Amelia Earhart Falls In Love With Flying
Plus all the week's most fascinating local history news and more.
It was during this week in 1932, exactly 90 years ago, that Amelia Earhart took off from a runway in Newfoundland, beginning a flight that would make her the very first woman ever to fly solo across the Atlantic. But in a way, that journey had really begun two decades earlier, when the idea of flying first snuck its way into Earhart’s heart. And that happened in Toronto.
It began during those terrible years of the First World War. Earhart had been raised in Kansas and Iowa, but her sister had come north to attend a girls’ boarding school on Bloor Street. And when Amelia came to visit her over the Christmas holidays in 1917, the trip would change her life.
The United States had only been in the war for a few months at that point, but Canadians had been fighting since the beginning. And Toronto had been transformed by it.
The city was now a major military hub. Factory workers toiled around the clock to produce munitions and supplies; in Liberty Village, for instance, they made bomb shells and machine guns among other things; the Distillery churned out smokeless gunpowder. Tanks rumbled between downtown skyscrapers while special streetcars, draped with banners promising a “free trip to Europe”, picked up new recruits. The sound of soldiers marching in lockstep echoed through the streets. Many of them trained at the armouries on University Avenue, or at the firing ranges on the banks of Etobicoke Creek, or in the war games held in the Humber Valley or in High Park. Tens of thousands of Torontonians had left for the front lines. And many had already come home, no longer able to fight; some missing limbs, others blinded or on crutches. Wounded soldiers filled the city’s sidewalks and parks. Many gathered at Yonge and College, which would become known as Shrapnel Corners, and the brick wall behind their benches was covered in a scrawl of chalk messages calling on others to do their part.
It was the sight of those wounded veterans that convinced Earhart to stay and help. “For the first time,” she explained, “I realized what the World War meant. Instead of new uniforms and brass bands, I saw only the result of four years of despair and struggle; men without arms and legs, men who were paralyzed and men who were blind … Returning to school was impossible with so much work to do.”
She dropped out and instead got her training from the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade so she could begin volunteering as a nurse’s aide at the Spadina Military Hospital. (The building is still there today in the middle of the big roundabout island just north of College. It’s now part of the University of Toronto.) She spent a year there, often working from seven in the morning until seven at night. She emptied bedpans, prepared meals, rubbed backs, made beds, did “anything and everything,” as she put it, “to bring a little merry sunshine to the wounded men.”
In her free time, she hung out with her new boyfriend, went to hockey games and concerts, got a library card, and went horseback riding. There was a fierce grey stallion named Dynamite who was notorious for bucking off his riders, including an army colonel. But she ignored all the warnings about the beast, befriending him with apples and kindness. She took him on long rides out to the edges of the city. And it was there that she saw the airplanes.
Toronto had become one of the world’s great aviation centres, where the Royal Flying Corps trained many of its new pilots. The University of Toronto, just next door to the Spadina Military Hospital, was home to hundreds of them. And in the fields on the outskirts of the city, three big new aerodromes were built. One of them was the Armour Heights Field, a flight school on Avenue Road (where it meets the 401 today). That’s where Amelia Earhart and Dynamite often found themselves on those long rides.
Earhart had seen one airplane before she came to Toronto, at a fair in Iowa when she was a kid. She’d been unimpressed back then. “It was a thing of rusty wire and wood,” she remembered, “and looked not at all interesting.” But that was in the very early days of aviation, just four years after the Wright Brothers made their first flight. In the decade since, there had been major advances. Airplanes were now much less clunky, much more elegant.
Earhart was amazed as she stood there in that wintry field off Avenue Road. “They were full sized birds that slid on the hard-packed snow and rose into the air with an extra roar that echoed from the evergreens that banked the edge of the field.” She got close enough to feel the spray of snow on her face as it was stirred up by the propellers. She even asked to climb aboard for a ride, but was told women weren’t allowed. “Not even a general’s wife.”
But that didn’t mute her fascination.
At the end of the summer, an early precursor to today’s airshow was held at the CNE. Earhart and a friend headed down to the waterfront to watch the flying war aces as they performed their aerial acrobatics. The young women found a spot by themselves in a clearing where they could get a good view, and it was there that one of the pilots spotted them.
“He was bored,” Earhart remembered. “He had looped and rolled and spun and finished his little bag of tricks, and there was nothing left to do but watch the people on the ground running as he swooped close to them.”
Alone in their clearing, the pair of young women made a promising target. He dove down out of the sky toward them, playfully excepting them to scatter like the others.
“I remember the mingled fear and pleasure which surged over me as I watched that small plane at the top of its earthward swoop. Common sense told me if something went wrong with the mechanism, or the pilot lost control, he, the airplane and I would be rolled up in a ball together.” But she didn’t listen to her common sense. As her friend ran for cover, Earhart stood her ground. And as the plane roared by overhead, close and exciting, she was forever changed.
"I did not understand it at the time," she said, "but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by."
What it said was “fly!”
Earhart wouldn’t stay in Toronto much longer. It was a dangerous era in world history, and not just because of the war. That fall, a wave of new patients began to arrive at the Spadina Military Hospital. And these ones weren’t injured. A deadly pandemic was sweeping across the globe and just a few weeks after Earhart got buzzed by that plane at the CNE, it arrived in Toronto.
The Spanish Flu would kill millions of people around the world; fifty thousand in Canada, nearly as many as were killed by the war. “The epidemic hit Toronto like a cyclone,” according to the medical officer of health. Half the city fell ill; 200,000 people. Amelia Earhart was one of them.
She’d been on the front lines of the fight against the flu, working nights in the ward where they kept those patients. Within weeks, she’d caught it herself, suffering from severe sinus pain and terrible headaches. Her case was so serious, doctors had to operate, opening a hole into her sinuses so they could regularly be drained.
It was a month before she was well enough to be discharged from hospital. And even then, she was far from fully recovered. Weakened by the ordeal, Earhart left Canada so she could recover at her sisters’ new place in Massachusetts. A year passed before she felt well again. She would suffer from chronic sinus problems for the rest of her life.
But she wouldn’t let that pain stand her way any more than the misogyny of flight instructors.
It was a year later that Amelia Earhart finally got into the air as a passenger — her dad bought her a 10-minute flight for $10. She fell instantly in love with the experience, confirming the suspicions she’d developed in Toronto. Soon, she’d saved enough to money to pay for lessons, learning from one of the world’s great flying women, Neta Snook. Earhart cut her hair. Bought a leather jacket. And then her own bright yellow biplane. Within months, she was using it to set new records in the sky, flying higher than any woman ever had before.
And that was just the beginning. There were even bigger milestones to come.
It was only a year after Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo flight across the Atlantic that Amelia Earhart made the trip. She was one of three people aboard a small plane that took off from the long harbour in Trepassey, Newfoundland and landed nearly 21 hours later in Wales. That made her the first woman ever to fly across the Atlantic, and while she hand’t been the pilot on that flight, she wouldn’t stop there.
On May 20, 1932, Amelia Earhart climbed into the cockpit of a little red plane in the pretty little town of Harbour Grace. This time, she was all alone inside. She roared down the runaway, took off into the sky above Newfoundland, and headed east, toward Paris. She spent the next fifteen hours flying through the night in what would prove to be a death-defying ordeal. Caught in the black clouds of a storm over the Atlantic, her plane was buffeted by high winds and pelted with freezing rain. Ice coated the windshield, the wings, the machinery… The aircraft spun out of control, sinking down out of the sky until it got low enough for the temperature to rise and the ice to melt, barely avoiding the white-tipped waves below. By then, her altitude meter had already failed and she’d spotted a little blue flame feeding off leaking oil. The fire threatened to spread. The gauge on her reserve gas tank was leaking, too; gasoline dripped down her neck. It was all she could do to land the plane safely at all, ahead of schedule, nowhere near Paris, touching down among grazing cows in a pasture in Northern Ireland. But she had lived. She had crossed the Atlantic alone. And she had written herself into history.
Her fame only grew from there. So, when she tried to set yet another record five years later, to become the first woman to fly around the entire planet, the whole world was watching. And when she disappeared somewhere over the Pacific, vanishing without a trace, Amelia Earhart would be remembered not only as one of history’s greatest mysteries, but also one of its greatest flyers.
Last summer, I paid a brief visit the old airfield in Harbour Grace while I was there shooting an episode of my documentary series, Canadiana. And I shot a wee little video:
We were actually in town to tell an entirely different story: the tale of a pirate admiral who turned Harbour Grace into his own personal fortress centuries before Earhart’s flight. His story is going to be part of a huge new episode of Canadiana all about the rise and fall of piracy on the East Coast — the first in a whole new season of episodes, which debuts next month.
It’s all free to watch on YouTube. So, you can subscribe and check out our first two seasons right here:
You’ll find all the most fascinating local history news and links from the past week below, along with listings for upcoming Toronto history events. But before we get to that, just a quick and friendly reminder that it takes a ton of work to write this newsletter every week. So the only way it makes sense to keep doing it is if enough of you are willing to switch to a paid subscription. For a few dollars a month, you’ll be supporting all the work I do — and get some fun extras in return, too, like access to free online talks, discounts off my online courses, and more.
You can make the switch — or subscribe for free if you haven’t already — by clicking here:
Thanks to everyone who reads, subscribes and spreads the word!
QUICK LINKS
The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…
OFFICIAL TREE NEWS — Toronto has picked an official tree! Residents were invited to vote for their favourite and the results was overwhelming. 47% of people picked a tree that’s been a study part of the history of this place since long before the city was founded. Toronto’s Official Tree is the oak. Read more.
BATTLE OF ST. ANDREW NEWS — Jamie Bradburn looks at a brutal 1955 election that proved to be “one of the nastiest races in Toronto history.” Filled with dirty tricks, it pitted a Conservative against a Communist. Read more.
OLD CITY HALL NEWS — On Twitter this week, Eric Sehr shares the fascinating story of the quite-possibly-illegal vote that put Old City Hall where it is:
BIGOT NEWS — At TVO, Daniel Peleton explores the disturbing history of white supremacist conspiracy theories in Canada and how they relate to extremist violence and the anti-abortion movement. Read more.
NOTORIOUS RIOT NEWS — During WWI, a mob of Torontonians turned against the city’s Greek businesses and residents in one of the biggest riots our city has ever seen. It ended up driving the community off Bloor Street and Yonge to the Danforth, where Greektown is today. Greek Reporter tells the story. Read more.
THE JEWISH MARKET NEWS — Two thousand TDSB students in Grades 6 and 7 are going to take a walking tour about the Jewish history of Kensington Market, which was originally known as “The Jewish Market”. Read more.
PELTED WITH HIS OWN CROCKERY NEWS — Bob Georgiou in on the trail of the first Chinese restaurant in the Junction, featuring violent scuffles and armed robberies and update on what now calls that address home a century later: another Chinese restaurant. Read more.
…and then Eric Sehr uses as impressive bit of sleuthing to figure out exactly which Chinese restaurant is featured in the photo Bob used for his piece.
UKRAINIAN-CANADIAN PHOTO NEWS — Toronto Life features photos from the long history of Ukrainian-Canadians in Toronto. Read more.
COLD CASE NEWS — Peter Edwards looks at a pair of unsolved murders from 1983. Two women mysteriously killed in their own beds, with more recent DNA evidence showing they were murdered by the same man. Read more.
FLAMING RAILWAY STATION NEWS — The Toronto Railway Museum shares the brief story of unfortunate anniversary on Twitter. It was 70 years ago this week that one of Toronto’s old railway stations burned down:
HISTORIC GAY BAR NEWS: Crews & Tangos, one of the flagship bars of the Church-Wellesley village, opened a quarter of a century ago in Victorian house built in the 1850s. It has now been given a heritage designation after the land was bought by a developer. CityNews covers the story. Watch it.
TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS
THE MAPLE LEAF MYSTERY CONFERENCE: IT REALLY HAPPENED TRUE CRIME PANEL
May 24 — 8:15pm — Online — Maple Leaf Mystery Conference
“True crime stories from Canada and around the word including cold cases, unsolved murders, killers and monsters, gangster and the havoc they create.” A panel of Canadian authors talking about true crime stories, including two writers from Toronto: Nate Hendley, author of The Beatle Bandit: A Serial Bank Robber's Deadly Heist, a Cross-Country Manhunt, and the Insanity Plea that Shook the Nation, and Lorna Poplak, author of The Don: The Story of Toronto’s Infamous Jail.
$25 for the entire conference.
HISTORY OF TORONTO’S CHINATOWNS: A WALK IN TIME 1850–2022
May 25 — 7:30pm — Online — The North Toronto Historical Society
“NTHS member Harvey Low will take a walk through time examining the Chinese population and the different Chinatowns in Toronto, using census data and photos. His presentation will showcase archival photos alongside present-day locations, while also highlighting some of the social challenges that this community faced while integrating into Canadian society. Harvey holds a degree in Urban Studies from Ryerson University, with an emphasis on urban history and demographics. He recently retired after 35 years in municipal government as Manager of the Social Policy & Research Unit. He is a 4th generation Chinese-Canadian with handed-down knowledge of the Chinese Community here in Toronto.”
Free with registration, I believe.
DOOR OPEN TORONTO
May 28–29 — 10am to 5pm each day — More than 100 buildings around the city
“Explore Toronto’s Buildings & Sites. Rediscover the city you thought you knew through Doors Open Toronto, celebrating 100+ sites of architectural, cultural and social significance. Go deeper with engaging tours, insightful talks, an online film series and other virtual experiences.”
Free!
DEATH OR CANADA: THE IRISH FAMINE MIGRATION TO TORONTO, 1847
May 31 — 6:30pm — Online — Enoch Turner Schoolhouse Foundation
“This year marks the 175th anniversary of Irish Famine migration to Canada. Join author and historian, Professor Mark McGowan, as he shares his work Death or Canada: The Irish Famine Migration to Toronto, 1847. Discover the impact this historic event had on the city and hear stories of the men and women who made the perilous sea voyage to Canada.” The talk will follow the foundation’s annual general meeting.
Free with registration, I believe.
RECONCILIATION: IS IT WHAT YOU THOUGHT?
May 31 — 6:30pm — Online — Riverdale Historical Society
“An in depth look at inequality, mythology, discrimination and action. The importance of history and learning while working toward reconciliation with tie-ins to work that the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society has done to highlight Dr. [Peter] Bryce’s legacy, as 2022 will be the 100th anniversary of the publication of ‘A National Crime’” his whistle-blowing report on the residential school system.
With Cindy Blackstock, a member of the Gitxsan First Nation, Executive Director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, and a professor at McGill University’s School of Social Work.
Free, I believe, if you join the Riverdale Historical Society’s mailing list.
1851: SPIRIT & VOICE
June 8 — 7pm — Online — Myseum
“Back by popular demand! Welcome to 1851: Spirit & Voice, a theatrical and playful revisiting of the 1851 North American Convention of Coloured Freemen. Through this new work written by playwright Luke Reece, step into the world of a fictionalized digital conference where the past and present collide.
“Live from St. Lawrence Hall, Marie and Anthony host a retrospective look at the gathering of 19th century abolitionists in Toronto, when their event is crashed by ghosts of conventions past. Together our characters grapple with the way history has been written, as well as issues that affect Black lives today. Watch leading historical figures Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Henry and Mary Bibb, and Frederick Douglass share their unfiltered thoughts on historical storytelling and 21st century anti-Black racism.”
Free with registration.
ERNEST D. BANTING’S LIFE IN WESTON
June 16 — 7:30pm — Online — Etobicoke Historical Society
“Ernest D. ‘Doc’ Banting (1892-1973), a distant cousin to Dr. Frederick Banting, discoverer of Insulin, was a leading citizen of the Town of Weston in the mid-1900’s. As a salesman and politician in a career that spanned more than five decades from the 1920s to the 1970s, ‘Doc’ was a shameless self-promoter but a constant home-town booster … and a bit of a rogue.
“Join EHS Historian Richard Jordan as he follows ‘Doc’ around the town while exploring topics like small town sports, municipal politics, the Orange Order, the effects of the Depression, the birth of Canada’s unemployment system, the role of service clubs like the Lions and, last but not least, temperance. Vividly recreating a community from a vanished era, Richard will draw on research from his newly-published book, Ernest D. Banting and Life in Weston 1921-1973.”
Free for members; an annual membership is $25.