so as humans we spend a lot of time developing our identities we spend a lot
of time adding on to our identities whether it's moving to a certain
neighborhood whether its buying a certain car buying a new pair of fancy
leather pants for your TEDx talk that you're about to do we spend a lot of
time adding on to develop who we are and what we mean to ourselves well I'm here
to tell you today that the one part of your identity that with the exception of
marriage you can't really add on to is your name now none of us got to choose
our own names with the very few exceptions my name is Amelia Earhart we
have slides that go along with this will get to these in just a minute my name
being Amelia Earhart is something that I have had to deal with for 30 years now
every single day of my life I asked what's the story behind your name are
you a pilot are you related to Amelia Earhart the moral of this story is that
the girl that you see here in this picture knows exactly who she is but
it's only because her name was taken away from her six weeks ago at the most
pivotal part of her life when she told in front of the entire world on the
today show that she was going to fly around that very same world in a Pilatus
pc-12 will get more to the flight in just a minute but first let's go back to
a childhood now I use these clickers every day on 9news and I can't seem to
figure this one out so when I was born in nineteen eighty-three I was born to
parents Debbie and Glenn two very humble simple individuals just met fell in love
in Southern California had a child and when they had me they had the last name
Earhart on my dad's side of the family your heart was the story the family name
was that somehow very distantly we were related to Amelia Earhart so my mom got
this crazy idea there's my mom and I right there laying on the floor of my
grandma's house she said we want to give her a name that no one will ever forget
let's name her Amelia Earhart it's great legacy you
should have a great female role model it never necessarily meant anything to my
parents other than let's give her a strong name that everyone will have a
reason to ask her about and it turned out to be one of those things that I
think I'm down the line my parents made regret it a little bit but it's only
been in the last few months that that's come to happen this picture of my dad
and I coming up here my dad real simple guy just really hard worker he's
actually a Buddhist cowboy now of all things he lives in pagosa springs and we
talk about my name a lot my mom and I do as well it's kind of coming from a
different place recently now in july june and july of this year i went to
oshkosh wisconsin for of course yays AirVenture event big huge airplane
celebration i'm sure you guys know all about it about 16,000 airplanes fly in
so I figured it was a great place to announce to the world that after being a
pilot for about 10 years it was time to do something bigger I wanted to fly
around the world in honor of Amelia Earhart because for 30 years we had been
told through my family's history that somehow we were related to Amelia now on
through the years childhood that little girl who grew up in the middle of the
desert just kind of playing in grandma's yard building forts real real simple
life you don't look at that little girl and think Amelia Earhart she's going to
do anything special with that name but that's a big burden to put on a child
when you don't get to choose your name you're forced to identify it in the best
way that you know how so for the first 18 years of my life I kind of avoided it
I went by the name Amy because it was short for Amelia according to my mom
when she was a little girl she would name all of her baby dolls Amy simple
enough she married into the family Earhardt amy was an art nice short name
for Amelia so they went for it and for those 18 years I really struggled with
figuring out who I wanted to be in terms of that name and it took until I was
about 17 and I joined the debate team in high school in tonganoxie Kansas after
moving all over the country with my parents after they got a divorce started
to figure out that it was kind of cool to have this name
it was a really nice way to start conversations and it was doing exactly
what my parents thought that it would do it would spark questions it would invite
me into conversations and unique situations that I would probably never
be invited to otherwise so when it came to my name and I joined the debate team
I had an opportunity to stand up in front of adults and total strangers and
say my name is Amelia Earhart and people started saying to me are you a pilot are
you related and to the first question the answer was no but someday I wanted
to be to the second question are you related the answer was always simply
somehow we are distantly related to Amelia Earhart that's what my grandma
told me that's what her grandma told her when it came to being about 18 19 20
years old and I started going to school going to college and went to KO and then
CSCO that eventually cu-boulder I got asked the question in so many direct in
so many uncomfortable ways that I decided it was time to hire a
genealogist and find out exactly how we were related to Amelia Earhart it was
simple enough so I got online googled genealogist in boulder and I found a
woman who said that she could track my family history and when she did that she
basically went back a couple generations she went back to the 1700s and said well
for the amount of money that you were able to pay me I can tell you that yes
you are distantly related to Amelia we can trace it back to the 1700s and
essentially you're a distant relative of her somehow distant cousins but if you
want to find exactly how you're related to Amelia it's going to cost a lot more
we're going to have to go into those international records and as a college
student who i'm sure a lot of you in this room can relate to paying for your
own college education really really tough and so to pay for a genealogist
when it was the option of buying things like fancy leather pants or paying for a
genealogist somehow the choice was a little bit easier to go with the simpler
option so I opted just to go with the distant common ancestry traced back to
the 1700s in my relation to Amelia and that was fine I started flying I started
taking flight lessons in Boulder and it was a magical thing I mean for those of
you who have flown in small airplanes before you get what that's like the
first time you lift off the ground you understand exactly where you're supposed
to be and for me that was the cockpit of a Cessna 172 so that's what I started my
flight training the N and it was awesome it was just
like what Jeff said you know you get to have these conversations with people
when they say well what do you do when you say oh I'm a pilot and people go oh
my gosh you're a pilot and they get kind of nervous and excited and you get a
confidence boost out of it and then people would say well what's your name
my name is Amelia Earhart and that would make people light up even more so on go
the years I end up getting a job at eight-fifty KOA doing traffic reporting
and news in the middle of the night it was the least glamorous thing I could
possibly ever do I would drive from Boulder all the way to the tech center
probably a two three in the morning get there for the morning show i would do
radio and then i would drive back to boulder and go to school all day but
then traffic reverses in the afternoon so then i would drive from boulder to
the tech center and do the same thing in the afternoon and this happened five
days a week it was a terrible commute but it was so much fun to have a real
job i had a big girl job in college and all my friends thought that was
fantastic because i was working in a helicopter and my name was Amelia
Earhart and I was somehow distantly related so it was all this perfect storm
of nice happy girl going through life going through college I wanted to be a
teacher at the time well everything progressed really nicely kept working
got a job at Channel nine and everything really worked out nicely there too i was
in the helicopter and i was the girl who had the beautiful sunset sunrise behind
her head and the ponytail flipping around and i was just happy to be up
there and it was really a nice place for me to be this is what i get to do people
doll me up and i stand in front of a taped up piece of yellow card board they
make fancy commercials where I say things like what's your drive going to
be like if you listen to 9news you've heard that a million times that I'm
sorry I think they're going to rotate it out soon but the point is the job the
school career the friendships the flight lessons everything was going so well so
on go the years and I decide to make a couple flights now I made a flight
across the US in a cirrus sr22 to recreate Amelia Earhart's
transcontinental flight was from Oakland California to Miami who went through
burbank we went through austin we went through louisiana and then we
eventually made it down to Miami and that was Amelia Earhart's last flight
across the u.s. it was the first portion of her mission on her uncompleted flight
around the world in 1937 so I thought that'd be a great way to wrap up my
instrument training release build the hours there so he jumped in the plane
that was donated to me I had sponsors paying for the fuel and it was a great
mission and it got a lot of attention we actually made our way to the cover I say
meet we myself and my instructor at the time who came with me we got onto the
cover of plane and pilot magazine which was pretty cool until the hate mail
started rolling in you would think that people would cheer you on doing trying
to do a good thing just going out and having your own adventure but people
weren't too happy about that because they kept questioning how exactly are
you related to Amelia Earhart we understand that that's your name and
that's fine but what's going on here who are you and are you telling us the truth
so I kind of ignored those things because that was really difficult at the
time did I want to pay thousands of dollars to a genealogist to research my
family history when to me it was simply the truth I had I already hired the
first one and my family had told me for years that that's just who I was and
when it comes to our identities like I said we can build things on we can add
on by neighborhoods and cars and homes and relationships that we build but when
it comes to our names it's not in our nature to question what that means and
who we are so after that flight was complete I decided I was going to make
some bigger goals being a television news person is a really convenient job
to have but my true passion of course is aviation because that's what I love to
do I want to spend time here I mean we've all been in situations like this
this was taken on that flight when I flew across the u.s. that's the wing of
the Cirrus as we flew over New Mexico and it was sunrise and it was
spectacular and that is what lights me up and when I'm up in the plane doesn't
matter that my name is Amelia Earhart could be absolutely anything because
it's that sort of emotion and passion they're really light to up and gets you
going in the morning watch it makes you want to do things like that so when I
announced my intention after the first flight across the u.s. to fly all the
way around the world of course people got very upset and he said okay once
again who are you what is this connection to Amelia Earhart
got to know more well it all kind of came to a head about 12 weeks ago when
in my mind and I will always remember this essentially my name which has kind
of taken away from me at that point what happened was we went to Oshkosh we sorry
this gets to me here because I'm still trying to work through all this we came
out with Pilatus who's a big sponsor of the world flight wings over the rockies
air and space museum is also a huge supporter I've got a lot of individuals
in my life who have come out to support and also a couple other companies as
well and we went to Oshkosh together and we had a big press conference set up and
got on stage and we said I'm Amelia Earhart started a foundation we put
young women through flight school so that they can have the same passion that
I do and find out who they are through flight we're going to fly around the
world you're going to do it in june twenty fourteen twenty four thousand
nautical miles 14 stops endless blue skies and beautiful oceans to cross and
that would be the path my intentions were completely pure well when you get
out there on a national level and then you're asked to go on the Today Show and
People magazine writing articles about you you think that that would be fun and
it's really not what I'm learning is that when you put yourself out there
with your big goals you better be ready to be criticized especially when you've
got a name is important as Amelia Earhart because she changed the course
of history and to a lot of us in this room that have aviation ties she changed
the course of what it means to fly especially as a young woman pilot so as
the news came out you got attacked on multiple levels people said how are you
related we've got to find out more so I said okay enough is enough this is
coming up to just turning into too much of a terrible situation we hired a
genealogist we went to ancestry.com and said can you help us figure out exactly
this connection between Amelia Earhart and myself and they said sure so they
got to work on it and a week went by and I thought okay we're just going to put
this to rest the first genealogist will be proved right my family will be proved
right and so I finally got the call after i would call ancestry.com and they
would say still working on it we're still working
on it call him back and say hey Kevin what have you got for me and the calls
got slower and slower and Kevin stopped returning my phone calls and finally he
answered one day and I said hey Kevin it's Amelia I have a really optimistic
person any of you who know me know that I am most of the time happy girl and I
could tell that there was something in Kevin's voice that day that was
different because Kevin had been really hopeful too he wanted to be able to tell
me yes this is how you're related to amelia earhart and the phone call the
site that ended that date basically he said I'm sorry Amelia said the first
genealogist was wrong so when you think you're somebody for 30 years and your
whole identity of traffic reporter and pilot and strong young woman who loves
flight because her name was Amelia Earhart when that's taken away from you
that's a part of your identity that you can't really replace by buying something
new moving finding a new relationship partner it when it's your name there's
something different about it and so I remember I got the phone call I was
sitting in my garage in my car and the car was turned off the garage door was
closed and the car was completely dark in there it was a it was a really
strange moment that it all happened and so I hung up the phone call and I'm
sitting there in my posture is like crushed if I wasn't Amelia Earhart
anymore why was I flying around the world why would I do this anymore if my
name wasn't Amelia Earhart and I SAT there for a good hour in my car at my
house just couldn't call my parents knew they would be crushed because that was
their story they named their daughter Amelia Earhart because they thought that
we were connected to her and what I've realized through all of this is that I
am now more connected to Amelia Earhart by having that name
and then identity taken away from me because that was a crutch all these 30
years being amelia earhart meant that I was able to get up in airplanes and do
cool stuff like this but what I realized there were other people out there in the
world who weren't named Amelia Earhart young amazing women they were out there
doing similar things like this young lady destiny this is our first
scholarship recipient for the fly with a million foundation her name is not
Amelia Earhart but she wants to fly airplanes now when everybody found out
that I wasn't related to Amelia Earhart I got the nastiest email sent to me I
was attacked on so many levels people actually said to me that if Amelia
Earhart was alive today she wouldn't even speak to you and I call BS on that
because what I have found out through all of this is that when you realize
exactly where you want to be what you're passionate about who you are in a daily
basis and you wake up and it's the first thing that you think about your name
could be absolutely anything in the world and it could change tomorrow and
as long as you still feel the way that you do when you get up in that airplane
and you know that you want to fly around the world and do it for the right
reasons to help other people get inspired about their own passionate
adventure it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever so to all those
naysayers that have come out I want the next slide to come up here for all those
naysayers who came out and criticized me for taking on that identity of Amelia
Earhart for 30 years sure I'll take it I read all the tweets I read all the
comments I responded to a lot of them that was fun what I realized now is that
when I was younger I used to say that the best gift that my parents ever gave
me was given me the name Amelia Earhart because it was a way for me to create an
identity and now I say that the best gift that I've ever received is actually
having that name taken away from me because I have now found out who I am
and that is Amelia Rose Earhart I'm the same type of woman that she was
I'm passionate I'm adventurous I like to stir things up a little like to cause a
little bit of ruckus and wear leather pants I feel like Amelia would have worn
these pants so next year when I fly around the world starting out in June
June first that's when our weather window opens we are going to fly very
close to Amelia's route because we want to see what it was like to be up in an
airplane just like she did in 1937 to see the night sky filled with all those
stars back in the day she used celestial navigation to know where she was going
and it wasn't a perfect science but now through the technology and the
advancements and the wonderful amazing airplanes that we have to use today
we're going to make it around the world and it's my goal to symbolically
complete Amelia Earhart's flight for her I'm not related and it doesn't matter
one little bit in fact I think it brought me even closer to her because
now I truly understand who I am and for the second Amelia Earhart to fly around
the world under the facade that she was somehow related in the blood
relationship actually mattered to make that flight happen go all the way around
the world it's just not the case because nobody looks at you and hands you a
pilot's license and says oh you're Amelia Earhart here you go they don't do
that you've got to work hard for it you've got to put in the effort you've
got to do all your homework just like gets out you've got to put in all of
that legwork to get there and you've got it do the reps and you've got to do the
sets so that's where I'm at right now I'm working hard we are two hundred and
twenty-six days away from that flight around the world when we lift off in the
Pilatus pc-12 from oakland california 14 stops and i can't wait to go i hope
you'll join me and i hope that you have your own adventure no matter what that
is whether it's leaving the house for the first time in a couple of days or
whether it's flying all the way around the world whatever you're passionate
about keep going for it determine your own identity no matter what anybody else
says thank you you