Earhart photos, goggles to be auctioned

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 18 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."

The 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. They were expected to fetch between $600 and $800 each.

The goggles - 1920s Luxor aviator goggles that have a cracked left lens - 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.

Englehardt said her friend bought them at an antique gun show although she did not know for how much. They were estimated to fetch between $20,000 and $40,000.

"I had no clue how valuable they were," Englehardt said in an interview Saturday. "They were just valuable to me."

Earhart gave the goggles to her flying instructor, Neta Snook Southern, who told Englehardt that she gave them to a friend, according to Englehardt.

Englehardt, who just turned 72, said she wanted to ensure the goggles weren't lost or discarded if something happened to her.

"Anybody that's going to pay that much money for the goggles, they really want them and will take care of them," she said.