1932 Amelia Earhart Photos & Letter
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GUEST:
These are pictures of, uh, Amelia Earhart, who-- the original pictures taken in 1932 in Derry. I was there in 1965 and got to know my aunt. And so I wrote to my aunt and I said, "Do you know anything about this 1932 trip?" I knew she was a photography buff. And I got a letter saying, "I was there, I took pictures, and here they are." And this is the family that she went to, and she went to them and said, "Where am I?" And so my aunt told me a great deal about this 1932 trip, and my husband took them out and had them framed for me and gave them to me for Christmas.
APPRAISER:
This is, um, a very well documented trip. And you mentioned Derry. We're talking about Derry, Northern Ireland. This was May 21, 1932. And she'd, had actually taken off from Newfoundland.
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
The Harbour Grace Airport in Newfoundland on May 20. Shortly after takeoff, she not only apparently had a broken altimeter, but she noticed a, a weld had popped in her fuselage and it was allowing fuel to leak into the cabin. She did tell her husband, when she phoned to let him know that she was okay, that she chose to fly very low over the ocean because she said that if she were going to crash, she would rather have done it in the water, and she was afraid of flames inside the fuselage, and with the fuel leak, she was worried that that could happen. Five years to the day, she was planning to land in Paris. She was trying to, to do a, kind of a five-year anniversary of Lindbergh's flight, but to do it as a woman. And she unfortunately did have to land early, and she said she knew that the minute she saw land, which was Ireland, she was going to find the first field that looked like she could land. She was known as Lady Lindy back then. She was already quite famous. You mentioned this family, this is actually the McLaughlin family.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
Um, we have some other newspaper shots from the people that she met when she landed, and the farmhands all came out and greeted her at the plane, and she asked them to extinguish their cigarettes because of her fuel leak, and of course the famous line, "Have you come far?"
GUEST:
Yes. (laughs)
APPRAISER:
And she said, "Well, just from America." So this flight is such a historic moment, obviously, for aviation but more so for, of the first woman to transatlantic solo.
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
In addition to that, which is her most famous achievement that day, it was actually the longest nonstop flight a woman had ever made, which was 2,026 miles. And it was actually the fastest transatlantic solo trip. So she actually beat Lindbergh, because he all, went all the way to Paris, but she did it in about 14 hours and 56 minutes. So she achieved a great number of things that day.
GUEST:
Yes, she did.
APPRAISER:
She also, after this trip, became the first woman to win the Distinguished Flying Cross, which was awarded to her by the vice president. So it was a, quite a big deal. It's a really important moment, and you have wonderful original photos. I think for everything you have here, with the four photos and the letter, is in the $4,000 to $6,000 range.
GUEST:
Oh, I'm surprised with that. That's very nice, thank you.
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