6 Amelia 'I want to fly. Will you teach me?' she asked, as flight instructor and aviation' pioneer Anita Snook recounts in her autobiography I Taught Amelia to Fly. The aspiring pupil was Amelia Earhart, and the year was 1920. Born in the Midwestern American state of Kansas on 24 July 1897, Amelia loved climbing trees, sledging and hunting rats with a rifle". Ambitious since childhood, she kept a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings of successful and inspiring women in male-dominated fields of the time such as film production, law, advertising, management and mechanical engineering. Initially Amelia did not find aeroplanes all that impressive. 'It was a thing of rusty wires and wood and looked not at all interesting, she said, after seeing a plane for the first time at a state fair when she was ten years old. A decade later, she felt the first thrill of excitement as she watched a plane swoop by her at a stunt flying exhibition. On 28 December 1920 she ...