If you want to worship your heroes, never study them too deeply. Being the daughter of a private pilot, I’ve been around airplanes, tiny airports in fields, air shows, air and space museums and the rest since I was only a few weeks old, the check list of getting ready to fly absorbed in the blood. I still can’t leave the house without asking myself “keys? badge? purse? wallet? cell phone? glasses? ” and Blacklight rolls his eyes every time I’m waiting at the door, keys in hand asking “Have you taken your meds? Do you have Kleenex?”. And learning that the female pilot of the 20th century didn’t even bother to check if her airplane had gas before taking off? The idol of Amelia Earhart in my head crumbled to dust, leaving a lanky, blond woman who I could run into at the grocery store. You know, the one who didn’t remember her reusable grocery bags or loyalty card? The one who backs her SUV out of the parking space next to you without looking and zips off through the parking lot barely paying attention to the stop signs and chatting away on her Bluetooth, late to her yoga class or picking up her kids from soccer practice…

Pick up Kathleen C. Winters’ Amelia Earhart: The Turbulent Life of An American Icon and tell me that if Amelia Earhart lived now that the above couldn’t have been one future for her. But during her actual life, Amelia Earhart was tossed around more than her Lockhead airplanes, the planes as battered and ill-used as Ameila herself. Did she feel the airplanes didn’t deserve any better care than she herself got? Born into a socialite mother from a good Midwestern family and a shy, alcoholic lawyer father, Amelia Earhart grew up moving between a comfortable home with her maternal grandparents and the strained of her parents. While trying to hold her parents together, Amelia grew up to try nursing and college before falling into aviation. And falling into aviation is a very apt term because contrary to legend Earhart is not a natural pilot but one who had the good fortune to have her flaws and drawbacks as a pilot smoothed over by the man who became her husband George Putnam.  Her life in the air was every bit as reckless in the air as on the ground leading to the circumstances of a pilot who perhaps should have never attempted her flight around the world but could not escape her own fame and public image. And in her wake left the people around her as devastated as her planes.