By Guy Page

A freshman legislator from Burlington is another Vermont connection with famed female aviator Amelia Earhart.

There are photos of Earhart at the Burlington International Airport, taken onsite about 90 years ago when the public was fascinated with aviation exploration. She was the first female pilot to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean and set many other records.

Bram Kleppner, D/P, is the great-nephew of the female flyer. His mother Amy Kleppner was Earhart’s niece, later became her biographer, and one of the last people to see her before her presumed death in 1937.

As Amy Kleppner’s Dec. 19, 2024 Seven Days obituary states:

“Her advocacy for women’s rights, her adventurous spirit and her athleticism were all traits she shared with — and were perhaps inspired by — her aunt, Amelia Earhart. Amy was almost certainly one of the last people who personally knew Amelia, who disappeared when Amy was just shy of her 6th birthday. Amy became the steward of Amelia’s legacy and worked to ensure that Amelia’s lifelong advocacy on behalf of women’s equality wasn’t overshadowed by her celebrity as a pilot or her dramatic disappearance.

“Amy stayed active until the end: She wrote that book about Amelia’s activism for women’s rights (completed at age 90).”

The famed woman aviator who would disappear two years later over the Pacific Ocean “attracted the excited attention of Vermonters and the Vermont media” in a March, 1935 visit to Vermont.

As reported by Vermont Public Radio in 2013, Earhart had just completed her Hawaii to California flight two months earlier and was floating high on the warm updrafts of public adulation. It wasn’t her first trip to Vermont. She’d landed in White River Junction and St. Albans, and had stopped in Burlington twice the previous year, once to be awarded the Key to the City by the mayor. 

Earhart had at least one other Vermont connection. She had been the matron of honor at the wedding of Norwich University President Porter Adams, an important figure in the early history of U.S. aviation. In March she visited Norwich then delivered her address on the future of the airplane to the Legislature.