Amelia Earhart in Chicago

GRIM YEAR | 'Never made an effort to fit in' at Hyde Park High School

Amelia Earhart once said she became an aviator not to show that women were equal to men but because she craved attention.

But long before then, in 1915, the year she graduated from Hyde Park High School, Earhart offered no hint of the outspoken American hero she would become. She took part in no clubs at the South Side high school, held no offices, played no sports.

In a yearbook essay in which the graduating seniors are cast as the crew and passengers aboard a ship embarking on life's grand voyage, Earhart is mentioned -- almost in passing -- as one of three waitresses, wearing "dainty caps and aprons to serve the meal."

Earhart -- whose story is told in the movie "Amelia," opening today, with Hilary Swank in the title role -- spent just that one year in Chicago. And, according to several biographers, she was miserable here.

"She acted very unusually," said Susan Butler, an adviser to the new Earhart film and author of East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart. "She never made the slightest effort to fit in with her high school class."

Earhart had more pressing concerns. Her family came to Chicago from St. Paul, Minn., planning to stay with friends in Morgan Park after Earhart's mother separated from her alcoholic husband, Butler said. But the future aviator was horrified by the sorry state of the neighborhood school's chemistry lab, refused to attend and told her mother she wanted to enroll instead at Hyde Park High, then the city's best public school, now called Hyde Park Academy.

Earhart was used to getting her way. And she got it again this time.

But the family was poor. They ended up renting rooms from two miserly spinster sisters, Butler said.

"These women were so stingy that they tried to discourage the Earharts from using the living room," author Beatrice Gormley wrote in her book Amelia Earhart: Young Aviator. "When [the sisters] left for work each day, they would turn the chairs upside-down and drape sheets over the rest of the furniture."

It was to this grim environment that Earhart returned each evening to console her distraught mother.

Did the young Earhart have any fun in Chicago?

"None; she survived," Butler said. "Interestingly, it showed her strength of character."

But 13 years later, Earhart was a celebrity "aviatrix" when she returned to speak at her alma mater.

During a speech to students, she stepped off the stage and onto a piano at the edge of the stage, "much to the horror of the principal and the delight of the audience," Butler said. A year later, the 1929 Hyde Park High yearbook was devoted to aviation and dedicated to the woman the school called "Our Amelia."

IN MOVIES: "Amelia," the new movie about Earhart's life, stars Hilary Swank and Richard Gere (left) as Earhart and husband George Putnam (right).