earhart and George Putnam are living in a mansion, but they're struggling for for cash.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:49

Well, at this point, um the marriage is, you know, like I I'm in a long-term marriage, and there's good years and there are bad years. That's what marriage looks like. Um, so uh is this a real marriage? Yes. Are they having sexual relations? Yes. Um, that's on tape from his colleagues. It's not like I'm just guessing. Um what kind of tapes are these? All off record, but now that they've now that the gentleman has died, they've been made available through the Smithsonian Institute. So there's really some like people thinking that their near their their words are not going to be heard. And here I am listening in 2025, and they were taped in 1971. But so I think what's really amazing to me is people don't realize. I mean, my had older parents. I my my father was born in 1920, which is pretty I he lived to 100. He had an older, I my mother was his second wife, and he could remember pretty far back the Great Depression got worse and worse and worse. And we have really forgotten that. And celebrities were hit too. Aviation contracts were drying up, and in 1935, it got worse. In 1936, it got worse. It got so bad that George Putnam, who was the vice president of the Explorers Club, I've seen the archives at the Explorers Club. I'm a new member of the Explorers Club, and he had to resign. He had no money. So they have very little money to go. And what they're looking for is a final stunt. Amelia Earhart has gotten a new gig. Um, she's not quite a professor, but she's hired as a consultant to Purdue University, where she is coming in for six weeks at a time to work with women, uh young girls, and talk about aviation, about becoming mechanics, about, you know, again, she's this tremendous feminist and they love her. I mean, this if you go to Purdue University, where many of the much of the archives are involving Amelia Earhart, there's statues of Amelia Earhart everywhere. And she has developed some relations there. And George Putnam at a party comes up with the idea of them buying her a plane and that she will be able to keep the plane. And this is an Electra 10E, which is the plane that she will take on her famous trip around the world. But what you need to know is that there are two attempts at this around the world trip. It is not a trip to push women forward, like her 1932 trip, where she wanted to prove that yes, she was at a sack of potatoes. She couldn't have to sit on her tush. She could actually fly across. She, you know, she didn't fly to Paris where she was supposed to. She went to Howfield in Dairy, Ireland, but you know, she was the second person across. Let's get let's not be so nitpicky, right? Um, but the thing that you need to know is that the first person that was hired as a navigator was a man named Harry Manning, who was a captain, a sea captain on the SS Roosevelt, where Amelie Earhart met him in 1928 when she was coming back as a passenger right before her ticker tape parade. He was very handsome and he was a bit of a womanizer, and she had a shipboard romance with him. That's in my book. Uh his and one of my sources on that is Harry Manning's uh wife, second wife. So I'm not just making this finger. Harry Manning and Amelia had a friendship, and she always promised him if she ever did a flight around the world that she would use his navigational skills. So he was a sea captain, but he was a really good navigator. And her friends, including the pilot Jackie Cochran, who would later help develop the WASP program in the United States, felt that Manning should not be her navigator because um he was not someone who was used to the air. And she wanted a test for him. And they gave him a test. And, you know, there's some in uh discretion, I get, I guess, like fight between Manning's version and Amelia Earhart's friend's version of whether or not he passed this test. But basically, they wanted to bring on a second navigator, just to be sure. And that man was a man named Fred Noonan. Now, Fred Noonan in the archives, and this is again on the tapes and in letters, came cheap because he was a tremendous navigator, but he had a lot of problems with alcoholism. And he was fired from Pan Am for alcoholism. And there are is a lot of paperwork and audio tapes to that effect, including his colleagues at Pan Am. For those who want to go down the rabbit hole, you can always email me at my website and find my website at Lor, you know, Laurie Gwenshapiro.com. I'll I'll get you the tape number. But they start talking about how he was just this incredible navigator, but very talented. But that's what Putnam wanted to just get him on there. And he was announced on St. Patrick's Day of 1937. The trip that they were doing was a trip around the equator. This is not one flight, but a series of flights. It's a gimmick. A Wiley Post had already gone around the world by himself. So this was a leisurely flight. The equator was, they mapped out a way to go from leaving from California, going to Hawaii, going to this tiny island that nobody thought she should go to, called Hallet Island, and then on to New Guinea. That was the original plan in that direction. What happens is that she's not really getting her hours on the select. She has a flight coach named Paul Mance, who doesn't think she's really that ready. But Putnam is getting book deals. He's getting a film deal with there's NBC deals. There's even Quaker Oates has a contract. If she makes this flight, she's going to get the equivalent of about millions of dollars in today's money. But what happens is Paul Mance secretly flies her from California to Hawaii one last time just to show her, you know, how to be on, you know, piloting. And then she's about to take off in Hawaii, and she's not in the air. Her plane spins out, and what happens is called ground looping, and the whole plane collapses on its belly, and it's complete. If you see photos of it, it's destroyed. Everybody, it's about to go into flames, but everybody gets out. Nobody dies, but Manning is disgusted. This is the person who was a navigator. And in lots of records that I have, he wants nothing to do with Amelia Earhart, the pilot, and goes back to the United States line as a sea captain. Junior navigator that was brought on at Jackie Cochran's suggestion. Um, and George Putnam finding out that this guy could come cheaply, um, was promoted to. The full captain. And this was Fred Noonan for a second flight, which was going in the opposite direction. Now, Amelia Earhart wanted to wait and follow the same flight that had been planned for her by a gentleman who knew a lot of these details. And he quit too. And George Padnam again is looking at that publishing deadline. If you around Christmas is when all the big books are, if she had to do this flight so the book could be written and they could hit the book contract. And my source on this that they wanted to flip the flight is Amelia Earhart's friend and rival, Louise Thayden, who won the women's air derby in 1929. She's on the Amelia Earhart tapes. Everybody write that down again. Smithsonian. She's talking off the record about how Amelia and George were fighting that she didn't want to go in that direction, but she felt very loyal to him. The problem with this is that Cowland Island, which is the size of Central Park in the middle of the Pacific, is a very dangerous place to stop and refuel. It could look like clouds from the sky if you miss it. There's only a certain amount of fuel that they could take from Leigh, New Guinea, which was a gold mining uh town in New Guinea. It wasn't an indigenous town. It was Australian run. That's why they had a strip there. If you miss it, you're out of fuel, you're out of luck. And people like Louise Thaden and Jackie Cochran, who were Amelia's pilot friends from the 99s, which still exists, the Women's Pilots Organization. Amelia was the first president, by the way. They are begging her not to do this. Why do you have to do this? You already have a career, you already have a record. You could go to Purdue, you could become a professor, but she is there's so much money. This particular flight around the world, again, a series of stops, is a money-making endeavor. It's a retirement plan. There's no reason for her to be doing this. Now, what happens is Fred Noonan starts out okay. He is not drinking for a certain period of time until he gets to around Indonesia, and there are people on these tapes drinking with him. And word gets back to Putnam, and they have words and harsh words. Amelia and Fred start to not get along. Amelia also gets very, very sick in Asia. She gets dysentery and she gets she's a skinny woman to begin with. She drops 10 pounds. I'm going to use the word, the D word, which is diarrhea, extremely vomiting and diarrhea, very sick. And she carries on. Eventually, when they get to Ley New Guinea, which is going to be the last place that we see footage with this video footage of her getting on there, Fred has a full leap relapse on drinking. The people, there's a small in Australian run in. I'm married to the into the to an Australian man, the Aussies drink. His are surrounded by men who are encouraging him to drink. And several of the people, including the hotel owner, are on tape saying that he was drinking very heavily two days before the flight. Now, what is also on the tape is that Amelia Earhart is so distraught. And remember, Amelia does not have Morse code skills. She had 10 words per hour, and uh Fred Noonan was a navigator. He was there was a whole team on the Pan Am flights. He wasn't in charge of Morse code and communications. He has less than 10 words a minute. Harry Manning knew Morse code really well. But these two people do not know Morse code. They have left a lot of things behind. They've left behind a trailing antenna. These George Putnam is so broke that they couldn't afford to pay any staff. He's now taken over. A PR guy, the PT Barnum of Publishing, is making major aviation decisions. Brad Noonan in Miami checked in with Pan Am and left some equipment behind. But even in New Guinea, when they're rushing to go, he leaves smoke bombs under his bed. Now, what happens the day before, this is as far as I can trace, um, is that Amelia borrows a truck from the late, there's a tiny little hotel in Ley New Guinea, and the owner, a very old lady, is interviewed in in New Guinea by El Jin Long. He's the reason he can do all these interviews is he's a member of a pilot himself from the Flying Tigers. So he's flying to his interviews and he's trying to solve, like many people have, the mystery of how Amelia Earhart disappears. And he realizes very quickly on that she this is a mismanaged flight and she's not prepared for this flight. But one of the things that he finds out is that um Amelia borrows a truck the day before she leaves because she wants to put eyeballs on Fred to make sure he's not drinking. And on paper, they go to an indigenous village in New Guinea. And I've been to New Guinea. That's one of the reasons I'm in the Explorers Club. I've spent quite a bit of time in New Guinea. And, you know, these are this is not the same as the Australian town lay that they're in. And she's writing, taking notes, and it's going to be ghostwritten into a column, maybe for her book later. You know, she would scribble a few notes and um they would wire it, and ghostwriters would start to write. And that was another source of income. A New York Herald Tribune, a syndicated column about her adventures. And remember, at this time, her her this trip around the world is getting not enough media attention. What is dominating world headlines is the Hindenburg crash. Very soon, Amelia Earhart's missing plane is going to replace the Hindenburg in the newspaper headlines, but they are not getting headlines. So she's trying to get color, but she's basically trying to make sure that he's not drinking. There is also a record that there is a radio operator in New Guinea named Harry Balfour, who works for the uh gold company. That's why there's planes there. And um Amelia is begging him, he has you know, obviously has Morse code skills, to come on this flight, even though they it's packed with fuel. They've gotten rid of everything. And he says no. And one of the reasons he says no is because his boss, who is an Australian man named Eric Chater, says, We're not gonna let go of our radio operator, all of our planes would crash. You got enough code. So she knows that she's about to get on that plane at a great risk, and she's sick. Remember, she has dysentery, she's on tapes. Um, people say that she was very upset with Fred Noonan. He was calling her a skinny bitch. Remember, this is not the book for your eight-year-old kid. I'm gonna say that. And it would who there's a lot of tension. We do see film of him hopping on the plane. He doesn't look drunk, but remember, he had that day in that indigenous village who knows what was going on in the plane. We do not know that he was drinking at all, that he snuck anything onto the plane. I only go by the facts. All right. What's amazing to me is that they got very close to Howlett Island, right there, because the radio operators from the Atasca, which is the Coast Guard cutter that was part of this whole setup, there was a Coastcard cutter that was parked right by the island that was supposed to be doing radio communication with her, which of course she's not gonna get in at in full capacity. He is talking to Amelia Earhart. He is the last person to talk to Amelia Earhart. He's on these tapes and he says she got there. They were right there. He got so close that he opened up his window on the on the ship to look out, to see, to look up and to wave at her. And shortly after that, she's very frantic that she's out of fuel. And he talks about how terrified her voice sounds. Now, I want to say this for anyone listening there, the facts, the Coast Guard records, these audio tapes that I was one of the few people to listen to, all support that she ran out of fuel about 12 to 24 miles from near Howland Island, and that the plane is at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, either in one or two pieces. There is a lot of nonsense there about capture stuff, other than that she had enough fuel to get to an island 400 miles away, that she her plane is in a lagoon. There's all sorts of money to be made on nonsense. And I'm a journalism professor. My only goal here is the truth. There's also money to be made on expeditions. There's a whole business of expeditions, you know, not-for-profits that raise money, and then someone has to take a salary, putting out things like, oh, we found her freckle cream, and then, oh, we didn't find it. It wasn't a freckle cream. Little can't, you know, people, scientists don't put out facts before they found something, and neither do seasoned people who are searching for planes. Now there is one organization I want to bring everyone's attention to, which is called Nauticus. And they also believe that Amelia Hearts plane is at the bottom of the ocean. They've recovered quite a few aircraft, and they're working with the radio uh team to try to recreate the radio frequencies, and they are legit. They are they they're they don't have a shyster reputation. I'm not gonna name anyone else. But what I will say is that, and this is fascinating to me, I I learned a lot about lost aircraft. Fred Noonan and Amelia Earhart were talking to each other by a jerry-rigged fishing pole, bamboo fishing pole. It was very noisy in the Electra, and they were passing notes back and forth. And if anyone is a Titanic fan that's listening, yes, things like buttons like will will last and shoes will last, but surprisingly, very deep in the Pacific, and this is one of the deepest parts of the Pacific, paper lasts. You can read the, you know, the the Titanic is in the Atlantic, but you can read papers that are at the bottom of the ocean. Maybe those papers that they were not they were passing exist, maybe manuals exist. We will know it's her plane, but do I think the plane is still there? Yes, I do. I don't think we have found it. And I want to emphasize to everyone that the Pacific is not the Atlantic, it is incredibly deep, it is incredibly wide. If you search an area, it's like searching a pinprick. But a lot of it has been ruled out, not all of it. And that is also useful information. Where someone is not is also information that a scientist will put into charts and then eliminate spots, and many planes and uh ships have been found after one spot was searched, including the Titanic. You eliminate where she's where where it's not. And I do think that maybe during my lifetime, maybe during your lifetime, the plane will be recovered. What's interesting is who claims ownership of the plane? Does this plane belong to Purdue University? Maybe that's why Purdue is now getting into the business of saying, oh, we found the plane. I don't think that plane is in a lagoon 400 miles away. And I know people might come for me, but you know, I just go by facts. I also, I also am very much aware of the business of Amelia Earhart, how Amelia Earhart funds a lot of things, including uh people's salaries when they're searching. They might not find Amelia Earhart, but they just got a salary for the year. So be very wary of anyone who says they found something before this evidence. Think like a scientist or a journalist. Don't think like a conspiracy theorist.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:09

That's a good point. Very good point.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:10

And uh what's amazing to me is that you know, I have people that say, well, you know, Fred Noonan is someone who's on this plane and we need to also think about his legacy. But one of the things that's really important to me is that I'm drawing um up characters that are human. Again, you can be an incredible navigator and also be a really um horrifying alcoholic. I mean, it's tragic. Human beings. Amelia Earhart is very, I say this in my introduction to the book, she's incredibly brave. When you know how unready, is that a word? Unready she was from the flight, you realize she's even braver. I mean, she's basically taking them on one of the most dangerous trips in the world. Her friends are telling her not to do it, but she did this often. When she goes on that 1928 flight as a passenger, the man flying the plane is Wilmer Stoltz. He will die of alcoholism in the air. She's literally throwing bottles of alcohol out the window while he's flying. And George Putnam has put her this young woman on that flight, but she's put herself on that flight. She knows Wilmer Stoltz is an alcoholic. Later on, she will take tremendously brave trips across Hawaii and in into Mexico, and she will set records, but often she's just a whisker from dying. And it is a sort of a mentality, I think, that occurs when you you've beat the odds quite a bit. You start to think that perhaps you think you're invincible. And it will catch up to you. Think about evil can evil. Like that mentality is not gonna work. It you know, you can be pretty lucky, but you know, you can also be very unlucky, and that's it. I think that anyone that was flying at the time, I mean, even Wiley Post, who's one of the great aviators, have a crash, right? We know where his plane is, you know, we we know where it landed, so there's not that mystery attached, but the men were crashing all the time. But Amelia Earhart was not the world's best um pilot. It's okay to say that, but she does do one thing that's incredible. She is pushing aviation forward, she's almost single-handedly saving the aviation industry at the stock market crash. And when you go up in a plane today as a passenger, you can thank Amelia Earhart, sort of normalizing that it's okay to take a plane ride. She's also pushing women forward. One thing we have to also understand is that George Putnam is part of the story too, because history is not clean. I want anyone listening to realize that we don't get rid of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson from our books for having slaves. But they had slaves. I mean, this is what history looks like. Amelia Earhart is not a slave owner. She's a kind, good person who people love. George Putnam is not a nice guy. He is bullying other women pilots, including Eleanor Smith, he and um uh Lady Heath from Ireland. There are women on record. Um, Louise Thaden is one of the great pilots. She talks a lot about this at the on those tapes that I've mentioned, the Amelia Earhart Project about how he was bullying Amelia Earhart to go around the world the other way. But what's fascinating to me is that we do not get that those women that idolize Amelia Earhart, including my own mother, who wanted to achieve partly because of Amelia without George Putnam. Um, some of the people that I interviewed for my book are the women that are involved with the new on a project where we're going back to the moon, women astronauts, their idol was Amelia Earhart. Now, Amelia Earhart was going to continue down a path of social work. That's where she was going. So if she wasn't plucked in 1928 in this almost reality show, you know, to fulfill a book deal, we might not know her name. And George Putnam is part of the reason that women are going back to the moon. So I want you to think about history in that way. You know, it's nuanced. We don't have to have our heroes perfect. Fred Noonan can be a great pilot and a bad drinker. He was also a womanizer. I'm just gonna get that out there. I kind of edited a lot of that out of my book because the drinking was a lie. So this is again at the height of the Great Depression. And I would say in my book, you have decades as characters as well. You have the prosperity of the jazz age, the free willing sexuality of the jazz age, and then you have the 1930s where people are pretty sober in terms of like getting whatever we have to do to get money. And you know, George Putnam was a master hustler, and he was able to get a plane for Millionaire who really found her calling. By the way, she had 31 jobs, she was not that young when she became famous. She was 30 uh one, she was lying about her age, she shaved two years, but a lot of women did. We didn't have the internet. Um, but she, you know, the women that were coming up, like Eleanor Smith was an incredible pilot. She was 16 years old. She's on the first woman on the Wheaties box. She was considered the best woman pilot in America in 1930. And that was the person that Putnam went after because he wanted Amelia Earhart to be the queen of aviation. That's one of the reasons why he put out the false story that she had the fourth transport license to try to like to cut Eleanor Smith's rise out. And he incredibly bullied her. But the thing is, by 35, everyone is feeling it. I mean, people are eating you know, the Binnies in particular were protected because people still they she Dorothy Binny Putnam says in her journal that she did lose a bit of money at the stock market, but people were still buying crayons in the Great Depression. You know, that crayon money cut, but she had some tragic remarriages. And it seems like George Putnam mellowed a bit on his fourth marriage. But one of the things is that, you know, right after Millia disappears, like literally six weeks later, he has a beautiful young stunt woman that he's lapped. Yeah, that's his girlfriend. But then he figures out that she's not really that wealthy, so he zeroes in like he did on Dorothy, on another uh woman named Jean, who is Beverly Hill's banking heiress in her 20s, early very beautiful, and he thinks that she has a lot of money, and he has fooled the world that he's a wealthy publisher, and she thinks he has money, and they kind of have a rude awakening on the wedding night. And that's maybe where the faked kidnapping attempt comes to try to get some money raised. I mean, it's a crazy wacky story, and I encourage everyone to um reach out to me if you have questions. Do answer my emails at laureguenchapiro.com. You could find the email there.

SPEAKER_04 1:47:32

Let's take a break for a moment and listen to a 1937 newsreel from Path A Gazette breaking the news of Amelia Earhart's disappearance.

SPEAKER_06 1:47:47

Only a short time ago, Amelia Earhart checked over every detail of her $80,000 flying laboratory in preparation for her round-the-world flight. This was to have been her greatest achievement, a skydash of 28,000 miles. With her husband, George Palmer Putnam on Wright, she discussed the hazardous cause which had been plotted for her by Fred Noon, the navigator who embarked with Mr. Earhart upon this great flight. A flight which was to have marked her retirement to aeronautical research. Then to a waiting world came news of disaster as the plane failed to reach Tiny Howland Island in the Pacific. A British crater, the Coast Guard, and the Navy sped to the search. The battleship Colorado steaming up from Honolulu under forced draft. From California, the aircraft carrier Lexington, with 3,000 men and 72 planes aboard, races into the distant Pacific to join the greatest searching colony in the history of aviation.

SPEAKER_04 1:49:00

I want to take a moment to close the loop on the Pan Am story here that brought us to this conversation. Lori's book is about Amelia Earhart and George Putnam, and that is exactly what she talked about today. But as we heard in the first part of this episode, that story cannot be fully understood without Pan Am. Fred Noonan learned to navigate the Pacific at Pan Am's expense on Pan Am's most important missions alongside Pan Am's finest crews. Juan Tripp personally extended the airline's full cooperation to Earhart's final flight. Pan Am Mechanics prepared her aircraft. Pan Am's radio network was on standby. And when the silence came on the morning of July 2nd, 1937, Pan Am's Pacific stations were among those listening. The U.S. Coast Guard's official records of the search effort included a formal Pan American Airways report, a detail that history has largely. Forgotten. Panam was there at the beginning of Earhart's story, at the center of it, and at the end of it. What strikes me most, sitting with all of this, is how small the world actually was at the center of it. Tripp, Earhart, Lindbergh, Music, Canada, Noonan, these were not distant figures operating in separate orbits. They knew each other, they flew together, planned together, and in some cases staked their lives on each other's judgment. Tripp was not simply building an airline. He was building a global network of routes with a genius of vision that few people in any era have matched, the belief that the entire world could be connected by air on schedule every week. And the people around him were the ones making it real, one crossing at a time over oceans that had never been flown over before. But they were also human, every one of them. Brilliant and flawed in equal measure, ambitious and vulnerable, capable of extraordinary courage and ordinary mistakes. This is not a diminishment of what they achieved. It is what makes their story worth telling honestly, because the truth of who they were is more interesting, more complicated, and more moving than any legend ever could be.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:39

Now, think about the very early test pilots for the moon race. Okay, most of them died. Many of them went on these trips knowing that they could die. We don't say how dare they take those trips. What Amelia Earhart wanted was the same chance to be able to take a venture. She just she was a stepmother, but she decided not to have kids with George Potton that had been discussed. She wanted to be, you know, she they did have a mother, her stepchildren had Dorothy, right? Um, she wanted to be able to take risks. One thing that I really believe about um uh Amelia, who was leaning towards civil rights at the end of her life. Um, she had started out believing in eugenics, unfortunately, like many people did in the 20s, including people in the black community themselves. But she was really pushing for civil rights. That's on record in the Eisenhower library, by the way, Jackie Cochran's archives. She's a little bit annoyed at Amelia Earhart. I'm kind of cheering for her. But what's amazing to me is that I do believe that she believed in women's ability in aviation. And I do believe that if Amelia Earhart had lived, she would have continued to be a mentor to women in aviation. And I believe she would have been very involved with the space program and really championing women astronauts. Unfortunately, Jackie Cochran, although she did push for the WASP program, had sort of the opposite effect on women astronauts in the early days of NASA. She did not think that women should go be going up in space. And I can't imagine Amelia Earhart thinking that way. And I think one of the things that I realized is that you that, you know, everyone that gets a platform, and we can now get platforms overnight on Instagram ourselves, we should be using whatever little platform that we have for good. And I have a little platform, I'm not Kim Kardashian, but you know, I'm a little, I got a little to go in here now. And I try to use it for reiterating not to buy into conspiracy nonsense, not to buy into easy facts. People did not find the plane. If you see that she's rust, you know, eaten by coconut crabs, that should sense sound like a little bell, like a journalist's uh brain going, uh, let me check that out. There's a saying in journalism: if your mother says she loves you, check it out. And the only other thing that I learned that I really want to share with, because this is an aviation podcast, is one of the great stops. I've done over 30 cities on tour. I'm um I'm taking a break. The book came out in July. I'm going out again on in March to Tucson and to many other cities around the country. I did go to the Oshkosh fly-in, the EAA event with 700,000 pilots, which is like Disneyland for aviation. It was extraordinary. I got to speak to a full crowd about Amelia Earhart. But one of the things that the pilots taught me, and again, I'm not a pilot, is that many aviators die from something they call get home itis. That is, oh, the flight's almost over. Remember, Amelia's sick. She's fighting with Noonan, who had been drunk. Um Putnam is sending telegrams. If you get here by July 4th, we'll get you on the radio. And she's trying to get Harry Balfour to come on the plane, and he said no. And they just get on that plane. It's like, let's get it over. Did Amelia Earhart perhaps die from get over itis? That's what I asked listeners as well.

SPEAKER_04 1:56:24

Interesting. Yeah, very interesting. Well, Lori, thank you very much for joining us. Uh, this has been an incredible conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:32

That's a nice compliment. Thank you. I am so honored to be on this podcast. And again, I was telling you at the very beginning before we started taping that when I was in college and I was kind of dressed in mod clothing, of course, touting instead of my knapsack in college, I was carrying around a pan Ambag because I had seen the Beatles photos and I just wanted to be on Carnaby Street. But I got into the whole world of aviation through uh vintage dresses.

SPEAKER_04 1:57:02

It's neat, it's very neat.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:04

And I want to give a plug for anyone that it's a long book, it's almost five 500 pages, but a very wonderful person um uh recorded the audiobook. Um yes, yes, and that's Stephanie Powers. Yes, heart to heart and uh uh from heart to heart, and she was also, if anyone remembers the the man from Uncle, she was also the girl from Uncle. She's an oxygenarian, she sounds incredible.

SPEAKER_04 1:57:32

She does indeed.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:34

And also, a little known fact, Stephanie Powers is a pilot herself.

SPEAKER_04 1:57:38

Oh, I didn't know that. Well, there you go. There you go.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:43

So I hope I hope that anyone will reach out to me. I I love people, I love talking about Amelia Earhart, and people have asked me if I like Amelia Earhart at the end of five years of research. And the answer is yeah. I don't know if I like George Putnam, but I do like Amelia Earhart.

SPEAKER_04 1:58:00

Well, thank you for coming on the Pan Am podcast, and it's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:05

Thank you. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_04 1:58:14

Pan Am was a pioneer in air travel and still stands as one of the most iconic and innovative airlines in aviation history. That legacy lives on at the Pan Am Museum in Garden City, New York, where you can explore the rich history of the aircrafts and individuals at the heart of the company known as the world's most experienced airline. For more information about the Pan Am Museum, check out our website at www.thepan Amuseum.org. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. As was once a tagline in one of our commercials, we would greatly appreciate your support to help the Pan Am Museum continue making the going great. You can also support the museum by shopping on our online store for all things Pan Am accessories, apparel, jewelry, books, models, and posters. We want to hear from you. If you have a question for us or want to share your story, our email address is podcast at the Pan Ammuseum.org. As flight crews once said to passengers departing for their destinations around the world, thank you for flying, Pan Amérique.