Most of his material came from people who have already died, "and then, by Jove, we find a guy living in Utah who was actually there. And he's a really great guy. He's a gem. His account is a memoir he wrote independently. I'm so happy to see it published."

Beckham said, "They tell me that I'm the last guy alive who participated in the search."

Two ROTC cadets who were on the ship are still around, Westfall says. They both went on to become doctors, and he has talked with both of them, but they didn't really participate in the search. "Dick was flying out over the islands. He was one of the ones up there looking, one of the ones who risked his life. He was only 22 at the time, really just a boy."

At the time Beckham didn't know exactly what he was getting into.

He'd heard a little about Earhart, "but I didn't really know who she was. You don't get all the news in the Navy. You're too busy with everything else."

By 1937, he had been in the Navy for three years. He was working in the radio room when the first dispatches on Earhart's disappearance came in. "We got word that she was supposed to have landed at 8 a.m. and didn't. Then they started sending messages to the chief of operations in Washington, D.C. When the messages came back, I knew we were going out."

The next morning, July 3, he woke up to find the ship at Pearl Harbor, taking on fuel and food. And then it headed out to sea toward Howland Island, a tiny spit of land that had been in U.S. possession since 1858 but was not used for much. It had the distinction of being the closest land to the international date line and the equator.

The Coast Guard cutter Itasca was already at the island. It had been there to meet and refuel Earhart's plane. It was already patrolling the open waters surrounding the island. The mission of the Colorado would be to send reconnaissance flights over the other scattered islands in the area.

The Colorado arrived in the area on July 7, and the chief radio officer asked for volunteers among the radio crew to go up as "radio ops and observers." Beckham volunteered. "I guess some of the fellows in the radio division didn't grab the moment. I had never flown before, but I had always wanted to. This was my chance."

The planes they would fly were O3U-3 Corsairs, with "two open cockpits and fabric-covered wings and tail assembly." These biplanes didn't take off; they were catapulted into the air.

"That first catapult shot, that was something else," Beckham said. "In hardly more than a second, you're at 65 feet high and going 65 miles per hour. You're supposed to go straight out, but I'd watched and knew they sometimes dipped, so I had my head ducked down. You have to align your head and shoulders so there's no whiplash. I didn't have a headrest, only handles to hold on to."