CHESHIRE, Conn.—Amelia Earhart is said to have trained at Rentschler Field, once the private airport of Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford. Her name can also be found with the likes of Charles Lindbergh in the logbooks of Sikorsky Memorial Airport in Bridgeport.
But could she have landed her plane on a rural airstrip near Weeks Pond in Cheshire, now the site of Highland School and the Police Department?
The strip, little more than a mowed field with a barn for a hangar, was owned by Nancy Hopkins Tier, a female aviation pioneer in her own right and contemporary of Earhart who also received one of the first pilot's licenses awarded to women.
Donald Gode, who grew up swimming and playing ice hockey at Weeks Pond in the 1930s, said Earhart did visit Cheshire. He was a friend of Tier's children and remembers Earhart making flights to and from the strip.
Gode said he occasionally would hear from the Tiers that Earhart had flown over or had come to visit.
Tier "and Amelia Earhart were good friends," Gode said. Louise Foudray, caretaker and advisor for the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum in Kansas, wasn't aware of a specific trip by Earhart to Cheshire, but she found it plausible that Earhart could have landed here. "It's certainly possible," Foudray said.
Glenn Oxford, Tier's grandson, also didn't know of any meetings between Earhart and Tier in town, but agreed that it could have happened. Earhart and Tier were both charter members of the Ninety-Nines, a group of the first women pilots formed in 1927. Oxford said Earhart probably would have known Tier by name.
So who was Nancy Hopkins Tier?
Born in 1909 in Washington, D.C., to an illustrious family that included her aunt Lady Astor and uncle artist Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the "Gibson Girl," Tier lived in Cheshire for 23 years after she and her husband Irving Tier bought the first house by Weeks Pond on Castle Glenn in 1931. She flew out of the private strip across the pond from her house and sometimes kept her plane in the barn.
Like Earhart, Tier made many contributions during the early days of aviation. A testament to her skill as a pilot, she was the only woman flier on the 1930 Ford Reliability Race, a cross-country aviation competition designed to demonstrate the efficiency and practicality of air travel.
During World War II, Tier joined the Civil Air Patrol and flew out of Meriden-Markham Airport. Her duties included patrolling the coast of Maine in search of German U-boats as well as guarding Meriden's airport.
"It all sounds kind of funny now, but I guess anything can happen," she told the Record-Journal in 1990.
She stayed in the Civil Air Patrol until 1950, and was the first woman to rise to the rank of wing commander and colonel. She helped found the International Women's Air and Space Museum in Cleveland, Ohio and continued to fly into her 80s, a member of the United Flying Octogenarians. She died in 1996.
Tier had her first flying lesson at age 17 and earned her pilot's license, signed by Orville Wright, two years later. She became a saleswoman for Kittyhawk planes and the Viking Flying Boat Co. at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, N.Y. in 1929. That same year her employer entered her in the Women's Dixie Derby, a race from Santa Monica, Calif. to Cleveland.
"It was a bad year to sell" because of the stock market crash, she said. But "it was the era of races and trophies; bombing and sandbagging," she added, referring to competitions to hit targets with sandbags. "I didn't have any brakes on that plane," she said of the Kittyhawk biplane she flew in the Dixie Derby.
Tier had two forced landings during the race, but had brought extra valves and a cylinder and was able to make repairs to the experimental engine she was testing.
It was common for pilots at the time to bring tools and extra equipment "otherwise you'd wait a mighty long time in some field," she told the Record-Journal in that 1990 interview.
During the 5,000-mile Ford Reliability Race, she was forced to land in a field in Arkansas to replace a cylinder in her engine, but still finished the race in 14th place out of 19 pilots.
She recounted the experience in an interview with New York Times columnist George Vescey for a book about the early days of aviation:
The engine "really blew at four thousand feet over the Mississippi, forty miles from Memphis. I just made a big circle -- I was used to landing in small fields. I landed in the back of a little shack, tree stumps all around, hit an irrigation ditch and blew a tire. "But the main thing was to see what was wrong. I pulled the propeller, checked out the cylinders, found the problem, went to work with a screwdriver and some wire, and it started right up."
Tier made headlines in the New York Times and other newspapers on Dec. 8, 1931, during her final flying test at Roosevelt Field for a license as a transport pilot. Oxford said Tier told him she was required to put her plane in a spin and get it out again. She had done it several times before, but this time she was unable to break out of the spin and was losing altitude. Tier was ready to bail out before regaining control.
"Half in, half out, she grabs the throttle and is able to control it," Oxford said.
"Terrified she struggled to free herself from the cockpit," the New York Times reported in 1931. "The centrifugal force of the spin held her fast, however. As a last resort she settled back into her seat and worked the controls while the horizon whirled dizzily around her. As the plane descended to 1,000 feet the nose dropped and the craft gathered speed in its spinning dive. A split second later, at 800 feet, it responded to rudder control and the pilot brought it out of a straight power dive."
Tier received her license and congratulations from a relieved license examiner.
"She described the examiner as being pale white, thinking he was going to witness a horrific accident," Oxford said.
Only on the train ride home after the test did it sink in for Tier how close she had come to dying or at the least wrecking her plane. Oxford said she told him "all of a sudden I couldn't stop my knees from shaking."
Tier's 67-year flying career was much different from those of other women aviators who dedicated their lives to the profession, according to Oxford.
"She kept it fairly well-balanced with church and family," he said. "There were a lot of other things going on in her life other than aviation."
Tier and her husband had three children, Mary Anne, Ben and David. Family responsibilities kept her from exploits such as Earhart's solo trans-Atlantic flight that would have made her famous.
"Amelia Earhart was singularly focused upon aviation," said Toni Mullee, executive director for the International Women's Air and Space Museum.
Few women pilots other than Earhart gained such fame and iconic status, despite their roles in advancing female aviation, Mullee said. Patrons may be drawn to the women's air museum by Earhart's fame -- and the recent movie "Amelia" -- but Mullee hopes people will come to recognize the other names in female aviation such as Nancy Hopkins Tier.
Unlike Earhart, Tier didn't have lectures or businesses to finance her aviation. Oxford said financing for planes came mainly from Irving Tier, who had inherited a good deal of money. Oxford said the Tiers likely had a maid and possibly a cook while in the Cheshire house.
"Granddad had some bucks," he said.
The Tiers moved to Washington, D.C., in 1954 and to Lakeville, Conn., in 1966.
Oxford said his grandmother continued flying until 1991 at age 83.
"She always had her hand in (aviation)," he said. "She never completely dropped it."
Oxford, one of six grandchildren, is the only pilot in the family. He flies for United Airlines in the Washington, D.C., area and also pilots his grandmother's plane, a Cessna 170A called Dilly.
Oxford said he was not particularly passionate about flying growing up, but in 1989 decided to get his pilot's license and asked Tier to teach him.
"I got real excited about flying after my first lesson," he said.
Oxford earned his wings with the Navy in 1992, and Tier attended the ceremony to pin his wings on. After she stopped flying, she gave Oxford her airplane, which she had flown for more than 40 years.
Pilots sometimes have a reputation for being arrogant, Oxford said, but his grandmother had none of those negative traits, possibly because she wasn't absorbed full-time in aviation.
"To me, she's grandma."
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Information from: Record-Journal, http://www.record-journal.com
