This Trophy Chest Belonged to Amelia Earhart

A husband's holiday present for his famous wife is now a museum artifact.

In the summer of 1935, George Putnam already knew what he wanted to give his wife for Christmas. Having noticed the ever-increasing number of trophies, plaques, and memorabilia that Amelia Earhart was stashing around the house, he commissioned a storage chest from a premier woodworking company, Albert Wood & Five Sons of Port Washington, New York.

Putnam instructed Wood to include details of Earhart’s three major flights, a bas relief reflecting the design of her Lockheed Vega monoplanes, and the notion of airplane wheels for the feet of the chest. Wood incorporated Putnam’s ideas into his design of hand-carved globe motifs on the front and sides of the Burma teakwood chest to memorialize Earhart’s three important milestones: her 1932 North Atlantic, 1935 Pacific, and 1935 Mexican solo flights. Wood offered his artistic interpretation in writing to Putnam: “Besides Amelia Earhart’s heroic spirit of flight, the design seeks to symbolize in line and contour the Lockheed Vega plane in which these flights were made. The wing spread on the front panel is in true scale and proportion and modeled direct from the working drawings from which the plane itself was made. The carving on the front commemorates the North Atlantic flight. On the circular border is inscribed the official distance, date, and flying time.”

After Earhart’s disappearance on July 2, 1937— during her round-the-world flight attempt—her mother and sister safeguarded the chest, followed by her niece, Amy Morrissey Kleppner, who donated it to the National Air and Space Museum in 2003. 

Dorothy Cochrane is a curator for the National Air and Space Museum’s aeronautics department.

This article, originally titled “The Christmas Gift,” is from the Winter 2025 issue of Air & Space Quarterly, the National Air and Space Museum's signature magazine that explores topics in aviation and space, from the earliest moments of flight to today. Explore the full issue.

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