"Gore Vidal: "Well, just the night before the final flight, she reported in and they had a code phrase, 'personnel problems,' which meant Noonan was back drinking. And my father said, 'Just stop it right now and come home,' and G.P. agreed and said, 'Come back, abort the flight, forget it, come home.' And then she said, 'Oh, no,' and she said, 'I think it’ll be all right,' something like that. So you may put that down to invincible optimism or it may have been huge pessimism."
"Personnel unfitness" (or if "personal unfitness") was apparently a very private term devised between AE and GP which seems intended to import real meaning but without bringing negatives to the light in their publicity efforts. What was so dark about it that they didn't want it creeping into the headlines?
If the Vidal observation is reliable the term carried potentially grave meanings - it would be no light thing to cancel plans, and AE resisted it at least on the occasion mentioned by Vidal.
On the TV program "The American Experience" Gore Vidal says that his father, Gene Vidal, was
at the Harold Tribune office with G.P. the night before the departure from Lae. A phone call
came in from Earhart reporting the code phrase "personnel unfitness" meaning that Noonan was
drinking and that Gene Vidal told her not to fly with Noonan but that they would get her another
navigator.
On the show "Vanishings" they also say that she called Putnam from Lae the night before the
departure.
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We know that she sent a radiogram to Putnam on June 30th, two days before the departure,
reporting "personnel unfitness,” did she also telephone him with the same information the night
before the departure?
Youngsters who have unlimited long distance calling on their cell phones have no conception of
what it cost to communicate in the past. When I was a kid in the '50s I remember that we didn't
make any long distance phone calls because they were expensive. If you thought about making a
long distance call you would first call the long distance operator "211" and get an estimate of the
cost before deciding if you could afford the call. We old guys remember making "person to
person" calls which were really coded messages to let people know that we had arrived safely or
to have someone call us back at a cheaper "station to station" rate since, if the recipient told the
telephone operator that the person we had asked for (often a made up name which was actually
the code word) was not there, that there was no charge for the attempted "person to person" call.
I was curious just how expensive those long distance calls were in the '50s so I did some
research. In 1950 a five minute call from New York to Los Angeles cost $3.70 which doesn't
sound so bad. But when you adjust it for inflation, that $3.70 would buy the same amount of stuff
that costs $33.44 today. In 1930 a three minute call from New York to London cost $368.70 in
2010 dollars. I wonder what a phone call from Lae to the U.S. cost in 1937.
I also looked into the cost of radiograms. As of January 1, 1937 it cost 39 cents per word from
San Francisco to Manila. I doubt that it was less expensive to cable Lae than it was to cable
Manila. 39 cents in 1937 is the same as $5.91 in 2010 dollars. The 40 word June 30th radiogram
cost at least $236.40 in 2010 dollars! She sent a longer radiogram the day before the departure
since the Tribune agreed to pay the cable costs. Her last message was 94 words (including the
address) costing the Tribune at least $555.54 in 2010 dollars!
Putnam was running short of money which is why he had to get the Tribune to pick up the cost of
the last cable. Who was going to pay for the telephone calls to Putnam and to Lockheed?
Is there any reason to even believe that telephone calls from Lae to the U.S. were even possible
in 1937? There was no undersea telegraph cable to Lae then, which is why the messages
exchanged were by radiogram so what would make anybody think that there was an undersea
telephone cable available? What about radio telephone calls on short wave? That's a pretty long
distance to cover by voice radio which is why Morse code was used to pass messages and, even
for Morse messages, they had to be passed in a series of relays, so I think it is highly unlikely
that it would have been possible to make a radiotelephone call to the States from Lae. I have attached
a map of the cables across the Pacific in 1939, none goes near Lae.
Bottom line, I don't believe the claims Gore Vidal. Note that this claim is hearsay. Gore Vidal
said his father told him, Gore wasn't actually there. (And Gore Vidal was also the source for the
supposed romance between his father and AE shown in the recent movie so it calls that claim
into question also.)
I have probably understated the cost of radiograms to Lae. I used the 39 cents per word rate,
which was the rate from San Francisco to Manila as being comparable to cost of radiograms to
Lae. But the map of undersea cables shows that there was an undersea cable to Manila so they
didn't have to send radiograms. Cablegrams are less labor intensive than radiograms since radiograms
require a series of radio
operators to take down the message and then retransmit it onto the next station in line towards
the destination. An example is given in Staffords book on page 124. Messages from Hawaii to
Lae were sent first to Samoa, onto Fiji, then to Sidney, onto Rabaul, thence to Salamaua ,and
finally to Lae. This process took a minimum of six and a half hours and required seven separate
radio operators to take down the message and then retransmit it about a half hour later to the
next station. Because of this I believe that the cost of radiograms would be quite a bit higher than
the cable rate to Manila since the cable didn't need the intermediate operators.
gl