Amelia Earhart's disappearance still haunts her stepson
deb...@comcast.net
By Eliot Kleinberg
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 27, 2004
BOYNTON BEACH - George Palmer Putnam Jr. is 83. He would like to
know, before he dies, whatever happened to his stepmother. A lot of
other people also want to know what became of Amelia Earhart.
The famed aviator and her navigator, Fred Noonan, left the United
States from an airstrip north of Miami on June 1, 1937. A month later,
on July 2, they vanished somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. Their fate
has become one of America's most enduring mysteries.
Now a Maine-based company plans to use sonar this spring to sweep a
1,000-square-mile piece of the ocean floor west of Howland Island,
often mentioned as the likely spot where Earhart's plane went down.
It's not the first effort to find the fliers, and Putnam isn't putting
money toward the effort. But he is encouraging it.
"If they could bring up something, it will bring a close to it," Putnam
said. "End the crazy stories."
Earhart's disappearance would have been dramatic enough by itself. But
she had become the 1920s version of a rock star - she was the first
woman to fly across the Atlantic - and an icon for women at a time
when they had had the right to vote for only 17 years and still were
mostly invisible in such manly pursuits as flying.
Earhart, three weeks shy of her 40th birthday, and Noonan, a newlywed,
made their last departure from Papua New Guinea. They were last heard
from as they approached the airstrip at Howland Island, a
0.6-square-mile piece of rock that lay in the middle of the vast
Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and Australia.
Over the next several weeks, the U.S. Navy searched a quarter-million
square miles of ocean - an area almost the size of Texas - without
luck. At $4 million, it was, at that time, the costliest and most
intensive air and sea search in history.
The theories about what happened to the two pilots are more numerous
even than those about who killed JFK: Earhart was Tokyo Rose, the
propaganda queen who tormented U.S. troops on the radio. She was
working as a prostitute in Japan. She and Noonan ran off together. She
returned to America under an assumed name and lived out her life as a
New Jersey homemaker.
And that doesn't even get into the extraterrestrials.
Twice, Putnam said, Japanese TV crews have come to interview him. That
country has been stung by theories that Japanese soldiers encountered
the fliers and shot them as spies.
The most likely theory is the simplest, but the least sexy: The plane
just ran out of gas.
"What else could it have done?" Putnam asked. He said it either crashed
into the water or had to land on an uncharted island, where Earhart and
Noonan were stranded and died.
A Coast Guard radio operator's logs suggest Earhart was low on fuel
because she hit a stronger headwind than she had anticipated. One of
her last calls said she had only a half hour's worth of fuel left and
couldn't see land.
Others have successfully completed Putnam's stepmother's failed
mission, but in 1937, Amelia Earhart's plane "was pretty doggone
primitive," he said.
Putnam's dad, publisher George P. Putnam, spent untold time and money
fruitlessly searching for the lost aviator. He had married Amelia,
about 10 years his junior, in February 1931. The young Putnam was 11.
He would fly more than once with the queen of aviation.
"I always liked her very much," Putnam said. "She was a great role
model. She took a position there were many things a woman could do as
good as a man."
The day Earhart flew from Miami, George, then 16, was in Fort Pierce.
His father was in California. George Sr. took his wife's disappearance
hard.
"Dad spent a lot of money searching," George Jr. said. He recalled how
his father bought a scarf from someone who claimed it belonged to
Amelia, only to find it was a scam. George Putnam Sr. died in 1950 at
63.
George Jr. suffered from polio as a child and his mother brought him to
Florida when he was 9. He has lived in the state ever since. He served
in World War II: His ship was torpedoed, and he was there when Gen.
Douglas MacArthur made his triumphant return to the Philippines.
George Jr. was a director of Binney & Smith Inc., the maker of Crayola
crayons, founded by his grandfather on his mother's side. He also was
in the construction and citrus business and has been an ardent
conservationist. He married his third wife, Marie, about 39 years ago.
Soon after that, the couple moved from the Fort Pierce area to their
two-story home near Interstate 95 and Woolbright Road, where his living
room is filled with newspapers and books. He said he hardly ever
watches television.
The Maine-based Nauticos company will be making its third attempt to
find Earhart's plane. A 1992 attempt was called it off because of
technical problems, and one in 1999 found nothing conclusive. The
company says its new expedition, costing about $1.5 million, will use
better sonar technology.
Nauticos officials believe Earhart's plane is in water as much as
17,000 feet deep; that's more than 3 miles. The advantage: That far
down, the water temperature is just above freezing and there's little
oxygen and few currents. All of that would be inclined to preserve the
plane, if it is there. Any human remains will be long gone, but jewelry
and even clothes might survive. Nauticos has said that if it finds the
plane, it will try to raise it.
Wouldn't the discovery of the plane destroy the legend? No, George
Putnam said, noting the burst of interest after the Titanic was found.
But he was adamant that anything recovered go to a museum, saying
"They're not just going to sell this to the highest bidder."