Biographers emphasize the active lifestyle that Amelia always enjoyed. Amelia and her sister Muriel played basketball, tennis, football, mud-ball and baseball. They also rode horses, swam, climbed onto roofs and enjoyed nature and it's creatures. Her friends considered Amelia the ringleader and fun to play with.

Amelia's parents recognized and supported their daughters' enjoyment of active games and provided Amelia and sister Muriel with bloomers to wear. It was not common apparel among their friends.

In the book, "Amelia Earhart - The Thrill of It," by Susan Wils, it states, "She (their mother, Amy) even freed them from the feminine restraints of skirts, making them the first gymnasium suits in town, of dark blue flannel with pleated bloomers. 'We wore them on Saturdays to play in,' Amelia remembered, and 'felt terribly free and athletic,' if a bit snubbed by the little girls who 'fluttered about us in their skirts.'"

The photo below of a three-person baseball game was taken in Worthington, Minnesota between 1907-1911 when the family vacationed at Lake Okabena.

Until eighth grade, Amelia stayed with her grandparents during the school year in Achison, Kansas.

Amelia's desire to learn how to play basketball while living in Achison, Kansas, is documented in the book, East to the Dawn, the Life of Amelia Earhart, by Susan Butler. See pp 39-40.

It states, "In the time-honored fashion of the day, girls didn't play team sports. The role was to cheer on the boys at the school basketball and baseball games... It wasn't enough for Amelia; she wanted more. She wanted to play basketball too, although being a realist, she probably didn't expect to play at school, only on her own with her girl friends. To play, she needed to know the rules. If she had been a timid child, she would probably have asked her friend Balie Waggener. But no; she went to the top of the school world - to team captain Frank Baker, who was older and whom she barely knew. One day during basketball practice, she approached him. They had never talked because she was so much younger and because boys hung out with boys and girls with girls; in approaching him, she was breaking custom. 'We girls would like to play,' she threw out, which startled him, but he agreed to teach her how to hold a ball and shoot for the basket. Amelia thereupon taught Ginger Park and Lucy (her cousin). This game, too, they played across the road in Charlie's Park, where there was a single baskeball hoop on the side of a barn - all their game required. (The boys at the school also played with just one hoop.) Under Amelia's guidance, they also played a form of baseball they called One-O-Cat that required only three people - pitcher, catcher, and batter - each out for themselves - another game the boys played."

The book continues, "Her activist nature is perfectly caught in two photos in Lucy's 1911 photograph album. Ine one picture Amelia and three friends - Katherine Dolan (referred to as Dolan), Lucy (Toot), Virginia Park (Ging) are lying on their stomachs, their chins cupped in their hands, staring at the camera either before or after a basketball game; it is Amelia who is holding the ball."

Amelia's friend Katch said, "She was not only fun...she could do everything."


"I want to do it because I want to do it."
Amelia Earhart

Editor's note: Our thanks for permission received from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University to post the photos, olvwork20016217, olvwork20093788 and olvwork20003719. See Schlesinger Library home page: http://www.radcliffe.edu/schles/.

Editors note: We are pleased to announce that our book, Daughters of the Game - The First Era of Minnesota Girls High School Basketball, 1891-1942 is now in the Schlesinger Library.