Amelia Earhart has Found Me
I grew up in the Mac-Groveland neighborhood of St. Paul. We had our share of local sports heroes from the area–Dave Winfield, Paul Molitor, etc.–but the biggest celebrity our little corner of the world ever produced was Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts. In fact, Schultz’s father was a barber (as was Charlie Brown’s in the comic strip), and when I was growing up that barbershop was still in operation, though it had left the Schultz family’s hands decades earlier. I had my hair cut there many times.
I’ve learned this morning from this article in the Minneapolis Tribune that our neighborhood briefly played home to another famous figure: Amelia Earhart lived there in 1913-14. She played girls basketball at Central High School, less than a mile from the house where I grew up. I’ve always heard she was from Kansas, but her father worked for the railroads and apparently they moved around quite a bit.
Guess where they lived after they left St. Paul: Chicago, in fact Hyde Park. I see a pattern forming.
Last week, on his blog the great baseball writer Joe Posnanski coined a new word, “dumbley,” to describe a fact that everyone else seems to know, but that you have somehow managed to miss learning. His example: he’d met a well-educated man who’d never heard of Amelia Earhart.
Of course, the new movie based on her life premiered last month. Conclusion: Amelia Earhart is no longer missing. She can be found all over the Internet.
