Amelia Earhart the aircraft came close. "I did not understand it at the time," she said, "but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by." By 1919 Earhart prepared to enter Smith College but changed her mind and enrolled at Columbia University, in a course in medical studies among other programs. She quit a year later to be with her parents, who had reunited in California. In Long Beach, on December 28, 1920, Earhart and her father visited an airfield where Frank Hawks (who later gained fame as an air racer) gave her a ride that
Amelia Earhart back to the United States (where it was assigned "unlicensed aircraft identification mark" 7083). When the Stultz, Gordon and Earhart flight crew returned to the United States, they were greeted with a ticker-tape parade along the Canyon of Heroes in Manhattan, followed by a reception with President Calvin Coolidge at the White House. Trading on her physical resemblance to Lindbergh, whom the press had dubbed "Lucky Lindy", some newspapers and magazines began referring to Earhart as "Lady Lindy". The United Press was more grandiloquent; to them, Earhart was the reigning "Queen of the Air". Immediately after her return to the