Neta Snook was Amelia Earhart’s first teacher
Your choice of teacher matters.
Twenty-three-year-old Amelia Earhart wanted to fly. Days after seeing the spectacle called the Winter Air Tournament at a Long Beach, California airport, her father bought her a ticket for an airplane ride. She was hooked as soon as the plane left the ground. Earhart causally told her family that evening that “I think I’d like to fly.” But she thought if she didn’t, she would die.
She wanted to learn from another woman. She picked 24-year-old Neta Snook, a field manager at the Kinner Field in Los Angeles. Snook herself had encountered a bias against women in her own pursuit of flying. When she had applied to the Atlantic Coast Aeronautical Station, a Curtiss-Wright Aviation School, her application came back stamped “No females allowed.”
Snook decided to beat this bias. About a month after she started teaching Earhart to fly, Snook was the first woman to enter a men’s air race at the Los Angeles Speedway in February 1921. When she finished in fifth place, she told the media, “I’m going to fly as cleverly, as audaciously, as thrillingly as any man aviator in the world.”
Earhart and Snook became good friends. Snook influenced Earhart’s desire to be the record-breaking aviator of her time. She helped Earhart believe she could do it.
It matters who teaches you.
Thanks to Doris L. Rich’s book Amelia Earhart
