Public Servant

All one night last week Mexican soldiers buzzed over the bed of a dry lake, 7,500 ft. above the sea, smoothed out a homemade runway three miles long, marked it with flags. In the dim glare of automobile headlights and a young moon, a red monoplane was loaded with 470 gal. of gasoline, a batch of letters with "Amelia Earhart" stamps on them, six hard-boiled eggs, four sandwiches, thermos bottles of water, cocoa, tins of tomato juice.

At dawn the world's No. 1 airwoman climbed into her Lockheed Vega, warmed the big Wasp engine while soldiers herded horses, cows, goats, Mexicans out of the way. Then she taxied into a biting wind, lifted her three-ton ship off the ground after a perilous run of nearly two miles.

Over snow-capped Mexican mountains, over 700 mi. of Gulf water, the onetime Boston social worker flew. She picked up her landfall near New Orleans. Aided by wind & weather, guided by radio and a perilous run of nearly two miles.

Lear homing compass, she reached Washington in half the time it took Colonel Lindbergh to fly the same distance in 1927.

When Amelia Earhart finally set her plane down in Newark after 14 hr. 18 min., she had flown 2,100 mi. nonstop. No sooner had she cut her switch than a wildly cheering crowd, ignoring 45 policemen, surged onto the runways. Mobsters forced her out of a police radio car, carried her off the field on their shoulders. George Palmer Putnam, ubiquitous husband, became frightened, angry. Said he: "The most disgraceful scene I have ever witnessed. . . . Mexico is four times as civilized as Newark."

Next day the Herald Tribune said: "There were tired lines about her face." Reported the Times: "There were no lines of fatigue." Miss Earhart announced that her next program would be: "Sleep, sleep and more sleep."

Few days later New York's air-minded Mayor LaGuardia presented her with the city's medal for "distinguished and exceptional public service."

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