7 Chapter 6 Amelia the Businesswoman

Chapter 6 Amelia the Businesswoman In the fall of 1929, the stock market crashed. Many people lost a lot of money. Many also lost their jobs. It was the start of the Great Depression. Amelia worried about her parents who had split up again. Her mother was living with Amelia's sister and husband. Amelia helped out by giving her mother some money every month. Her father was ill. So Amelia bought the log cabin in Los Angeles where he was living. Amelia felt a strong sense of duty to her parents.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

It started on October 29, 1929. That was the day a lot of people lost a lot of money on the stock market. Since they had less money, people couldn't buy things. Businesses had to close. Millions of people lost their jobs. Soup kitchens were set up to feed people. The hungry waited for hours in long lines hoping to get a little free food. The Great Depression dragged on for years. Mother Nature made things even worse. There was very little rain in the Great Plains during the 1930s. Farmland turned to dust. More families became homeless. Under President Franklin Roosevelt, the government formed a plan to make things better. It was called the New Deal. Jobs were created. People began to make money again. By the end of the decade,

the worst was over. But people who lived through the Great Depression would never forget the hard times. Amelia had to keep earning money but that was not easy during the Depression. She still gave speeches but she had another job, too. Amelia helped start an airline on the East Coast. It was called The New York, Philadelphia and Washington Airway because it flew between those cities. Amelia's job was to convince people to fly on the airline. It was difficult to run an airline in the early days. Only a few cities had airports. Once three planes arrived in Philadelphia at the same time. Some passengers had to change planes. Some people just got off to stretch their legs. But airline

workers got confused. They put people on the wrong planes. Some were accidentally flown back to the city they had just left! Another problem on the early flights was airsickness. It wasn't just the bumps. Fumes from the engine often came into the cabin. There also was no air conditioning. Sometimes more than half of the passengers on a plane threw up. Still, more than fifteen hundred passengers flew on the tiny airline during the first ten days. Amelia was happy to report that almost half the tickets had been sold to women.

AVIATION INDUSTRY Today traveling by plane seems as normal as taking a bus. But it wasn't always that way. In fact, your grandparents may not have stepped foot on an airplane until they were grown-ups! At first airplanes primarily delivered mail, not people. But the many small companies that carried