Earhart 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.

Earhart belonged to an athletic sorority, Alpha Phi, but apparently she came to believe that the girls rejected by sororities suffered in ways the school should not sanction. And she said so to Sutherland.

"I nearly had my head taken off when I told her [Sutherland] the essence of true leadership was to have the girls behind you," Earhart wrote home to her mother.

Sutherland finally relented, replacing the sororities with an Honor Board. But for the remainder of her time at the school, Earhart was on the alert for covert attempts to reintroduce sororities at Ogontz.

That same year, when seniors were split about getting class rings, Earhart was on the side of the minority who wanted to forgo costly traditional rings. She favored buying "little gold bands for a trifle, about four or five dollars" and giving the rest of the cash to the Red Cross.

"I don't know how we will come out" on the issue, she wrote home in November 1917.

In East to the Dawn (Da Capo Press 1997), Susan Butler notes that Earhart was not interested in the future most Ogontz girls assumed would be theirs - presentation to society followed by marriage.

Instead, she kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about women of achievement: Dr. Bessica Raiche of Anaheim, Calif., who was an even earlier aviator and the first woman president of the Orange County Medical Association; and Helen H. Gardner, the first woman to serve as U.S. Civil Service Commissioner.

Gardner was quoted in the clip saying that keeping a home and a job "is difficult but not impossible." Earhart added this note: "Good girl, Helen!"

The Ogontz School had other graduates of distinction. Mary Curtis, for example, who founded the Curtis Institute of Music, and Nancy McFeely, the mother of television neighbor Fred Rogers. And the school apparently remained dear to the hearts of graduates long after it closed in 1950.

Some 185 "Ogontz Girls" and their families contributed $65,000 and donated some of their personal memorabilia to create the school's archive room at Penn State.

Earhart returned to Ogontz several times to address graduates, and she received an honorary degree in 1930.

In 1932, she would become the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. That same year, she was the first woman to fly nonstop coast to coast. In 1935, she completed the first solo flight by anyone from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland.

She was last heard from on July 2, 1937, heading east from New Guinea into the Pacific, on a quest to become the first person to fly around the world at its widest point, close to the equator.

Later, "when the papers still throbbed with details of the tragedy," Sutherland wrote this in a tribute:

"The last time she visited the school and spoke to us, she told us of that wonderful experience among the stars when she took off from Hawaii, and realized she was alone over the Pacific with nothing but the friendly stars about her looking in at her cockpit."

The historical connection between Ogontz, Philadelphia and Penn State is explained in library records.

The Ogontz School for Young Ladies began life in 1850 as the Chestnut Street Female Seminary, at 1615 Chestnut St. It moved in 1883 to the estate (in what became Elkins Park) of Jay Cooke, who was renowned as a Civil War financier.

Cooke had been so instrumental to the Union cause that when Ulysses S. Grant accepted Robert E. Lee's surrender, he praised Cooke, saying, " . . . to his labors more than those of any other man, the people of this country owe the continued life of the nation."

Philadelphia showed its thanks by naming Cooke Middle School in Logan for him.

Cooke had named his mansion, which is now a housing development at Washington Lane and Ashbourne Road, for a childhood mentor, Chief Ogontz of the Wyandotte tribe.

As a child in Sandusky, Ohio, Cooke grew up at the site of the chief's lodge. Cooke recalled that the chief would visit his home for weeks at a time, delighting the children with tales of Indian adventures, according to one history, and Cooke was impressed by the chief's bravery, loyalty and integrity.

Chief Ogontz never came to this area, but for decades, a swath of Cheltenham Township would be known as Ogontz. And it's a short trek, literally and figuratively, to Ogontz Avenue in West Oak Lane.

As for the Penn State connection, when the Ogontz estate no longer suited the school, headmistress Abby Sutherland bought land in Rydal, Abington Township. She closed the Ogontz School in 1950 and donated the property to Penn State.

In its early years, the campus, then known as Penn State Ogontz, was a two-year program from which students transferred to the main campus. It became a four-year institution in 1962 and took the name Penn State Abington.

Penn State Abington professor emeritus Moylan C. Mills and library assistant Lillian Hansberry will discuss the movie "Amelia" and attempt to fill in the blanks about Earhart's life at the Ogontz School, at 2:30 p.m. Nov. 8, Room 112 of the Woodland Building at Penn State Abington. The program is free and open to the public. Parking is available in Lot M, off Woodland Road in Rydal. For more information, contact Pam Brobst 215-881-7634.

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