Viewing page 42 of 140

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

The woman who is now best known as the person who taught Amelia Earhart to fly had problems in finding flight instruction for herself. Neta Snook grew up in Iowa and developed the desire to learn to fly from watching balloon ascensions at county fairs. Her hero was Thomas Scott Baldwin.

She wanted to attend Glenn Curtiss' aviation school at the Atlantic Coast Aeronautical Station in Newport News, Virginia. But even in 1916 Curtis still was not in favor of women learning to fly, so the school turned her down.

Ms. Snook entered college in Iowa that fall but still retained her dream of learning to fly. In the summer of 1917 she was accepted at the Davenport School of Aviation.

The school had just opened and had no airplane, so the task of Neta and the other members of the first class there was to build one. Her first flight was in that airplane on July 21, 1917, with the school's instructor Louis Boudor. She made several more flights with Boudor during that summer and was allowed to take the controls more and more often.

However, before Neta could solo, the school was closed on September 9 after a bad accident. The school's new president was killed and Boudor badly injured.