Amelia Earhart
A record-setting aviation pioneer and adventurer, Amelia Earhart was
a celebrity and advocate for women’s equality in the early 1900s.
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Millie and Pidge were two unusual little girls. Growing up in the 1860s in Kansas, their
mother let them run wild like the neighborhood boys - something that just wasn’t done in
those days. Millie and her sister became fearless tomboys: climbing trees, collecting
bugs, and helping their uncle build a home-made (and very dangerous!) wooden roller
coaster.
Full of self-confidence, Amelia (Millie’s real name) grew up determined to do something
great with her life. She just didn’t know what it was going to be.
One answer seemed to come during World War I, when Earhart visited her sister in
Toronto and ended up volunteering as a nurse at a military hospital. Right after the war, a
worldwide flu pandemic killed millions of people in 1918. Earhart kept nursing but got
sick herself, and spent nearly a year recovering in the hospital.
Then, something else happened in Toronto that changed Amelia Earhart’s life. She
watched one of the first annual air shows at the famous Canadian National Exhibition.
The pilot of a biplane swooped down low and flew right over her head. From that
moment, she was hooked on airplanes.
Back home in Kansas, Earhart took her first airplane ride and announced that she was
going to learn to fly. Working every job she could get, Amelia saved up the money for
lessons and became only the sixteenth woman in the world to get her international flying