Courtesy Library, Penn State Abington
Although she had dropped out , Amelia Earhart returned to the Ogontz School in 1929 to address the graduating class.
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Post a commentEarhart was spreading her wings at a local school
The movie Amelia shows the legendary aviation pioneer at the height of her career. But here's a little-known snippet of Earhart's bio: Before becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, she attended a finishing school in our neck of the woods.
Letters, documents and artifacts from the Ogontz School for Young Ladies, which is now the site of Penn State Abington, offer a glimpse of a girl on her way to breaking barriers of speed, distance and gender.
In a school dedicated to shaping the daughters of highest society into proper debutantes, "Amelia was the most illustrious of the alumnae," said Lillian Hansberry, archive coordinator, who will discuss Earhart's local connection in a Nov. 8 program on campus, "Amelia Earhart: From the Ogontz School to Worldwide Fame." The talk is free and open to the public.
"I don't think most people have any idea she had a Philadelphia connection and how formative it was in her life," said Moylan C. Mills, professor emeritus at Penn State, who will also speak in the program.
"Apparently, she really blossomed at Ogontz. She was a quiet, introspective young girl who came into her own at the school. In a sense she started becoming the Amelia we know through the biographies and films.
"Of course, we're fascinated because she was a pioneer in so many ways. She took on challenges many men would not. And the way she vanished. It's like a story with no concrete ending."
Hansberry says the archives trace a happy, popular student who excelled academically, and had a strong independent streak.
"Amelia had a really strong sense of ethics and honor," Hansberry says. "The other girls saw her as a cool, eloquent leader."
Earhart challenged the school's domineering headmistress to abolish sororities because of their psychological damage to girls they rejected. She was caught more than once climbing on the roof of the dormitory in her nightgown. And she dropped out of the two-year school a semester early to help with the war effort.
A March 1917 letter home shows Earhart as aware and concerned about world affairs, even as she enjoyed late night high jinks when some of her teachers were away:
"We played the ukeleles [sic] at midnight . . . made hot chocolate with marshmallow . . . and drank it from trophy cups," she wrote in one paragraph.
And in the next, she asked her mother, "What do you think of . . . the abdication of the Tzar" Nicholas II of Russia.
"Clearly, she was forging her identity at Ogontz," says Penn State librarian Sam Stormont. "She was forming her idea for a life path that would be far different from that of her peers."
A Kansas native whose family moved frequently because of her father's alcoholism, Earhart enrolled at Ogontz, one of the most exclusive finishing schools in the country, in October 1916 when it was located in Elkins Park, Cheltenham Township. And she continued on when the school expanded to 54 wooded acres in nearby Rydal - a property that would later become Penn State Abington.
Meelie, as Earhart was known, dropped out in December 1917 at age 19 and volunteered for the war effort, working at a Toronto hospital.
The Ogontz curriculum was modeled after that at Vassar, and it attracted some of the best teachers, among them the dancer Martha Graham. Headmistress Abby Sutherland, with whom Earhart would tangle, had been in the same class at Radcliffe with Gertrude Stein and Helen Keller.
Earhart excelled at French, played offense on the field hockey team and placed first (with a teammate) in the three-legged race on Field Day. Classmates reaching for irony sometimes called the slender, graceful Earhart by the nickname Butterball.
"Butter, for short," she wrote home.
In fall 1917, Earhart was elected vice president of the senior class and composed the class motto: "Honor is the foundation of courage." She was secretary-treasurer of the Christian Association, and secretary of the campus Red Cross Chapter, whose members knitted sweaters and socks for soldiers.
She also took on Sutherland in a dispute about sororities.
