By Audrey Anderson
Hometown Weekly Reporter
Bob Begin loves studying history, and he is talented at researching and sharing what he has learned. He gives history talks at libraries throughout the area on various topics. Those topics have a common thread: they are those that people feel they know a lot about, but there is more that Bob can share. Bob’s topics include The Cocoanut Grove Fire, Gertrude Bell, The Loss of the USS Indianapolis, The Two Battles of Bunker Hill, The Mutiny on the Bounty, and others.
On Tuesday night, May 23rd, in the Needham Free Public Library’s Community Room, Bob’s topic was Amelia Earhart, an American Icon. People generally know that Amelia Earhart was an aviator, and that she was lost at sea in the first half of the 20th century, but there was more for Bob to tell.
Earhart was born in 1887. Her father worked on the railroad, and the family traveled around a lot. She was fascinated by his work and the movement of people on the railroad. When the family moved to LA, they found themselves in the middle of the aviation boom occurring there. They attended stunt shows, and saw the newest, fastest, airplanes available.
Earhart was drawn to aviation. In 1928, she became the first woman to travel, as a passenger, across the Atlantic Ocean. She immediately became a celebrity, championing aviation, authoring books, giving speeches to large crowds, and meeting influential people. In 1932, she was the first woman to make a nonstop, solo, transatlantic flight. For this feat, she received the United States Distinguished Flying Cross from Congress, the Legion of Honor from the French Government, and the Gold Medal from the National Geographic Society from Herbert Hoover. She became a visiting faculty member at Purdue University, supported women’s rights and women’s suffrage, and worked with The Ninety-Nines to support women aviators.
In 1937, Earhart put together a team to plan her flight circumnavigating the globe. She took off with navigator Fred Noonan from California for the first leg of her trip to Honolulu, Hawaii. The first stop of her trip, to refuel, was scheduled for tiny Howland Island. She never made it there. After a year and a half of searching, she and Noonan were declared dead.
Noonan was not much help to her, as he was likely inebriated for much of the trip. She had two communication channels, one outgoing and one incoming. As she wasn’t too knowledgeable about them, she used both to try to contact a ship following her path. The ship couldn’t hear her.
Theories about her disappearance range from being captured by the Japanese or Chinese and used to spread propaganda to coming back to the US with a different identity. A scarf and skull were found on a Pacific Island that might be hers.
