EARHART FLIES INTO SKIES OF MYTH : AMERICA'S FIRST LADY OF THE AIR MADE LAST HOME AT TOLUCA LAKE.

Byline: Holly Andres Daily News Staff Writer

A 10-minute ride in the skies over Hollywood was long enough to ignite the passion for flying in 23-year-old Amelia Earhart.

The $1 trip in 1920 led Earhart to earn her pilot wings in 1922. She would go on to become the world's most famous female aviator not only for her celebrated firsts, but also for the enduring mystery of her disappearance in the Pacific Ocean on her flight around the world in 1937.

Earhart, who is memorialized in a 7-foot, gold-leaf statue at the North Hollywood Library at the corner of Magnolia Boulevard and Tujunga Avenue, was anything but typical of women of the era.

Born July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kan., Earhart was the elder of two daughters born to Amy and Edwin Earhart.

Encouraged by their parents' liberal views, Earhart and her sister, Muriel, were known as tomboys. Instead of playing demurely in the long dresses of the day, the sisters wore loose-fitting pants, the bloomers that were coming into style for women. They were well-known in their town for fishing and for playing baseball, basketball, football and tennis. This free and easy, unconventional lifestyle set the tone for the rest of Earhart's life.

A good student known for her unorthodox views, Earhart was graduated from Chicago's Hyde Park High School in 1915. At 18, she became a nursing aide in Toronto and worked with soldiers wounded in World War I. Long interested in medicine as a career, she became a pre-med student at 22 at Columbia and Barnard universities.

At the urging of her parents, who had settled in Los Angeles, Earhart moved west in 1920. Excited by the flying that she saw at weekend air shows, she was eager to learn how to fly a plane. The price tag for lessons was about $1,000, too much for Earhart's modest income. Determined to learn, she took a mail-room job in a phone company to pay for the lessons.

Her flight instructor was Neta Snook, the first woman to graduate from the Curtiss School of Aviation. Earhart trained in a Curtiss Canuck biplane. When she was 25, she was able to buy her first aircraft, a secondhand Kinner Canary.

After her parents were divorced in 1924, Earhart moved east with her mother and sister. Finally deciding not to go back to college, she did social work at a community center in Boston, and she demonstrated planes on the weekends for an aircraft manufacturer. In 1928, she got a call that set her on the course to international fame.

A goodwill flight between the United States and Britain had been planned. Two pilots were picked for the flight, William Stultz and Louis ``Slim'' Gordon. Earhart was chosen to be their passenger, the first woman to cross the Atlantic by plane.

Earhart tried to deflect the attention paid to her by saying she had only been along for the ride, like a sack of potatoes. But the public and media made a celebrity of her and called her ``Lady Lindy,'' female counterpart of Charles Lindberg, the first person to fly across the Atlantic.

Later, she actually became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, landing in Ireland on May 21, 1932. Earhart embarked on speaking engagements throughout the country, wrote an aviation column and endorsed products after that flight. She also was the first woman in the United States to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Earhart married publisher George Palmer Putnam, but only after he proposed six times. Unconventionally, she kept her maiden name and never wore her wedding band.

They moved west in 1934 and lived at 10515 Valley Spring Lane in Toluca Lake. That is where Earhart plotted her flight from Hawaii to California. Flying a Lockheed Vega, she made the trip on Jan. 12, 1935, as the first person to succeed in flying solo for such a distance.

In February 1937, Earhart announced her plan to circle the globe in a Lockheed Electra, starting with a flight from Oakland to Honolulu. A crash on the takeoff to Howland Island forced Earhart and crew to return to Los Angeles for repairs in March 1937. The flight was rescheduled to start from Miami because of weather changes in the Pacific.

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from Miami on June 1, 1937. They made numerous stops until they landed in Lae, New Guinea. Two more stops were scheduled, on Howland Island and Honolulu, before a landing in Oakland.

They took off for Howland Island at 10 a.m. July 2 and expected to arrive at 6:30 p.m. July 3. Despite preparations for their arrival and radio signals from a Coast Guard cutter to guide them, the plane vanished. Earhart's last communication came at 8:45 p.m. July 3, 1937. Searchers in 60 planes and 10 ships found nothing in a two-week search.

Her disappearance intrigued the world. She is remembered for her passion for flying, her aviation firsts, her views that women could accomplish just as much as men could, and her individualism in the face of conventional views of the time.

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

PHOTO (1) Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, is pictured in the last year of her life in a photo that hangs at the Smithsonian.

John W. Underwood

(2) Earhart pauses by her Lockheed Electra in a stop on her final flight. Her plane vanished over the Pacific in July 1937.

(3) Larger than life - 7 feet tall - Amelia Earhart is memorialized in a gold-leaf statue at the North Hollywood Library.

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