Earhart memorabilia going to auction

SAN FRANCISCO – A Northern California gallery plans to auction goggles it says were worn by famed aviator Amelia Earhart during an early plane crash.

The auction today in Oakland will also feature negatives and photographs of Earhart, who disappeared while trying to circumnavigate the globe.

Clars Auction Gallery, which is running the auction, said 15 of the photographs – the bulk of the lot – include shots of Earhart at a barbershop and making other preparations for the round-the-world flight, as well as the plane taking off on March 17, 1937.

That was one of two attempts Earhart made that year to circumnavigate the globe. Her plane would disappear during the second attempt a few months later. She was declared dead in 1939.

“It’s more like a day-in-the-life concept,” said Marcus Wardell, a furniture and decorative arts specialist with the gallery. “She’s getting up in the morning, packing, going to the barber’s and the plane sort of taking off.”

Those photographs were recently discovered by a California woman whose mother was a student of Earhart’s and received the photographs as a gift from the pilot, Wardell said.

The goggles were brought into the gallery’s free appraisal clinic by Barbara Englehardt, a Contra Costa County resident who got them from a friend about 20 years ago.

Earhart was wearing them during a 1921 plane crash, Wardell said.