Star Tribune
Did Amelia Earhart play basketball at St. Paul Central High School?
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Long before she became the first woman to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean, Amelia Earhart was Millie, a 16-year-old junior at St. Paul Central High School.
Minnesota’s capital city was a brief stop for the Earhart family, who spent the winter of 1913-1914 living in a house at 825 Fairmount Avenue.
After reading a biography that mentioned Earhart’s time in St. Paul, a reader contacted Curious Minnesota, the Star Tribune’s reader-powered reporting project, wanting to know whether it’s true that she played basketball at Central.
The answer? Probably.
Amelia Mary Earhart was born in Atchison, Kan., in 1897. She had a tumultuous childhood, shadowed by her father Edwin’s alcoholism, and the family moved frequently as he struggled to hold down jobs. This included stints in Des Moines, St. Paul and then Chicago, where Amelia graduated from high school in June 1915.
During her time at Central, Earhart earned high grades — 80s and 90s in English, physics, math and German — and was “busy and popular,” according to information the school supplied to writer Jack Pitman in the 1950s. The correspondence with Pitman, who was writing a book on Earhart, accounts for the bulk of the Minnesota Historical Society’s records on Earhart’s time at Central.
“I remember hearing Miss Dickson and others say that she was an attractive, friendly, red-haired teen-ager — not at all unlike her friends,” school librarian Laurie Johnson wrote of Earhart. Johnson added that Earhart may have been interested in theater since she had signed the school stage curtain.
The Pitman correspondence doesn’t mention basketball. But author Susan Butler wrote that Earhart made the basketball team at Central in her 1997 biography “East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart.”
“She played basketball, making the basketball team, which she enjoyed, writing her Atchison school chum Virginia Park, ‘You miss much by not having gym,'” wrote Butler, who had no further details to share when contacted by the Star Tribune.
The 1914 Central yearbook offered no additional clues — or even mention of the girls basketball team. The team won the city championship a year after Earhart departed, according to news accounts.
Local media claimed Earhart as a hometown darling after she achieved fame in the late 1920s. “Records at Central High reveal flier was above average as pupil” read a May 1932 headline.
The story described the young Earhart as “a slim, fair girl who was quietly studious back in 1913.”
“She was a good student, and did some good work in my classes,” her former physics instructor, W.M. McClintock, was quoted as saying.
As an adult and international celebrity, Earhart returned to St. Paul multiple times. She visited the St. Paul airport in 1933 and likely returned to her old Fairmount Avenue house in 1935, based on news reports.
In 1937, Earhart embarked from Miami on an attempted flight around the world. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared over the southwestern Pacific Ocean and were never found.
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Two people from Minnetonka were killed late Friday afternoon when their GMC Suburban ran a stop sign and was struck by a GMC Yukon headed north on Hwy. 169 west of Palisade, Minn.
According to the State Patrol, Marlo Dean Baldwin, 92, and Elizabeth Jane Baldwin, 61, were dead at the scene. The driver of the Suburban, a 61-year-old Minnetonka man, was taken to a hospital with life-threatening injuries.
The Suburban, pulling a trailer, was headed east on Grove Street/County Rd. 3 at about 5:15 p.m. when it failed to stop at Hwy. 169 and was struck by the northbound Yukon. The Yukon then struck two westbound vehicles stopped at the intersection.
Four people from Zimmerman, Minn., in the Yukon, including the driver, were taken to HCMC with life-threatening injuries, while two passengers were treated for non-life-threatening injuries. Three girls in the Yukon ranged in age from 11 to 15.
The drivers of the two vehicles struck by the Yukon were not injured, the State Patrol said. Road conditions were dry at the time of the accident, and alcohol was not believed to have been a factor. All involved in the accident were wearing a seat belt except for Elizabeth Baldwin.
Hill City police and the Aitkin County Sheriff’s Office assisted at the scene.
Amid the cacophony and chaos of the pregame preparation before a recent Minnetonka High School football game, an exceptional group of six girls is gathered together among the school’s deep and talented cheerleading and dance teams.
The cheerleaders, a national championship-winning program of 40 girls, dot the track around the football field. As the clock ticks down to kickoff and their night of choreographed routines begins, the six girls, proudly wearing Minnetonka blue T-shirts emblazoned with “Skippers Nation” and shaking shiny pom-poms, swirl around the track, bristling with excited energy.
Their circumstances are no different from any of the other cheerleaders with one notable exception: The girls on this team have special needs.
They’re members of the Minnetonka Sparklers, a squad of cheerleaders made up solely of girls with special needs.
A football game at Minnetonka High School is an elaborate production. The Skippers’ recent homecoming victory over Shakopee brought an announced crowd of 8,145. And that is just paying attendees; it doesn’t include school staffers, coaches, dance team, marching band, concession workers, media members and others going about their business attached to the game.
The Sparklers program, now in its 12th season, was the brainchild of Marcy Adams, a former Minnetonka cheerleader who initiated the program in her senior year of high school. Adams has been coach of the team since its inception, staying on through her tenure as a cheerleader at the University of Minnesota.
She started the program after experiencing the Unified Sports program at Minnetonka. The unified sports movement at high schools brings together student-athletes with cognitive or physical disabilities and athletes with no disabilities to foster relationships, understanding and compassion through athletics. Many Minnesota schools offer unified sports.
“I grew up in a household that valued students with special needs and valued inclusion,” Adams said. “I saw a need to give to those students. At Minnetonka, we have a strong Unified program, and this was a great opportunity to build relationships and offer mentorship opportunities.”
Elite runners are in a league of their own.
To get a sense of how far ahead elite runners are compared to the rest of us, the Minnesota Star Tribune took a look at how their times compare to the average marathon participant.
The 2022 Twin Cities Marathon men’s winner was Japanese competitor Yuya Yoshida, who ran the marathon in a time of 2 hours, 11 minutes and 28 seconds, for an average speed of 11.96 mph. He averaged 5 minutes and 2 seconds per mile.
That’s more than twice the speed of the average competitor across both the men’s and women’s categories, of 5.89 mph, according to race results site Mtec. The average participant finished in 4 hours, 26 minutes and 56 seconds. That comes out to an average time of 10 minutes and 11 seconds per mile.
And taking it to the most extreme, the fastest-ever marathon runner, Kelvin Kiptum of Kenya, finished the 2023 Chicago Marathon in 2 hours and 35 seconds, for an average pace of about 13 mph. Kiptum averaged 4 minutes and 36 seconds per mile.
Here is a graphic showing these differences in average marathon speed.
