Beckham made three flights this way, flying over islands in the Phoenix group. He saw nothing. "We didn't see any signs of wreckage. There were some shacks on some of the islands that had been built for watching solar eclipses, but no one was there now. We made enough noise that if anyone had been in them, they'd have come out."

The flights took off at daybreak. "In the evenings I was in the radio room transmitting press reports to a commercial radio station in Honolulu. In those days all our communication was done by Morse code."

Eventually, other ships joined the search, and the Colorado's job was to provide fuel for them. "They'd come up alongside and throw big hoses over," Beckham said. "We refueled two or three destroyers before we left."

The intensive search lasted for 16 days; nothing was ever found.

Beckham stayed in the Navy for several more months. "They called me in two weeks before my discharge and wanted me to ship over, but I had other plans."

He went to engineering school in Washington, D.C., then returned to the Northwest, where he had grown up. He eventually went to work for the Civil Aeronautics Administration, which later became the Federal Aviation Administration. He managed an FAA regional office in Montana during World War II.

He worked for the FAA until 1964. At one time he served in Guam, so he did get back to the South Pacific. He also learned to fly and had half-ownership in a plane.

Beckham went back to school and became a high school teacher for a year but decided he'd rather work in electronics, which he did until he retired and moved to Utah.

Since then he's also "read some on Amelia Earhart" and has come to have mixed feelings about her. She did some pretty amazing things, he said, "but she seemed to be interested in promoting herself. Some people think she wasn't that good of a pilot. And she was not interested in radio at all. If she had gone to radio school, she could have learned enough to save her life."

He had talked to some of the radiomen on the Itasca, he said, and learned that "she didn't seem to understand radio at all. She would hold the key down for three or four seconds, is all, but it needed more than that." That may be why some of her radio messages seemed to be garbled, he said.

He learned that she had had a life raft in her plane but left it in Australia. "Even in New Guinea, she left personal belongings behind. She was just going by weight."

But another problem, he said, was that "Howland was not where it was shown on the chart. The Brits had gone through a hundred years ago and located things as best they could. Some had been repositioned; some had not. Howland was about 5 1/2 miles from where it said." It hadn't mattered a lot until then.

A lot of things could have been different. History is like that.

Beckham looks back at the whole experience with no regrets. "We did our best," he said. But one image does stick in his mind. "The Itasca had come aside us, and it sent over some 55-gallon cans of aviation fuel. They had had them there to refuel her plane. I remember seeing those blue cans sitting on the deck, and a sad feeling came over me. I knew we had given up."

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"The Hunt for Amelia Earhart," by Doug Westfall, is published by The Paragon Agency. It is available as an e-book. For more information, go to www.SpecialBooks.com.

E-mail: carma@desnews.com