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One day in May 1927, skies over the greater Boston area rained down free passes to a Memorial Day weekend country carnival.
Who knows, maybe your great-grandmother plucked one from the air. If so, she possessed, for that moment, a ticket to history.
Source of the flurry was a young social worker who taught Chinese and Syrian mothers at Dennison House, a Waltham settlement, beneficiary of the event.
That day, she was passenger in an open cockpit plane out of the former Quincy field. That was before she was to become famous.
This summer, we may finally have the answer to a very old mystery: Whatever happened to Amelia Earhart?
She disappeared a decade later, in 1937, at age 39, while trying to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.
As the world focuses this July on the mid-Pacific, on yet another search mission, remember that Massachusetts has stakes in the game.
Earhart is our personal heroine, at least as much as she is anyone else’s.
The aviator was born in Kansas, but spent formative years here, living in Medford and soaring with apparent glee over the Boston area – maybe even over Mansfield or Plainville or Attleboro. (Let’s imagine that she did.)
As her stature grew, she flew farther afield, setting one aviation record after another, all over the place.
It was July 2, 1937, on her attempt to circle the world, this particular leg en route from Lae, New Guinea to Howland Island, that all communication with Earhart was lost and no remnants of her journey were ever found despite a massive search.
This ending may be re-written soon.
A world traveler and explorer, Jon Thompson, who has already conducted Earhart missions, plans to bring modern technology to bear with expertise of the deep-sea exploration company Nauticos, as the 75th anniversary of the pilot’s disappearance comes fast upon us.
Nauticos Corp., by its own description online, was founded in September 1986 and provides ocean technology services to government, science and industry.
In 1995, Nauticos received international recognition for its participation in the discovery of the I-52, an historic World War II deep-water shipwreck of a Japanese submarine found at a depth of 17,000 feet.
But Thompson is not the only one looking. Whoever solves this puzzle will become nearly as famous as Earhart herself, with all the riches such a bonanza would cull.
In March, the International Group for Historic Aircraft, headed by Ric Gillespie, said a U.S. State Department analysis of an image off the remote island of Nikumaroro, in what is now the Pacific nation of Kiribati, looks like landing gear, reported The Associated Press. His team will also return in July to renew the search.
Again, all these decades later, Amelia Earhart is creating a flurry.
“Admittedly, it’s a needle in a haystack,” Jon Thompson told MSNBC, “but with the technology we have employed and the brains we have involved, if we don’t find it, no one will.” Maybe yes, maybe no.
But as the missing aviator herself once said, “Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn’t be done.”
Coax kids to read books or view DVDs about Earhart so they can observe with more authority what unfolds this summer. This is one amazing story.
Amelia Earhart belongs to the history of the world. But she grew her wings over Massachusetts and we’re not about to let anyone forget that.
BETSY SHEA-TAYLOR, a former editor and writer for The Sun Chronicle, is a freelance writer.