Amelia Earhart
201 W Washington Street
Cuba, MO
The fifth mural chronicles a September 4, 1928 story in the Muskogee Times-Democrat. Amelia Earhart was reported to have left Scott Field in Belleville, Illinois in her 1927 Avro Avian plane with a destination of Kansas City or Muskogee in route to Los Angeles. She was later forced down outside of Cuba in an unscheduled stop. No great damage was reported, and she continued her journey. Thus, the destiny of the first woman to fly across the Atlantic and the small town of Cuba, Missouri crossed.
After a long career in aviation, in 1928, Earhart reached the national spotlight when she became the first woman passenger, representing the United States, to cross the Atlantic Ocean by airplane. She continued to set aviation records, including becoming the first woman, and the second person after Charles Lindbergh, to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932.
In 1937, Amelia Earhart and her plane disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in her attempt to travel around the world by airplane.
Amelia Earhart was an aviation pioneer, writer, speaker, and a role model for women. She founded the “Ninety-Nines,” a women’s pilot organization in 1929.
For more information on Amelia Earhart visit the web site www.ameliaearhart.com/.
Local artist Shelly Smith Steiger, who worked on the first three murals, created this mural with the assistance of Julie Balogh Brand. Shelly Steiger is a 1986 graduate of Crawford County R-II School in Cuba. She attended Mineral Area College with an emphasis in commercial art. She also attended the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville, Arkansas, where she majored in Art Education. Shelly specialized in residential art projects in Arkansas and Missouri. Besides working on Cuba’s murals, she visited Canada for a training session on painting outdoor murals. Shelly lives in Cuba with her husband and two daughters.
Julie Balogh Brand has attended many art workshops with nationally known artists and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. She owns and operates a fine arts ceramic studio in Cuba.
[…] onto like when Bette Davis and her husband ate turkey dinners at the local Southern Hotel, or when Ameilia Earhart was forced to land in Cuba in an unscheduled stop, or their biggest one: when Harry S. Truman […]