Amelia Earhart's helmet that sold for $825,000 spent decades in Minnesota closets

For much of the last century, Amelia Earhart's lambskin leather aviator helmet was wrapped in a plastic bag and tucked amid tissue in a shirt box in Austin, Minn.

Austin is where Elinor "Ellie" Twiggs settled in 1949, raising four kids with her husband, Dr. Leo Twiggs, who ran a general practice after a stint in the Army Medical Corps during World War II. They're buried at Fort Snelling National Cemetery.

Ellie often trimmed a few years off her age because she disliked being a year older than Leo. But it turns out she wasn't fibbing about that aviator cap in the shirt box — a cherished souvenir she wound up with as a teenager when she joined a crowd greeting Earhart at Cleveland Municipal Airport in 1929.

After decades in closets in Austin and Edina — with stops in Ohio, Kentucky and California along the way — the historic flight cap soared into the online-auction stratosphere last month when an anonymous bidder paid $825,000 for it. Nearly $688,000 of that windfall will flow to Ellie's descendants.

"It's been a wild ride, and we're still in shock about it," said Anthony Twiggs, 67, a retired commercial photographer from Edina.

Extended bidding pushed the online auction to 2 a.m. on Feb. 27. As the leading bids climbed on Twiggs' computer screen from $100,000 to $250,000 and then over a half-million dollars, Twiggs said his 26-year-old son, Elliot, kept yelling, '"Refresh it, refresh it!" from his computer in another room.

Twiggs doesn't know the winning bidder's identity but was told it's a high-profile California entertainment celebrity. "Oprah Winfrey?" he speculated. He dismissed others who guessed it went to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who took Earhart's goggles into space on his Blue Origin flight last summer.

The story of Earhart's long-lost helmet first appeared in a New York Times story last month by filmmaker and writer Laurie Gwen Shapiro, who's working on a book about Earhart. She said Heritage Auctions honchos predicted the winning bid would top $80,000. It exceeded that tenfold.

"The story my mother told was always consistent," Twiggs said. "The details were never different."

The daughter of a Cleveland doctor, Ellie Brookhart had just turned 13 when she crossed paths with Earhart on the tarmac near her home. Earhart had gained fame as the first trans-Atlantic female passenger, when she was nicknamed "Lady Lindy" for crossing the ocean in a plane flown by two men a year after Minnesotan Charles Lindbergh made his historic solo flight to Paris in 1927.

Earhart finished third among 20 women who had taken off in the Women's National Air Derby, racing from Santa Monica, Calif. to the finish line in Cleveland. Ellie and her friends were in the mob that swarmed Earhart's single-engine Lockheed Vega after a rough landing.

A boy who had a crush on Ellie offered her Earhart's helmet, which he said he found on the ground at the airport.

"My mother never mentioned the boy's name," Anthony Twiggs said. "He didn't impress her, but the helmet sure did."

Twiggs admitted he had been skeptical about his mother's story.

"In the beginning, I didn't think it was real," he said. "It was always in the back of my mind, a curiosity, something barely on my radar."

When Ellie died in Minneapolis in 2000 at age 84, the helmet went to her daughter, Susan Knowles. After Knowles died in California five years ago, the helmet wound up with Twiggs in Edina.

He shared the artifact's story with producers of the PBS show "Antiques Roadshow," who pooh-poohed its provenance. Cute story, they said, but we're not interested. Two auctioneers of historic items also brushed him off, saying that proving it belonged to Earhart would be impossible because such helmets were mass produced.

Aggravated, Twiggs turned to his own area of expertise — high-end, high-resolution photography. He found archival photos of Earhart during the 1928 Atlantic crossing and the race to Cleveland. Using a new process called photo matching, he zoomed in on three distinct striations or creases that appeared on the helmet Earhart wore in the photos and the one in his mother's box.

After spending $2,000 for a second opinion from an industry leading photo matching firm in Seattle, Resolution Photomatching, "We were 100 percent sure it was authentic," Twiggs said. "There was no way to fake it."

Earhart disappeared in 1937 while flying over the Pacific Ocean. But the helmet she had lost in Cleveland has found a new home after decades in Ellie's shirt box.

"You have to be dogged about these things," said Twiggs, who will divvy up the auction loot among his two brothers, both retired doctors in New Mexico and Wisconsin, and Knowles' children.

"Even if you think the artifact you've inherited isn't genuine," he said, "find out, because it just might be your retirement fund."

Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota's history appear each Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.