Guest Blogger Robin Acker, M.D.

If Amelia Earhart was alive today, she could only be proud that a recent survey (USA Today, Feb. 4, 2008) of teenagers from the 50 states named her the 6^th most famous American (not counting Presidents) since the days of Columbus.

Now more than 70 years after her disappearance, researchers may be closing in on the final whereabouts of Earhart and the Lockheed Electra in which she was lost.

Since her disappearance in 1937, thoughts of Earhart’s last hours have been the focus of numerous articles, books and movies. Gradually, the theories have coalesced into three main groups:

1. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, ditched their plane in the sea and floated some time before drowning. This is the official opinion of the US Navy.
2. Earhart managed to land somewhere, but she and Noonan were never found and they subsequently expired.
3. Whether after ditching in the sea or finding land, Earhart and Noonan were captured by Japanese soldiers, and died either due to dysentery or by execution.

Although theories one and three seem to have been the most popular, I, and a group to which I belong (TIGHAR), believe that the evidence points most strongly to the second.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery got into the “Earhart game” (as Barney Fife might have put it) a little more than a year after it was formed in 1987. The founder, Ric Gillespie, initially believed that there was no hard evidence that could justify a search for Earhart and her plane. But when two members of TIGHAR, knowledgeable of “old school” celestial navigation, told Gillespie the implications of her final radio transmissions, the head of TIGHAR was hooked.

For myself, I learned of Earhart when I was 10 years old in 1966, growing up in a town of about 4,000 in central California. Though I wasn’t in an enrichment class, we were blessed with a teacher who was indeed gifted. She encouraged my interest, which gripped me for years, but by April, 2007 had grown dormant. Dormant, that is, right up until my wife casually mentioned one day, “There’s something here in the news about Amelia Earhart.”

A few weeks later, I found myself the team physician on TIGHAR’s fifth major expedition to tiny, uninhabited Nikumaroro of the Kiribati nation, doctoring an epidemic of seasickness on the five-day motor-sail voyage to the atoll, a piece of land almost directly on Earhart and Fred Noonan’s last described line of position, some 300 miles southeast of their intended destination of Howland Island. Niku is just as hot as one would expect from a lava rock baking just 4 degrees south of the equator.

Why do we believe Earhart and Noonan died on Nikumaroro? Both Gillespie and Thomas H. King, chief archaeologist of TIGHAR, have written books that lay out the evidence quite nicely (Finding Amelia and Amelia Earhart’s Shoes, respectively). The notion that Earhart and Noonan ditched in the ocean doesn’t stand up to the fact that well-documented radio broadcasts received in the days after her loss virtually had to come from Earhart, whose plane was incapable of broadcasting from water. And while anecdotes have indicated a Japanese military capture, Earhart’s last transmissions to Howland were so strong that Coast Guardsmen ran out of the radio shack to look up in the sky, a circumstance unexplainable if the Electra was more than a thousand miles away.

Pursuing a site first explored on earlier trips, in 2007 we continued work on a section that appears to match contemporary colonial records of a skeleton discovery in 1940. The section, stained by the detritus of multiple campfires, has borne evidence of one or more castaways, including American-manufactured bottles from the 1930s, clumsily opened clams, and now the most recently confirmed substance--early 20^th century cosmetic.

As laboratory testing continues on other items found on the island in 2007, I and other TIGHAR members have our fingers crossed for a major breakthrough that could lead to the mystery’s resolution, and finally bring Earhart and Noonan home.

Thanks Robin for this fascinating article on your Amelia Earhart experience.

Something about the Amelia Earhart story resonates with many people. The above story came to me out of the earlier blog postings about our Friend's annual meeting program of Ann Birney portraying Amelia Earhart. Interest in the story of Amelia Earhart will continue. -- Pete

The Hearts of Horses

Every once in a while I come across a plain, good story. This book is one of those where I recognized early on that it is going to end long before I have had my fill of the characters and the story.

Molly Gloss has written four or five earlier books, some juvenile or intermediate and some stories and poems. Her latest, The Hearts of Horses is described on Gloss's website thusly:

In the winter of 1917 many of the young ranch hands in this remote Eastern Oregon county have been called away to war. When 19-year-old Martha Lessen shows up at George Bliss's doorstep looking for work breaking horses, George glimpses beneath her showy rodeo costume a shy young woman with a serious knowledge of horses, and he hires her on. Martha's unusual, quiet way of breaking horses soon wins her additional work among several of George Bliss's neighbors, and over the course of the winter she helps out a German family whose wagon and horses have tipped off a narrow road into a ravine; she gentles a horse for a man who knows he is dying—a last gift to his young son; and she clashes with a hired hand who has been abusing horses with casual cruelty. Against the backdrop of a horrifying modern war, Martha gradually comes to feel enveloped by a sense of community and family she's never had before. And eventually, against her best intentions to lead a solitary cowboy life, she falls in love.

Molly Gloss lives in Portland, Oregon and has won numerous literary awards. Her book Wild Life was chosen as the 2002 selection for, "What if all Seattle read the same book?"

Our library currently owns:

• The Hearts of Horses (2007)
• Jump Off Creek (1989)

I will look into purchasing more of her work.

The loss of downtown merchants

DeFever-Osborn Rexall Drug Store closed last month. There was a wildfire rumor then notice in the afternoon Independence Daily Reporter. Steve DeFever gave employees one week notice that the store was to close. Steve sold the store to Walgreen's so they could acquire his prescription files and customers. The historic orange neon sign for the store projected 90 degrees from the building and would be seen from both direction on Penn Avenue for many years. It is now dark.


When I visited Independence to be interviewed for the library director's position my son visited with me to access prospects and my staying power moving from metropolitan Palm Beach County Florida to small-town Kansas. The first impression we both had as we drove into town that August of 2001 was positive, bolstered in-part by the busy downtown commercial district. After dinner with the library board and selection committee at John's Kitchen and Pub, I met with them again the next afternoon. At noon that day, my son and I had gone to the lunch counter at DeFever-Osborn Drug Store for soup and sandwiches.

The drug store bustled both at the prescription counter and at the lunch counter. A dozen stools faced what had started as a soda fountain before 'pop' came in cans and teenagers ordered cherry-limeades that came in glasses not styrofoam cups from Sonic Drive-In. There were two or three wooden booths between the lunch counter and the prescription counter for coffee drinkers and newspaper readers. Steve had hung lots of historic photographs in the store and he actually had a better collection than the library. I borrowed a couple from him to copy for our files.

I was in Walgreen's the other day to get a prescription and saw Steve working there behind the counter as I waited. I won't say that I liked the line and the wait. I think I liked looking at the old photos at the old store better.

Across the street from DeFever-Osborn was Calvert's Department Store. They announced their closing in the same article that announced the drug store closing. I may write more about that later.


So, in one month two downtown landmark stores closed. It is tough for merchants in small towns as Walmart and city malls take customers away.

Robert B. Parker talks about his books

He is six books ahead of publication, a good interview.



His latest, Stranger in Paradise, is a Jesse Stone and is a good story, made for a TV movie. Tom Selleck does a good job in these moody procedurals to my taste. This is the eighth novel Parker has written using the Jesse Stone character. They are:

• Night Passage (1997)
• Trouble in Paradise (1998)
• Death in Paradise (2001)
• Stone Cold (2003)
• Sea Change (2006)
• Blue Screen (2006) *
  
• High Profile (2007) *
  
• Stranger in Paradise (2008)

Adding to the fun, Parker includes Sunny Randall in Blue Screen and High Profile and promises to include her in future efforts.

Explaining the book to a new user ...

It is obvious that I spend too many evenings at the computer. The evidence is clear. Anyway, it's my life and the results can be fascinating. I offer the following as proof. (Thanks Stumbleupon.com.)

How cool is this?