AMELIA BECKONS STILL

That mural, dedicated June 23 on the wall of a coffee shop, is the newest entry in Earhart’s history with Greater Lafayette. It’s meant to be the launching point for the Greater Lafayette Amelia Earhart Festival, an annual celebration the mural’s backers hope to hold every year going forward.

But the festival itself isn’t funded yet. Its organizers are trying to raise $50,000 by August 13 through a crowdfunding campaign that would unlock matching funds from CreatINg Places, a placemaking program run by the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority.

Angie Klink, a writer, historian and member of the General de Lafayette chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), helped lead the effort behind the mural and was among those who stood at the dedication.

“The mural of Amelia Earhart honors the history of Earhart’s bond with the Greater Lafayette community and inspires girls and women to know that they can be anything they desire,” Klink said.

Her interest in Earhart predates the mural by more than a decade. Klink’s 2014 book, “The Deans’ Bible: Five Purdue Women and Their Quest for Equality,” devotes a chapter to Earhart’s years at Purdue, drawn from two years spent in the university’s archives. What Klink came to understand, the more she looked into it, was how local, and how financial, Purdue’s stake in Earhart’s story actually was.

“Many people around the country, and the world, have no idea of Earhart’s deep connection to Purdue University and our twin cities,” Klink said.

Earhart was also, Klink said, attracted to Purdue because it was the only university in the nation with its own airport, one that would, in 2025 name its terminal after her. That faculty appointment became the financial and logistical foundation for the most ambitious flight of her life.

The mural that now memorializes that flight is not the city’s first. In the fall of 2025, the Detroit muralist Zach Curtis painted a wall near 7th and Main Streets honoring Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, three men who had each passed through Greater Lafayette’s history. It was commissioned for the national America250 anniversary, the official nationwide commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

After it went up, Diana Vice, the DAR’s historian, began pursuing a second Curtis mural, this one of Earhart, eventually painted on the wall of Wanderlust Coffee at 835 Main Street.

The DAR secured a $5,000 grant from Visit Lafayette–West Lafayette, about a third of what the new piece would cost.

Klink looked at that plan and saw something underbuilt. A second mural, on its own, would be striking, yes, but what she pushed for was something that would outlast the paint: an annual festival.

She brought the idea to Vice and to a third DAR member, Audrey Johnson, and the three of them joined Dennis Carson, the City of Lafayette’s economic director, in taking the proposal to the Indiana Arts Commission.

They were invited to a Creative Convergence Workshop, run jointly by the Indiana Communities Institute and the Arts Commission, built specifically to pair local arts ideas with the state money that could fund them. They made their case, and it worked. Within a single proposal cycle, the Earhart mural went from a third-funded DAR idea to a project backed by four institutions— the DAR, the Arts Commission, Visit Lafayette–West Lafayette and the City of Lafayette.

Eighty-nine years earlier, the money behind Earhart’s final flight had come together just as fast, pledged over the course of a dinner party. In the autumn of 1935, at a gathering at then Purdue President Edward Elliott’s home, Earhart talked about her hopes for women in aviation and her interest in studying how long-distance flying wears on a pilot. Before the evening was over, Purdue trustee David Ross had offered to help pay for a plane that could make the study possible. Elliott also agreed to help.

In April of 1936, Purdue established the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research, and the university’s research foundation contributed roughly $40,000 toward an airplane built specifically for long-distance flight, what Earhart called her “flying laboratory.” Ross gave money. So did J.K. Lilly, Vincent Bendix and a handful of companies, including Goodyear and Goodrich.

Earhart intended to give the plane back to Purdue once she returned, so the university could use it for its own aeronautical research. Purdue funded a woman flying toward the edge of what was known, with no certainty she’d come back to deliver on it.

Earhart turned 39 on July 24, 1936, the day she got the plane from Lockheed’s plant in Burbank, California. The twin-engine Electra 10E was purchased for roughly $80,000. It wasn’t built for long-distance flying so much as rebuilt for it. The cabin that would normally have seated 10 passengers was stripped out and refitted with 10 fuel tanks holding 1,151 gallons of gasoline, nearly double the standard plane’s capacity. The passenger windows were sealed over with sheet metal.

She knew exactly what she was asking it to do.

“Please know I am quite aware of the hazards,” Earhart wrote in a letter left for her husband, George Putnam, to be opened only if she didn’t come back. “I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.”

On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart flew into the Pacific sky and did not fly back out of it. To this day, no one has been able to say where she went.

The record of what happened that morning survives in the radio log of the United States Coast Guard cutter Itasca — the ship standing by to guide her in — now held at the National Archives in Washington D.C.

At 7:42 a.m. local time, Earhart’s voice came through: “We must be on you, but cannot see you — but gas is running low. Have been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet.”

An hour later came her last recorded transmission: “We are on the line 157 337 — we will repeat this message — we will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles.” Nothing more was heard from her plane.

The United States government responded with the largest and most expansive search effort of its era: nine ships, 4,000 crew members, 66 aircraft, 16 days, more than $88 million in today’s dollars spent. According to the Smithsonian, the search covered an area of the Pacific roughly the size of Texas. It found nothing.

Back in West Lafayette, Elliott sent a telegram to her husband that the university still keeps on record.

“George, she would not want us to grieve or weep; she would have been a heroine in any age,” he said.

That sense of obligation didn’t end with a telegram. When the university announced, in late 2025, a renewed effort to find Earhart’s missing plane in a lagoon off Nikumaroro Island in the Pacific, university officials framed it explicitly as an act of honoring her. Nearly 90 years after Earhart was recruited to Purdue and helped prepare an aircraft for her flight around the world, a team of experts was trying again to locate that plane, because the university’s spirit of exploration was still alive. Purdue Research Foundation backed the new search with a $500,000 line of credit. The expedition is ongoing.

Greater Lafayette’s mural and festival are a smaller, more local version of a similar gesture.

The mural runs the full height of the building. Earhart strides forward at its center, chin lifted, dressed for flight, a silver Lockheed Electra breaking through a wash of orange and blue clouds behind her. Her name is painted in tall script across the upper wall.

Klink has noticed what happens to the wall at a particular time of day: the sun catches Earhart’s face during the golden hour, and Klink sees a woman fulfilling her longing.

“She stirs us to do the same,” Klink said.

Earhart’s legacy, in the end, is one of courage.

"Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace,” Earhart once wrote. “The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things; knows not the livid loneliness of fear."

She was a woman who named the risk and went anyway at a time when women were routinely told that wanting too much was its own kind of hazard.

But the deeper pull of her story, one reason it still gets a mural and an airport and a city’s attention nine decades later, may have more to do with something most people recognize from their own lives.

We will always wonder about the things that vanish. The personal ones like a class ring or a childhood, or a person who isn’t there to ask about it anymore.

And the larger ones, like a woman and a plane that disappeared over the Pacific Ocean nearly a century ago. What’s left, in both cases, is a memory and the question of what, exactly, memory is supposed to do with something it can’t finish.