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November 2009

 

Search party ends work to find Amelia Earhart

 

 

 

Frank Cotolo

 

I was in Paris recently when I learned that the search for Amelia Earhart is over. The surprise to me, of course, is that I thought it had ended years ago.

 

After decades of searching for the pilot and her lost plane, a crew of Frenchmen who have been looking since she was officially lost have given up.

 

"We quit," said Brian LuPonte, now in his 80s. "There is nowhere else to look and we are very tired."

 

The search party, according to LuPonte, who I met at a cafe while admiring a waiter's apron, was established in 1938, a year after Ms. Earhart's disappearance. All of the men in the search party are now aged 80 or more. LuPonte said he lost count of his age when he thinks he turned 78, "which is when I began to feel we would never find Earhart's plane and also the year I gave up thickly buttered croissants."

 

In 1937, as Earhart neared her 40th birthday, she was ready for a monumental, final challenge. She wanted to be the first woman to fly around the world, preferably in a plane. A determined Earhart had a twin-engine Lockheed Electra rebuilt for the journey, which she told close friends she was confident she could complete as long as she had enough fuel.

 

"But she didn't make it," said now former searcher Rene Boulier, who I met when LuPonte told me to go talk to a man names Rene Boulier about the Earhart search party. Boulier was one of the search-crew members who insisted the search should be a lifetime career and backed that conviction by going through three marriages.

 

"We looked everywhere," LuPonte, now around 87, though he carries a birth certificate that claims he was born in 1968. "We even went under water and we are very tired of doing that."

 

The search crew did not miss a spot, according to Claude Monet, who swears he is not related to the famous French painter but likes to play Connect-the-Dots. "We put on all of that heavy scuba gear more than once," he said, "and when we did it last year, I lost my breath really quick."

 

The self-appointed head of the party, Francois Clique, said, "We are sorry for the family, friends and whoever else may still care about this woman but really, what can one do? She's gone and we are going fast, so ta ta to her and the search."

 

It was impossible to get all of the living members of the search party together in the same room. The group is strewn across Paris and most of them are not fond of one another.

 

"I told Clique," said Monet, "that we may have found at least a wing of Earhart's plane if he hadn't drawn every search map in dots. And I always got dizzy looking at him when he wore those shirts with dots all over them."

 

Boulier commented about LuPonte by saying, "He always wanted to search near Lisbon. What the hell did that mean? Lisbon was no place to look for Earhart. But everything with LuPonte was Lisbon. He liked the restaurants, the clothing shops. It was Lisbon this and Lisbon that and Earhart probably crashed near Lisbon. Nuts."

 

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