COURTESY PHOTO
A commemorative plaque in front of Amelia Earhart’s former home in Medford reads: “Amelia Earhart: The famed flier lived here from 1925 until she left to make the first Transatlantic flight by a woman on July 17, 1925.”
By STEVE FREKER
MEDFORD — The house where the world’s most famous woman aviator ever lived with her family in West Medford for some of the formative of years of her life still stands.
In front, a commemorative plaque encased in stone reads: “Amelia Earhart: The famed flier lived here from 1925 until she left to make the first Transatlantic flight by a woman on July 17, 1925.”
It is a piece of national history tucked away at a 130-year-old residence at 76 Brooks St., up the hill from Route 60/High Street, one of Medford’s most heavily traveled thoroughfares.
The plaque was donated and installed by the Medford Cooperative Bank and the Medford Historical Society on the 60th anniversary of that internationally-hailed event.
This week marks another Earhart anniversary — a tragic one. A massive search was launched 80 years ago in the Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of Howland Island, just north of the equator, to try and locate the famed aviator and her navigator, Fred Noonan. The pair’s plane disappeared without a trace on the last leg of a 21,000-mile trek seeking to make Earhart the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by air.
Earhart and Noonan’s plane left New Guinea on July 2, 1937, just 2,500 miles from completing their historic flight and despite a few static-filled trouble transmissions, were never seen or heard from again.
From July 2 to July 9, 1937, the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy scoured a total of 150,000 square miles of ocean and island space looking for the famed pilot and her plane. The search by U.S. authorities officially ended 17 days after Earhart’s disappearance, on July 19.
Following the end of the U.S. military search, Earhart’s husband, George Putnam, a wealthy publisher, financed a private search in the Pacific which continued to the end of July 1937, to no avail.
At the time of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance and the search that followed, her mother, Amy Otis Earhart, and sister, Muriel Earhart Morrissey, were still living in Medford in the Brooks Street house, awaiting news of their daughter and sister’s fate.
Earhart’s mother moved to Ohio for several years, but returned to the Brooks Street homestead and then lived there with her daughter until her passing in 1962 at the age of 93.
Amelia Earhart’s sister, Muriel, never left Medford, working as a teacher in Belmont then as an English teacher at Medford High School for nearly 40 years before her retirement in 1968. Muriel Earhart Morrissey passed away in March of 1998 at the age of 98.
She was active for decades in Medford organizations and politically as well, serving two terms on the Medford School Committee and devoting many hours to the League of Women Voters, was a charter member of the Medford Zonta Club, served on the local Conservation Commission and in the 1980s was appointed to the Council on Aging. She was a longtime member of The Daughters of the American Revolution and a member of the Medford Historical Society. In 1979 she was named “Citizen of the Year” by the Medford Chamber of Commerce and honored for her community participation by American Legion Post #45.
Amy Otis Earhart and Muriel Earhart Morrissey, are both interred in Oak Grove Cemetery in Medford.
