Page 22 THE VILLADOM TIMES III • June 12, 2013 thickly glamorized version of Earhart undertaking a reconnaissance mission at the behest of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s White House to study Japanese fortifications in the Pacific. There were a few problems: The United States, unconcerned with Japanese “aggression,” was still selling the Japanese military equipment at the time of Earhart’s last flight; the Japanese invasion of China did not occur until months after Earhart vanished; and an immediate post-war search of the Japanese records supervised by Earhart’s fellow aviatrix and personal friend, Jackie Cochran, convinced Cochran that the Japanese had nothing to do with Earhart’s disappearance. As an ancillary issue, Earhart was a well-known pacifist who wanted nothing to do with fostering overseas wars - perhaps because, as a German-American, she had seen her family take some lumps from “super-patriots” during the frantic German-bashing of World War I, more likely because her volunteer work in Canadian and U.S. military hospitals during and after the war had given her an extreme distaste for wars conducted by anyone. Earhart risked her own life with sublime courage, but understood that she had no right to risk anyone else’s life. The skeptical view of the Earhart-Noonan murders was not binding on a CBS correspondent whose 1966 book claimed interviews with Chamorro natives of the Marianas who saw an aircraft crash off the coast of Saipan -- then part of Japan’s pay-back for fighting against Germany in World War I. The book claimed that a white man and a white woman were taken off the plane by Japanese soldiers and held in custody. Many natives reportedly saw them. The white man slugged a Japanese guard and was briskly beheaded. The white woman died of dysentery while in secret custody. This has a certain artful plausibility: Noonan, like Earhart’s father, had a serious drinking problem and a notable temper. The fact that Earhart’s own purported demise did not involve the predictable torture routine lifted the story from the level of propaganda to the level of what sounded like unbiased reporting -- temporarily. A few years after the “final” story, a Japanese woman reporter voyaged to Saipan -- the descendants of those Japanese settlers who survived the invasion and the mass suicides still live there -- and looked up the Chamorro people the CBS guy quoted. Many of them remembered a recent “white man” -- the CBS guy from a few years before. None remembered a white man and a white woman from an aircraft crash when the Japanese still owned Saipan, and none of the Chamorro people the CBS guy quoted ever told him about an execution or a white woman’s circumstantial death in custody. A couple of other books later turned up with photographs that purportedly show Amelia in custody. The photographs have all been proven fraudulent or were taken before Earhart took off from New Guinea. An Australian story describes the jungle wreckage of a Lockheed Electra that crashed in New Britain before it ever got any real distance from New Guinea. A U.S. B-17 had exploded in mid-air in 1943 during the war in the same area where the Lockheed Electra parts were purportedly found. However, the U.S. Coast Guard reported radio messages from Earhart and Noonan near Howland Island in 1937. Still more absurd was the claim that Earhart fled her husband, faked a plane crash in the Pacific Northwest of the North American continent, and turned up in the 1940s as a New York City investment banker. The banker in question sued the book’s publisher for $1.5 million, the book was withdrawn from print, an undisclosed settlement was made out of court, and comparisons of photographs of the aviatrix and the banker strongly suggested that they were two distinct people. What finally happened? In 1940, a British colonial official described a skeleton “possibly that of a white woman” on Gardner Island, an uninhabited island that also contained the wreck of a large freighter. This would have been two-and-a-half flight hours along Earhart’s flight route, but along the same course line. The skeleton was reportedly missing its head -- one last chance for a Japanese outrage flopped because Gardner Island was British at the time -and was said to be that of a “tall white female of northern European ancestry.” Earhart was five-foot-eight with bluegray eyes. Needless to say, the skeleton disappeared somewhere on Fiji and has not been seen since the 1940s. The TIGHAR expeditions have since turned up bronze aircraft parts, a zipper pull, and a bone that DNA testing incredibly reported could have been either from a human or a sea turtle. Despite fake atrocity propaganda stories, an indignant New York banker, and a missing skeleton, Earhart’s fate is still up for grabs. The memory of that brave and gracious young woman who left my late mother a lifetime memory makes me personally interested in finding out what actually happened. The world of the Web was less than thrilled when TIGHAR, The International Group for Historical Aircraft Recovery, went online with reports that a sonar image showed a 22-foot anomaly in the sea off an island where Amelia Earhart may have landed 75 years ago. TIGHAR was reviewing 2012 sonar images taken off the island of Nikumaroro, and now believe a manmade object that appears in those images could be part of Earhart’s plane. I was far more interested than most people seem to have been. Some years before I was born, my mother was walking along the boundary of the family farm just outside Teterboro Airport when she saw a high-wing monoplane idling on the side strip waiting for takeoff clearance. She was surprised to see a young blond woman at the controls -- the only person in the aircraft. They stared at one another briefly. “Are you Amelia Earhart?” my mother asked incredulously. “Yes, I am,” Earhart replied. They spoke for a few moments. “Then she asked me if I wanted to go up for a ride,” my mother later told me. “I was afraid so I turned her down, but you know -- I’ve always wished that I’d taken her up on it.” My mother’s experience explains why I was one of the few people who read the latest story who would have supported what would be the 11th expedition by the same group, now about to try to raise the sunken Lockheed Electra that vanished beneath the surface of the Pacific in July 1937. Earhart was 39 when she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared on the most dangerous leg of an attempt to fly around the world, from Lae in New Guinea to Howland Island in the Pacific. Howland Island was occupied by Americans at the time, but the island is a very chancy place to locate, just over a mile long and half a mile wide. Unfortunately, the best available charts Earhart and Noonan were using placed Howland Island five miles from its actual location. To make matters worse, a movie of the take-off from New Guinea suggests the Electra had lost its trailing radio antenna. Radio transmission was garbled, especially just before the disappearance on July 12, 1937. The U.S. Navy search team, including the battleship U.S.S. Colorado, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Itasca, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lexington, the Japanese seaplane tender Kamoi, and the Japanese oceanography vessel Koshu kept up the search for seven days at a cost of $4 million, the most expensive sea search in history up to that time. (TIGHAR needs a mere $3 million to try to raise the plane they just found.) Earhart’s husband, G.P. Putnam stayed at home, but funded a private search including the Gilbert and Marshall Islands and other small islands. Neither the AmericanJapanese naval search nor Putnam’s private search found anything. Earhart was declared legally dead on Jan. 5, 1939, but that was not the end of the story. In 1943, Hollywood got into the act with a movie called “Flight for Freedom” in which Rosalind Russell portrayed a thinly disguised and Amelia Earhart is still important Upper Saddle River Members of the Upper Saddle River community who wish to support sixth grade language arts/social studies teacher are urged to attend the board of education’s June 17 meeting. Murphy is a Cavallini School teacher who has been with the district since 2011, but is now being terminated. Murphy’s supporters assert that Murphy’s personnel eval- Community wants to save teacher’s job uations and classroom observations do not provide support for her termination. The Upper Saddle River Board of Education’s June 17 meeting will be held at 8 p.m. in the media center of the Cavallini Middle School located at 392 West Saddle River Road in Upper Saddle River. made donations; Mark Borst of Borst Landscaping and Bruce Rohsler of Rohsler’s Nursery, who were not only instrumental on the committee, but kindly donated the soil and plants for the planters; Councilwoman Amy Wilczynski and Mayor Vince Barra, who also contributed a lot of time, effort and did everything they could to assist the effort; the township of Allendale and the DPW, who donated their time to assemble and install the benches, we thank them for their support,” Kalpagian said. president. He was appointed to the Saddle River Board of Education in 2006 and successfully ran for reelection to his seat on the board in both 2007 and 2010. His experience in school boards began in 1998 in Upper Saddle River. When he moved to Saddle River in 2005, Saddle River was experiencing some of the same issues he had faced as a trustee in Upper Saddle River, and attended meetings in his new hometown to share his expertise. Senger has served as head of the Saddle River Board of Education’s Finance, Negotiations, and Middle School committees. He is also the district’s (non-voting) representative to the Northern Highlands Regional High School Board of Education. In addition, Senger is a member of the Saddle River Environmental Commission member and volunteers with a homeless shelter in Harlem. Downtown project (continued from page 4) one-time project,” he said. Kalpagian also expressed appreciation to those who contributed to the success of the project. “First and foremost, all the generous people and organizations that have BOE candidates (continued from page 5) years. She served the first two years as auction chair and the last two as president. Originally from Long Island, New York, she received her undergraduate degree from Hamilton College in New York and completed her graduate work at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. She holds a master’s degree in pediatric social work. Senger is a senior vice president for UBS. This multiterm incumbent is currently serving as board president and previously served seven years as the board’s vice