Amelia Earhart

Essay by fetusontoastJunior High, 8th gradeA+, August 2006

download word file, 3 pages 4.2

Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas on July 24, 1897. While growing up, she was a real tomboy and very daring. She would climb trees with the boys, ride sleds really fast, hunt with a .22 rifle, and other types of things that little girls didn't do in the early 1900s. She didn't want to be stopped from doing things that people thought only men could do. She even kept a scrapbook of newspaper articles about women who had been successful in what people thought were men's jobs.

When she graduated from high school in 1915, World War I was going on. She became a nurse's aide in a military hospital in Canada. After the war was over she went to college at Columbia University in New York and then later at Harvard in Boston. She eventually became a social worker.

Amelia saw her first plane at a state fair when she was 10 years old, but she wasn't that excited about it.

However, when she was 20 years old she went to see a stunt-flying show and became fascinated with flying. She went for her first ride in a plane when she was 23, and after that she really wanted to learn to fly. The next year she took her first flying lesson. Six months later she saved up enough money to buy her first plane, a bright yellow, two-seater biplane that she named "Canary." It was in that plane that Amelia set the woman's altitude record when she flew at 14,000 feet.

In 1928, when she was 31 years old, she was asked by two American pilots to be a passenger on a transatlantic flight, making her the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an airplane. They flew from Newfoundland to Wales in 21 hours.