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Famous last words. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Town Pod. Famous last words.

I'm Jason Horton.

I'm Rebecca Leeb.

And this is Ghost Town.

You're in Florida, and it's the summer of 1937. You're a young teenage girl sitting on the floor in front of the family radio. You're listening to music, of course, while drawing, writing, and jotting down the words to your favorite songs in a notebook.

Sometimes you even listen to the shortwave radio, the long antenna picking up stations all over the world. Today you're daydreaming, doodling, and playing with the shortwave radio absent-mindedly,

searching for something interesting. But one channel gives you

pause. It's staticky, and then you hear a woman's voice. The woman sounds upset,

panicked, speaking in desperate, articulated English. This is Amelia Earhart, the voice says,

and of course, you listen. Today on Ghost Town,

the last words of Amelia Earhart. Amelia May Earhart was born on July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kansas.

From an early age, Amelia and her sister Grace were taught by their mother not to conform to gender norms. They wore bloomers, went sledding, kept bugs and toads, climbed trees, and hunted rats with rifles. At 10, Amelia saw her first airplane at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. She described the biplane as, quote,

a thing of rusty wire and wood and not at all interesting. After many moves following her father's

jobs, or lack thereof, Amelia Earhart graduated from Hyde Park High School in 1916. She kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about

successful women in male-dominated careers, including film and production, law, advertising,

management, and mechanical engineering. But when Earhart visited her sister in Toronto,

she was moved by wounded soldiers returning from World War I. Instead of going to

junior college as planned, Earhart got trained by the Red Cross as a nurse's aide and began working

with the voluntary aid detachment at Spadena Military Hospital, making food for patients and handing out

...