Like my previous stories about Ellen Church and Bessie Coleman, I wrote this one in a style a little different from what my readers may be used to. Why? Well… like I mentioned in Squirrel, I’m all over the place! 😂 Actually, I just love bringing history alive. Especially by telling stories that aren’t as well known. I hope you enjoy!
Awake long before the sun scaled the fence at Kinner Field, Anita stood looking skyward. She let the pale, early warmth settle against her skin, though it did little to cut the January chill. The air was thin and sharp, heavy with the scent of burnt oil, gasoline, and dust. A fragrance that, to an aviator, smelled like home.
Anita Snook, better known as Neta, moved around her Canuck—a Canadian cousin of the American Curtiss JN-4 Jenny—with deliberate care. Her boots crunched over the hard-packed earth as she worked. Fingers traced the fabric ribs; knuckles rapped the struts, listening for the note to ring true. Every sound mattered. Every vibration told a story. Machines never lied, and on this field, the truth was the only thing that kept you alive.
She set her toolbox near the hangar and knelt beneath an open cowling, tightening a fitting, adjusting a cable, wiping oil from her hands with a rag already soaked from years of work. An engine downfield barked awake, coughing once, twice, then roaring into a steady pulse that rolled across the open ground. Neta paused, listening, not with her ears alone, but with memory. She knew the sound of a healthy engine. She also knew the sound of a dangerous one.
The sun climbed, pressing the long, spindly shadow of the biplane’s wing flat against the dirt. A breeze lifted dust into twisting columns, swirling between hangars, scouring over the boots of a few men leaning against the fence. Their laughter carried on the wind, bright with anticipation. They leaned back, pointing towards heaven, eyes fixed on the horizon as if it were a carnival curtain about to part for the next impossible act.
Neta loved this raw stretch of land, though she felt a quiet grief knowing its days were numbered. Yet, she couldn’t have imagined the sheer scale of the transformation. Someday, concrete and terminals would bury Kinner Field, reinventing it as Los Angeles International Airport (KLAX), its horizons choked with metal giants. But here in 1921, it remained a wild proving ground… a place of wind-swept dreams.
For Neta, she had earned her dreams the hard way…
She’d clawed her way into a cockpit while the rest of the world tried to keep her feet on the dirt. When the instructors looked past her, she got her hands greasy, learning the guts of an engine because nobody was handing out lessons.
She flew the exhibitions no one else wanted and test-piloted crates that were one loose bolt away from a funeral. Her students looked at her with sideways grins and folded arms, right up until she pulled back on the stick and left their doubts in the dust.
Every hour in the logbook was a gamble. Every gust of wind was a test. She knew the stakes: one slip-up and the gallery would howl that a woman had no business soaring through the heavens. It had made her hard, and it had made her sharp. She didn’t have time for hope. She put her faith in steel, in the cold logic of a clear sky, and in the kind of people who didn’t wait for a “yes” before they reached for the sun.
The past was a long, oily road of “no,” but Neta had driven it until the engine hummed. She knew the smell of doubt as well as she knew the scent of fuel. It was a weight she carried every time she strapped in.
But then the air changed. The memories of the struggle didn’t fade; they snapped into focus, sharpening her gaze for the present.
That’s when she saw them.
A young woman and an older man cut across the field, their boots kicking up the dry, impatient dirt. They weren’t the usual weekend gawkers who hovered at the fence line with their mouths open. There was no hesitation in their stride, no pointing fingers. They walked with the quiet, dangerous confidence of people who had already mapped out their destiny.
Neta felt the world go quiet. Her focus narrowed, her senses tightening with the electric hum of a preflight check. She didn’t know who they were yet, but she knew that walk. It was the stride of someone who didn’t ask for permission.
She studied the young woman closely. Calm shoulders. Measured steps. Eyes fixed not on the pilots, but on the airplanes themselves. No flutter of nerves. No need to impress. Just focus. Neta felt a quiet jolt of recognition. She liked her on sight.
When they reached her, Neta folded her oil rag and waited.
The man stopped a few paces back, but the young woman kept coming until she was toe-to-toe with the prop. She didn’t look at Neta first; she looked at the machine, her eyes tracing the airframe with a hunger that Neta recognized like a reflection in a dark window.
“Neta Snook?” the man asked, his voice carrying the gravel of a hundred dusty runways.
Neta didn’t move. She kept her wrench tight and her expression tighter. “Depends on who’s asking and what they’re trying to buy.”
The woman finally looked up. She was slight, almost fragile-looking in her leather coat, but her eyes had the same cold clarity Neta had just been conjuring in her mind. There was no “please” in her expression.
“I want to fly,” the woman said. The words didn’t drift; they landed like a challenge. “And I heard you’re the only one around here who won’t tell me I can’t.”
Neta wiped the oil from her palms onto a rag, slow and deliberate. She looked at the woman and saw the same restlessness that had kept her own heart beating through every crash and every “no.”
“Flying’s expensive,” Neta said, her voice dropping to a low, noir drawl. “And the sky doesn’t care about your feelings. It’s just waiting for you to make a mistake.”
“I’m not looking for a friend,” the woman replied, stepping closer into the shadow of the wing. “I’m looking for an instructor.”
The roar of distant radial engines softened to a ghost-hum, and the late morning warmth seemed to freeze the dust mid-air. Everything… the noise, the grit, the chatter of the hangars, retreated until there was nothing left but the two of them standing in the shadow of the biplane.
Neta felt the weight of the woman’s words settle in her chest like a lead sinker. In this business, she’d heard every variation of the pitch. She’d seen the thrill-seekers wrapped in false bravado and the bored socialites dripping with fleeting curiosity. Most people treated the sky like a carnival ride.
But this young woman wasn’t looking for a ride.
There was no tremor of uncertainty in her stance, no wide-eyed wonder. This was pure, stripped-down intention. It was a hunger so sharp it could have sliced through the canvas on the wings.
Neta leaned back against the fuselage, the warmth of the fabric pressing through her shirt. She fished a cigarette from her pocket but didn’t light it. She just watched the woman, who stood there like she was already claiming the air as her own.
“Hunger is a dangerous thing” Neta said, her voice a low rasp. “It makes you take risks. It makes you forget that the ground is hard and the gravity is unforgiving.”
The woman didn’t flinch. She didn’t even blink. “I’ve been on the ground my whole life. I know exactly how hard it is.”
Neta looked at the woman’s hands—steady, expectant. She knew that look. It was the look of someone who had realized the world was a cage and had finally found the key.
Neta named her price, throwing the number out like a barrier.
The woman didn’t reach for a purse. She just nodded, a small, grim smile ghosting her lips. “When do we start?”
Neta glanced up at the sun, then back at the woman who was about to change everything. “Check the oil. Let’s see if you’re afraid of getting your sleeves dirty.”
Neta didn’t know she was instructoring a ghost-to-be. She didn’t know that the young woman standing in the California dust was already halfway to the clouds of legend.
It was only later, after the headlines had yellowed and the records were etched in stone, that the world would find a name for that hunger. They’d name streets after her, build monuments to her disappearance, and wonder what kind of fire it took to fly into the blue and never come back.
But that morning on Kinner Field, there was no brass band. There was just a woman who walked onto the dirt and asked, with a voice as sharp as a switchblade, for the sky. And Neta Snook, the woman who had never been given a thing in her life, simply handed her the hope of flight. A hope that would soar into history… a name we all know as… Amelia Earhart.
Crock’s Thoughts 
