Ric claimed that AE did phone in a story from Lae to the New York Herald Tribune. I haven't gone looking for his source yet. But the quotation from Ric reminds me that Putnam was in California. I speculate that the office of the New York Herald Tribune that took AE's press report was in New York.
Confirmed: "Putnam had negotiated an arrangement with the Herald Tribune newspaper syndicate for Amelia to phone, or when necessary wire, the syndicate’s New York office from each destination with a travelogue about her flight and the exotic people and places she saw along the way. Earhart’s bylined story would be carried in the next morning’s paper. For the syndicate this was an opportunity to give Herald Tribune readers a first-person, serialized, near-real-time account of what it was like to travel the world by air. For Earhart and Putnam it was a publicist’s dream come true: coverage of Amelia’s adventures, as told by Amelia, featured in major papers around the country virtually every day for a month or more" (Finding Amelia, pp. 32-33).
Confirmed: There was international telephone service from Lae to the U.S. mainland. But Earhart was low on cash, and it seems that she could not afford to pay for another call to the Herald Tribune after her call on 30 June.
Well, not so fast.
All of my research confirms that there was no telephone service, either by
undersea cable or by radiotelephone, from Lae to the outside world in 1937. Even
local radio telephone service in New Guinea did not come on line until 1939.
It appears the only evidence that telephone service was available between Lae and the U.S. is the story printed in the Herald Tribune that, it is claimed, had been telephoned by Earhart in Lae to the newspaper. Let's look at this claim.
The last chapter of Earhart's book,
Last Flight, reprints the two stories printed in the Herald Tribune. The second part of the chapter, beginning with "'Denmark's a prison...'," is the newspaper story clearly sent by radiogram. We know this because we can find this radiogram at the Purdue site. This story was printed in the July 2, 1937 edition of the newspaper. The first half of the chapter beginning with "After a flight of seven hours..." was the earlier story sent to the newspaper and this story is the one claimed to have been telephoned by Earhart. We can't find a copy of a radiogram for this story but I have found a telegram from the Herald Tribune to Putnam acknowledging the receipt of this story and that first story was clearly sent by radiogram. This telegram is
dated June 29 so it cannot be referring to the radiogram for the second story because the radiogram for the second story did not
arrive until July 2nd. The June 29th acknowledgment telegram states;
"
LAE DISPATCH ARRIVED LATE TONIGHT..."
The word "DISPATCH" obviously did not refer to a telephone call. "Dispatch" was the commonly used word in the newspaper industry to mean "a story sent in by a correspondent." The dispatch was received late at night on June 29th but early enough for this telegram to be send to Putnam, still on the 29th. So let's say it arrived around 10:00 p.m. New York time. Lae is 15 hours ahead of New York so the message was sent some time prior to 1:00 p.m. in Lae on June 30th, the day after Earhart had arrived in Lae.
I have attached a copy of this telegram. I have also attached a copy of the radiogram containing the second story showing it was received "VIA RCA" from Lae NG (RCA= Radio Corporation of America, an obvious radiogram) on July 2nd at 3:48 in the morning.
This appears to be another case (all too common in scholarship, and well represented in writings about Earhart) of the first person writing a story getting it wrong and then everyone else just copying off of his paper without going back to the source documents themselves. It looks like decent research because they include cites to their sources, and they usually cite to the original document cited in the secondary source that they are actually using, not revealing that they are only using a secondary source. But since the secondary source got it wrong the error propagates throughout the literature, like a snowball rolling downhill. (TIGHAR is to be congratulated on its instance of references to the original documents.)
A couple of other examples of this in the Earhart saga.
From Lovell's book:
"...Her obsession with weight may have been taken to extreme length,
for according to Harry Balfour, radio operator at Lae, survival
equipment was also taken off. Balfour claimed that "she unloaded all her
surplus equipment on me including her [Very] pistol and ammunition,
books, letters and facility books"".
I don't know who placed the "Very" inside the brackets but, according to Balfour, the "pistol" that Earhart gave him was an "automatic pistol," apparently carried for personal protection, not an emergency signaling "Very Pistol." I don't know who was the person who made this change to Balfour's words and if it was done out of ignorance or if it was due to "political correctness." I am still curious who changed "automatic pistol" to "[Very] pistol", was it Ms. Lovell or her source? She footnotes this information as coming from Francis X. Holbrook, NA&SM Library, Amelia Earhart General File: F0171300. The fact "Very" was put in brackets shows that it was deliberately changed, but why and by whom? The letter from Balfour containing this quote was sent to Holbrook.
Almost every book about Earhart repeats this as the basis for
claiming that Earhart did not have a very pistoll with her but it does not support that claim.
It is amazing how often these kinds of things happen. Someone makes a statement that is erroneous and it gets repeated over and over until it becomes gospel, nobody goes back to check out the accuracy of the original statement. Here is another example that goes back to a seemingly unimpeachable source as it comes from Earhart herself. She wrote in her book that they flew the 163 miles from St. Louis to Dakar the next morning. The problem with this statement is that it is NOT 163 miles from St. Louis to Dakar, it is only about 101 SM. BUT, it
IS 163 kilometers. Where did Earhart get this information? Did somebody tell her "kilometers" and she got confused and wrote "miles?" Or did she just ask somebody at Dakar "hey Pierre, how far is it to St. Louis from here?" "Il est cent, soixant- trois, Madame" and Amelia just assumed he meant miles, not kilometers.
But the 163 miles number has been printed in virtually all the Earhart books, it has become gospel.
gl