but not from her friend, louise thaden. hat week, louise who is back home in arkansas, writes amelia a letter. and louise, had a very specific kind of way of speaking. a sort of folksy charm about her. and spoke with a little bit of a country twang. and she told amelia in this letter, and i'm quoting here. she said, don your hide, i could speak your pants. someday you, have to tell me why you do things like this. in this letter, luis goes on to tell her friend amelia that she wished amelia would rest on her laurels. and then very prophetic ali, louise tells her you're worth more alive than dead. this is, of course, two and a half years before amelia will go missing in another very dangerous ocean flight. and you know, the same was true of amelia and ruth nichols. they had a bit more complicated friendship. maybe each of us had this kind of friendship in our lives. where we understand someone and we appreciate them but we're also sort of competing against them all the time. that was ruth and amelia. and yet, i found evidence

in particular these three here, you know amelia earhart and ruth nichols and louise thaden. they were really the triumvirate of this time. and and they quickly realized that they could compete against one another in the sky. they could try to fight one another across the ocean indeed amelia and ruth nichols lied to one another about their transatlantic plans. both of them didn't want the other one to know what they were hoping to do each of them understood that the first woman to cross the ocean and solo in a plane would have that key to the room of immortality. but on the ground they recognized right away that they had to stick together. and indeed they would become good friends. because who could understand ruth nichols better? then amelia earhart. or or louise hayden better than ruth nichols. you know i've often thought about louise. in the early 1930s and what it would have been like to drop your kids off at kindergarten and preschool. how little she would have had in common? with the other mothers there. and so they did become really close. and i found a lot of evidence