Then, finally, it disappeared.
For the first seven hours of her flight, Amy stayed in contact with a radioman on Lae. On course, 750 miles out, still clearly heard, she was advised to maintain the same radio frequency until further notice. But that was the last she was heard on Lae.
The U.S.S. frigate Ontario, midway between Lae and Howland in the Pacific, waited to provide navigation and weather updates; the Electra should have passed over the ship where three sailors kept watch and a radio operator stood by. No sign of her. Of course, the good weather had turned bad after midnight, a nasty squall kicking in and holding on till dawn. This might have slowed Amy down and/or caused her to use up a considerable amount of fuel, outmaneuvering the storm, and unintentionally escaping the Ontario’s sight.
The Coast Guard cutter Itasca lay anchored just off Howland Island, assigned to help Amelia Earhart with radio direction signals, voice communication, and surface smoke. But starting at midnight, Itasca’s radio room had sent weather reports on the hour and half-hour, and Amy had not acknowledged any of them.
Then at 2:45 A.M., the chief radioman — with two wire service reporters, eavesdropping at the off-limits radio room doorway — thought he recognized her voice; so did the reporters, and at 3:45 they heard her again, more clearly now, saying, “Earhart. Overcast. Will listen on 3105 kilocycles on hour and half-hour.” So at 4:00 A.M., the radio operator called on 3105, asking, “What is your position? When do you expect to arrive Howland? Please acknowledge.”
But she didn’t, though at 4:53 A.M., as the operator was issuing a weather update on 3105, Amy interrupted with a faint, muffled, garbled message, with only “partly cloudy” discernible amidst static.
Fifteen minutes before she was due at Howland, at 6:14 A.M., Amy’s voice could be heard saying: “Want bearing on 3105 kilocycles on hour. Will whistle in microphone.” But her whistle got lost in the harmonic whines of Pacific radio reception at dawn, and the operator couldn’t get a fix on her.
At 7:42 Amy’s voice, stronger, said, “We must be on you but cannot see you... gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. Flying at altitude one thousand feet.” A minute later, interrupting Itasca’s frantic transmissions, Amy’s voice, louder yet, chimed: “Earhart calling Itasca. We are circling but cannot hear you...”
The radio operator on the Itasca sent messages by voice and key and listened on every frequency that Amy might use. Her final transmission, at 8:44, was shrill and frightened: “We are on the line of position 156–137. Will repeat message. We will repeat this message on 6210 kilocycles. Wait. Listening on 6210 kilocycles. We are running north and south.”
With no frame of reference, her “position 156–137” and “running north and south” were meaningless. Until 10:00 A.M., the radio operator continued trying to make contact.
At 10:15 A.M., the commander of the Itasca ordered full steam, beginning a desperate search at sea, soon to be joined by the minesweeper Swan, the battleship Colorado, the aircraft carrier Lexington, and four destroyers in a sweeping mass rescue effort the likes of which had never before been expended on a single missing aircraft.
Amelia Earhart was back in the headlines.
Chapter 9
I was drawn into the matter of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance well before she got around to disappearing.
Midafternoon on Friday, May 21, in my office, in my swivel chair with my back to the uninspiring view of the El and Van Buren Street, a warm, barely discernible breeze drifting in the open window, I sat hunkered with a fountain pen over a stack of retail credit check reports, when the phone rang.
“A-1,” I said, over the street noise.
“Nate Heller? Paul Mantz.”
Even in those four words, I could tell he was worked up in some sort of lather; and since our only common ground was Amy, that got my attention. I shut the window to hear better, though the connection was remarkably good for long distance.
“Well hello, Paul... is everything all right with our girl’s round-the-world venture?”
“No,” he said flatly. “It’s gone seriously to shit. She’s taken off.”
I sat forward. “Isn’t that what pilots do?”
Bitterness edged his voice: “She took off on ‘shakedown flight’ of the Electra, she told reporters, but really she’s headed to Miami. She’s on her way.”
“Where are you, Burbank?”
An El train was rumbling by and I had to work my voice up.
“No, no, I’m in your back yard... St. Louis. Down here with Tex Rankin, we got an air meet at Lambert Field. Flyin’ competition aerobatics.”
“I thought you were working full-time as Amelia’s technical advisor.”
“So did I. February, I put all my motion picture flying on hold to give myself over to this cockeyed world flight. But when this air meet came up, Amelia and Gippy encouraged me to take a little time off and go.”
“Are you saying they double-crossed you? She sneaked off on her big flight while her top advisor was out of town? Why the hell would she do that?”
“I think it’s Putnam’s doing. Listen... this thing stinks to high heaven. We got to talk.”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”
“...You want a job?”
“Usually. What do you have in mind?”
“You free this weekend?”
“I’m never free... it’s going to cost you twenty-five bucks a day.” Since G. P. and Amy were paying Mantz $100 a day, I figured he could afford it. Besides, I’d have to cancel my date Saturday night with Fritzie Bey after her last show at the Koo Koo Club.
“I’ll pay you for two days,” he said, “whether you take the job or not. I’m flyin’ the air meet all day tomorrow, but nothin’ on Sunday, and we’re not headin’ home till Monday.”
“You want to come to me, or should I come to you?”
“You come to me... We can meet at Sportsman’s Park, Sunday afternoon — playin’ craps the other night, I won a pair of box seats for the Cardinals and Giants, should be a hell of a game. Dean and Hubbell on the mound.”
That might be worth the trip alone. Baseball wasn’t my first love — boxing was my sport, growing up on the West Side with Barney Ross like I did — but, after all, Dizzy Dean and Carl Hubbell were to the diamond what Joe Louis and Max Schmeling were to the ring.
“You take the train down here tomorrow,” Mantz continued, “and I’ll reimburse you. I’ll have ya booked into the Coronado Hotel.”
That was where Amy and I had stayed on the lecture tour; where I gave her that first neck rub...
“Is that where you’re staying?” I asked him.
“No! I’m at a motel out by the airport. I don’t want us to hook up till the game.”
“Why the cloak-and-dagger routine, Paul?”
“It’s just better that way. Safer.”
“Safer?”
“I’ll leave your ticket for the game at the Coronado front desk. You in?”
“I’m in,” I said, not knowing why, unless it was my love for Amy, or maybe my love for $25 a day with a Cards-Giants game tossed in.
Sunday afternoon in St. Louis, baseball fanatics from all over the Mississippi Valley squeezed into Sportsman’s Park, nearly thirty thousand of them bulging the stands. Many of them had driven all night to see Dizzy Dean try to stop master of the screwball “King” Carl Hubbell’s winning streak, which stood at twenty-one straight; here sat an Arkansas mule trader, there an Oklahoma dry goods salesman next to a WPA foreman from Tennessee, sitting in front of a country farm agent from Kansas, men in straw hats drinking beer, women in their Sunday best fanning themselves with programs, as the annual heat wave was getting a nice early start. Despite the heat, and the anticipation, the crowd wasn’t surly, laughing and applauding the pregame horse and bicycle exhibition and a drum and bugle corps show. The sky was blue, the clouds white and fleecy, and there was just enough of a breeze to flutter the flag above the billboard ads of the outfield fences.