Neta Snook The Ames Iowa Aviatrix Who Taught Amelia Earhart To Fly

 

Neta Snook (Los Angeles Evening Post-Record. July 13, 1921)

In the summer of 1920, newspapers around northern Illinois told people there was something at the Carroll County Fair worth traveling miles to see.

 

Her name was Neta Snook, and she flew airplanes.

 

The fair had the usual attractions. Livestock. Grain exhibits. Horse racing and free entertainment. But the advertisements promised something most people still hadn’t seen up close: an airplane taking off, circling the fairgrounds and coming back down.

 

Better yet, a woman was going to fly it.

 

“AEROPLANE FLIGHTS EVERY DAY,” announced the Pearl City News. It called Snook the “GIRL BIRD” and said the Mount Carroll native was known across the country. She was “one of the most daring of aviators, and would be worth going miles to see.”

 

Another advertisement for the fair was simpler. Beneath the giant words “THE CARROLL COUNTY FAIR” were the words “Aeroplane Flights,” followed by Neta Snook’s name.

 

For four days, August 24 through 27, Snook would take an airplane into the sky over the fairgrounds at Mount Carroll, Illinois. Airplanes were still strange enough to stop traffic and draw a crowd.

Neta Snook was the pilot people were coming to see. She had gotten there the hard way.

 

Three years earlier, Snook had shown up at a small aviation school in Davenport, Iowa. She was 21 years old, had been attending Iowa State College in Ames, and wanted to learn to fly.

 

That was easier said than done in 1917.

 

The Wright brothers had made their first powered flight only fourteen years earlier. There weren’t airports scattered around Iowa or flight schools in every decent-sized city. Airplanes were still crude machines made mostly of wood, wire, and fabric.

Neta Snook when she started at the Davenport Aviation
School. (Davenport Democrat and Leader. June 4, 1917)

Flying was dangerous. Learning to fly wasn’t much safer, and women weren’t exactly expected to show up asking for the controls.

 

Snook did.

 

The Davenport Democrat and Leader noticed her almost immediately. On June 4, 1917, it reported that “Miss Neta Snook” had arrived in Davenport and was beginning her second day’s instruction at the aviation school.

 

The newspaper seemed almost as interested in what she was wearing as what she planned to do. Snook wore overalls, a man’s workman’s cap and what the reporter called “big, horrible looking work gloves.”

 

It wasn’t much of a fashion statement. That was the point. She was there to work, not walk the runway.

 

The Davenport Aviation School wasn’t the place where a student showed up, climbed into a polished airplane and took off. The school was struggling to get established, and learning aviation meant learning the machinery.

 

Snook wanted all of it.

 

The newspaper said she intended to learn “every phase of the aviation school.” That included more than moving the controls and getting the airplane off the ground. She wanted to understand how it went together and how it worked.

 

That probably wasn’t a bad idea. In 1917, a pilot who didn’t understand the machine underneath her could have a short career.

 

Students at Davenport worked on the airplane they expected to fly. They learned about its construction and helped get it ready for the air. For Snook, flying and mechanics became tied together from the beginning.

 

The Davenport operation didn’t last long. America’s entry into World War I changed aviation almost overnight, and the school had problems of its own. A crash destroyed its training airplane.

 

Snook had managed only a small amount of actual flying time before the school fell apart. The school was finished, but she wasn’t.

 

She went somewhere else.

 

Snook continued her training at the Curtiss School at Newport News, Virginia. Even that didn’t go smoothly. Wartime restrictions were tightening around civilian aviation, and flying was becoming almost entirely a military business.

 

When opportunities for civilian pilots disappeared, Snook found another way to stay around airplanes. During the war she worked inspecting aircraft equipment connected with the British war effort.

 

When the war ended in November 1918, thousands of airplanes and engines found their way onto the civilian market. Machines that had been valuable military equipment could suddenly be bought for a fraction of what they had cost to build.

 

Snook wanted one.

 

She eventually found a Canadian Canuck, a training airplane closely related to the Curtiss Jenny. There was a problem with it.

 

The airplane was wrecked. Snook bought it anyway.

 

She brought the damaged machine back to Ames and started putting it together again. Not at some big aircraft factory, and not with a crew of mechanics standing around. She worked on it at her parents’ home.

 

Piece by piece, the wreck became an airplane. Then Snook flew it.

 

That part of her story is easy to skip because everyone knows what comes later. Amelia Earhart eventually walked onto Snook’s airfield in California, and the names of the two women became permanently tied together.

 

But Earhart wasn’t there yet. This was Neta Snook’s airplane, and she was the one who had figured out how to make it fly.

 

By the summer of 1920, Snook was barnstorming around the Midwest. The word sounds romantic now. The work wasn’t.

(The Lanark Gazette. August 11, 1920)

Barnstormers went where the crowds were. County fairs. Celebrations. Small towns. Anywhere people might pay to see an airplane or hand over a few dollars for a ride.

 

There weren’t many paved runways. A reasonably flat field would do.

 

The pilot flew in, gave rides, put on a show, collected the money and hoped the airplane was still in one piece when it was time to leave. Gas cost money. Repairs cost money. Engines needed constant attention, and a rough landing could wipe out whatever profit had been made that day.

 

The weather could shut down the entire operation.

 

Snook made it work.

 

The Carroll County Fair advertisements show how she was being sold to the public. She wasn’t somebody’s assistant or the woman standing beside the actual pilot.

 

She was the aviator.

 

The “GIRL BIRD.”

 

The advertisements told people to come see her fly.

(The Pearl City News. August 19, 1920)

By the end of 1920, Iowa’s weather was a problem. There wasn’t much money in barnstorming if snow, mud and cold kept the airplane on the ground. California offered a flying season that didn’t end when winter arrived.

 

Snook went west and eventually ended up at Kinner Field near Los Angeles. Bert Kinner was building airplanes and engines there, and Southern California was becoming the center of the young aviation business.

 

There were airplanes, pilots, and people willing to pay to learn how to fly.

 

Amelia Earhart showed up in early 1921. She was 23 years old, had taken an airplane ride, and decided she wanted to learn to fly, so she came to the field looking for an instructor.

 

Neta Snook got the job.

 

It is difficult to look at that meeting now without seeing everything that happened afterward. Earhart would cross the Atlantic, set records, become internationally famous, and eventually disappear somewhere over the Pacific.

 

None of that had happened yet.

 

In 1921, Amelia Earhart was the beginner and Neta Snook was the pilot.

 

Snook had already spent years fighting her way into aviation. She had worked on airplanes, survived failed flying schools, rebuilt a wreck, barnstormed, and carried passengers. She knew engines and what happened when something broke. Most importantly, she knew how to fly.

 

So Snook taught Earhart.

 

The two women flew together at Kinner Field. Earhart worked to pay for lessons and eventually bought a Kinner Airster of her own. She kept learning, with Snook sitting in the other seat.

Amelia Earhart. (The Ottawa Citizen. June 18, 1928)

For all the attention that later fell on Earhart, Snook was still making news of her own in 1921.

 

A photograph published by the Los Angeles Evening Post-Record on July 13 caught her beside an airplane in full flying clothes. It is a better picture of Snook than most of the formal portraits that survive.

 

She is bundled up in heavy flying gear, smiling broadly with one knee raised. There is nothing delicate or staged about it. She looks comfortable around the airplane. Like she belongs there.

 

A few months later, Iowa newspaper readers got an even stranger look at her California life.

 

On October 3, 1921, the Des Moines Register ran a photograph under the headline, “Ames Girl And Her Dog Hunt Deer From Plane in Mountains of California.”

 

There was Snook again, this time with a dog.

 

The story described her flying over the California mountains while hunting deer. Her dog rode along in the airplane and apparently had learned what was happening when Snook prepared for a trip.

(Des Moines Register. October 3, 1921)

It is a minor story, almost silly compared with the aviation records that would come later. But it says a lot about how far Snook had come.

 

Four years earlier, a Davenport newspaper had been fascinated by the sight of a young woman in overalls trying to learn how an airplane worked. Now she was using one to go hunting.

 

The airplane had become part of her everyday life. Then, almost as quickly as her flying career had started, it ended.

 

Snook married William “Bill” Southern in 1922 and stepped away from professional aviation. She was still in her twenties. She had spent only a handful of years as a working pilot.

 

Her former student kept flying.

 

Earhart began setting records and building a name for herself. The name became bigger and bigger, but the event that changed everything came in 1928.

 

That year Earhart was selected to join Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon aboard the Friendship for an attempted flight across the Atlantic. Earhart wouldn’t actually pilot the airplane across the ocean. Stultz did the flying.

 

That distinction mattered little to the newspapers. A woman was going across the Atlantic by airplane, and the story exploded.

 

Back in Iowa, somebody remembered the woman about to become famous had learned to fly from a former Ames woman. On June 8, 1928, the Des Moines Tribune ran a large photograph and story about Snook.

 

The headline told Iowa readers why she suddenly mattered again.

 

“FORMER AMES WOMAN TAUGHT AMELIA HOW TO FLY.”

 

Seven years had passed since the two women had flown together in California. Snook had married and left professional aviation. Earhart was standing on the edge of international fame.

 

The headline was accurate, but it also showed what was happening to Neta Snook’s place in aviation history.

 

Before Amelia Earhart became famous, newspaper stories about Neta Snook were about Neta Snook. She was the Iowa State student who wanted to fly. The woman in overalls at Davenport, the pilot rebuilding an airplane in Ames, and the barnstormer people were told to travel miles to see.

 

She was the “GIRL BIRD.”

 

Then Earhart became famous, and Neta Snook slowly became the woman who taught Amelia Earhart.

 

It wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t the entire story.

 

Earhart’s fame grew enormously after the 1928 Atlantic crossing. Four years later, she flew the Atlantic alone and became the first woman to do it. She became one of the most famous women in America. Then she disappeared in 1937 while trying to fly around the world.

 

The disappearance changed everything.

 

Earhart stopped being only an aviator. She became a mystery, and nearly every person connected to her became part of that story.

 

Neta Snook had a good connection.

 

She had taught Amelia to fly. That became the line attached to her name for the rest of her life. But another newspaper photograph suggests Snook’s aviation identity hadn’t disappeared so quickly.

 

On December 4, 1926, the Long Beach Telegram and Long Beach Daily News published a photograph under the headline, “LOCAL INVENTION IS USED IN AIR AND IS SOLD AND DELIVERED FROM AIR.”

 

The photograph involved an aerial publicity stunt for the Gunther Humidifier. Standing beside the airplane were inventor George Gunther, pilot Burger Johnsen and Snook.

(The Long Beach Telegram & The Long Beach Daily News. December 4, 1926)

The caption identified her simply as “Miss Neta Snook, girl air pilot.”

 

She hadn’t been flying professionally for several years by then. The newspaper still knew what she had been.

 

A pilot.

 

Snook lived long enough to watch the world of aviation she entered disappear completely.

 

When she first went to Davenport, airplanes were still strange machines. A flying school could comprise a handful of students trying to assemble the airplane they hoped to learn in, and one crash could end the entire operation.

 

Airports barely existed. Pilots landed in fields and sometimes followed railroad tracks to find their way from one town to another. Engines quit. Wings broke. Barnstormers flew into towns, and people came running because an airplane overhead was still something worth seeing.

 

Snook had been there for that.

 

She lived through Lindbergh and Earhart, then watched commercial airlines turn flying from a spectacle into ordinary transportation. Propeller planes gave way to jets. Jets crossed the Atlantic in hours. Then rockets went up. Men walked on the moon.

 

The woman who had struggled to learn in a crude airplane at Davenport lived long enough to see the Space Shuttle.

 

In 1974, Snook finally told her own story in a book. The title was I Taught Amelia to Fly.

 

She died in 1991 at 95. By then Amelia Earhart had been missing for more than half a century, and the mystery surrounding her had grown larger than either woman’s flying career.

 

Neta Snook had settled into her place in the story as Earhart’s first instructor. That’s usually where her biography begins.

 

Maybe it shouldn’t.

 

Go back to August 1920, before anybody knew Amelia Earhart’s name. Newspapers were advertising the Carroll County Fair and trying to give people a reason to come through the gate.

 

They had one.

 

Neta Snook was going to fly.

 

The advertisements called her the “GIRL BIRD” and told readers she was one of the most daring aviators around. They said she was worth traveling miles to see.

 

Then go back three more years to Davenport.

 

Snook was 21 years old. She was wearing overalls, a man’s work cap, and a pair of ugly gloves. She wanted to learn how an airplane worked and, if everything went right, how to get one into the air.

 

Almost nothing went right.

 

The Davenport Aviation School failed. Its airplane was wrecked. The war shut down civilian flying. Snook moved on, stayed around airplanes and waited for another chance.

 

Then she bought a wreck of her own.

 

She rebuilt it in Ames, flew it, and started making money with it. She barnstormed around the Midwest, carried passengers, and became the woman county fairs advertised as an attraction.

 

California came next. So did Kinner Field.

 

By the time Amelia Earhart walked onto that field in 1921 looking for someone to teach her, Neta Snook had already done the hard part. She had become a pilot when becoming a pilot wasn’t easy for anybody, and she had done it through busted schools, wrecked airplanes, war and whatever else got in the way.

 

Earhart was just another young woman who wanted to fly.

 

Snook knew something about that.

 

A few years earlier, she had been the young woman asking for a chance. Now she owned the experience, knew the machinery, and could sit in the other seat and teach someone else.

 

The student became a legend. The teacher married, left professional aviation, and became a footnote in that legend.

 

But the old Iowa and Illinois newspapers caught Neta Snook before that happened. Before Amelia Earhart, there was the girl in the ugly work gloves.

 

Then there was the “GIRL BIRD.”

 

And for a few years, Neta Snook was the one people came to see fly.

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