20 Hrs. 40 Min. Our Flight in the Friendship

Miss Perkins is Head Worker at Denison House, Boston’s second oldest settlement, with which Amelia Earhart has been identified for two years.

A TALL, slender, boyish-looking young woman walked into my office in the early fall of 1926. She wanted a job and a part-time one would do, for she was giving courses in English under the university extension. Most of her classes were in factories in Lynn and other industrial towns near Boston. She had had no real experience in social work but she wanted to try it, and before I knew it I had engaged her for half-time work at Denison House. She had poise and charm. I liked her quiet sense of humor, the frank direct look in her grey eyes.

It was some time before any of us at Denison House knew that Amelia Earhart had flown. After driving with her in the “Yellow Peril,” her own Kissel roadster, I knew that she was an expert driver, handling her car with ease, yes more than that, with an artistic touch. She has always seemed to me an unusual mixture of the artist and the practical person.

Her first year at Denison House she had general direction of the evening school for foreign-born men and women. She did little teaching herself, but did follow-up work in the homes, so necessary to the success of such an undertaking. In her report of her year’s work after we had planned her next year’s program, which did not include the evening school, she wrote: “I shall try to keep my contact with the women who have come to class; Mrs. S. and her drunken husband, Mrs. F.’s struggle to get her husband here, Mrs. Z.’s to get her papers in the face of odds, all are problems that are hard to relinquish after a year’s friendship.”

In the spring of 1927, Denison House was giving a country carnival for the benefit of the house. For such a good cause, Amelia consented to fly over Boston and drop publicity dodgers. She first said that she would do this if her name could be kept out of the papers! We had to use some persuasion to keep her from flying incognito. The first day of the carnival, the Boston police up and down Boylston and Tremont Streets were perhaps too amazed to try to arrest a man and woman, apparently Italian peasants just landed, who drove back and forth in a queer yellow car, stopping now and then to grind a tune on a battered hand-organ and to distribute handbills.