Sheldon Ross / The Columbus Dispatch, © Dispatch Printing Company / Via dispatch.com
Just before the coast disappeared into sea and sky, Jerrie Mock switched on her airplane’s long-range radio and found only silence. She tried again and again, leaning her ear to the speaker, and still heard nothing, not even static.
When Mock departed from Columbus that morning, she had heard the tower controller’s voice on a loudspeaker. “Well, I guess that’s the last we’ll hear from her,” he told the crowd gathered to see her off to Bermuda. He was joking, but suddenly his words had the ring of truth.
In an aircraft not much larger than a cargo van, surrounded by gasoline tanks, Mock was completely alone, navigating to a speck of an island with a compass and paper charts. Unable to report her positions or call for help, she could have become another Amelia Earhart: a woman trying to circle the world, lost at sea, never to be found.
Yet Earhart was a full-time aviator with a passenger who served as navigator; Mock was a full-time mother of three flying solo. Earhart had crossed both oceans; Mock, a licensed pilot for only seven years, had never flown farther than the Bahamas. Compared with Earhart’s brand-new, twin-engine airplane, Mock’s single-engine Cessna was 11 years old, with fresh paint covering the cracks and corrosion.
Suddenly — and suspiciously — cut off from communications, Mock considered turning back. She wasn’t flying around the world to become rich or famous. Initially, she hadn’t even realized she could set a record. Her original impetus for making the trip: She was bored.
But in the months before her takeoff, the flight had become much larger than a housewife with a dream. As Mock’s ambitious husband secured her sponsorships and media coverage, another woman — more experienced, with a faster plane — announced that she’d attempt the same flight. As she headed toward the Bermuda Triangle, Mock had to ignore the danger and keep flying, feeling pressured to win a race she had never intended to enter.
Twenty-nine days later, when she finished the flight on April 17, 1964, Mock could have been America’s sweetheart, a household name. On stops from Morocco to Saudi Arabia to Guam, the barely 5-foot brunette had stepped out of her plane in a blue skirt and sweater set and said demurely, as she still does now, “I just wanted to have a little fun in my airplane.”
“She has kind of pretty, all-American looks, and I think when they make the film, Doris Day will play her part,” panelist Orson Bean declared when Mock appeared on the game show To Tell the Truth shortly after the flight.
But the last 50 years have produced no Hollywood movie, no legend, and, until recently, not so much as a statue of Mock in her small hometown. Elsewhere in Ohio — the so-called birthplace of aviation — the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton doesn’t include her. Committee members who vote for inductees, according to one who added Mock to the ballot in 2003, don’t recognize her name.
While history has largely forgotten Jerrie Mock, she never wanted much attention, not even 50 years ago. And not now, at 88, when she’d prefer that her life be remembered for what it was then and not for what it’s become.
Front page of the Columbus Evening Dispatch, January 19, 1964
The Columbus Dispatch
Quincy, Fla., doesn’t seem a place big enough in which to easily disappear — there are only so many places to go, people to see. The town of 8,000 between Tallahassee and the Georgia border used to be known as a haven of Coca-Cola millionaires, early investors who struck it rich. But now that Quincy’s poverty level exceeds 28%, the mansions are deteriorating, and the once-charming courthouse square is lined with empty storefronts.
About six years ago, a man seeking an autograph had to wander from door to door before finally encountering someone who knew a Jerrie Mock. The owner of a bed-and-breakfast recognized the name; she lived a block away. Yet after 13 years in Quincy, he’d never heard about his neighbor being a pilot, let alone her circling the world.
Mock, along with her son, Roger, and his family, left the Midwest for Quincy in 1992. At that point, there wasn’t much reason for her to stay behind; her husband had left her more than a decade earlier. With much of her remaining money, she paid $68,500 for a four-bedroom home that hadn’t, and still hasn’t, been updated in years.
“I’ve been here ever since and not done a darn thing,” she says now, chuckling only slightly.
Roger’s gone now, as is Mock’s other son, while her daughter and only surviving sister remain in Columbus. A grandson recently moved in but spends most of Mock’s waking hours at work. So Mock is usually alone, sunken into a worn green recliner in the living room. Christmas decorations hang over the windows two months too late; dead plants fill the corners. She reads mystery books, watches CNN, and passes the days, claiming not to mind the quiet.
But the flight gets her talking for hours. Though her memory has started to fade, she brightly recalls flying situations, names of ambassadors, the couscous she ate in Casablanca — “anyway, it was lots of fun,” she’ll say in conclusion. She likes to bring up how the world has changed in 50 years, which countries have improved and which have deteriorated.
Highlights of the half-century since her trip, though, she struggles to identify.
“I’ve had good years and bad years, good things and not-so-good things,” she says, following a long pause. “It’s been a different life.”
Jerrie Mock preparing to take off from Port Columbus, March 19, 1964.
Gene Smith / AP Photo
Growing up in rural Newark, Ohio, Geraldine "Jerrie" Fredritz wanted different. “I did not conform to what girls did,” she says, matter-of-factly, as usual. “What the girls did was boring.”
After her family took a short airplane ride at the local airport, 7-year-old Jerrie announced that she wanted to be a pilot. A few years later, as she listened to after-school radio broadcasts about the adventures of her heroine Amelia Earhart, she expanded her goal from flying across Ohio.
“I wanted to see the world,” she says. “I wanted to see the oceans and the jungles and the deserts and the people.” Fascinated by geography books, she imagined riding a camel across the desert.
The only girl playing Cowboys and Indians grew up to be the only female aeronautical engineering major at Ohio State University. The men didn’t bother her after she got the lone perfect score on a chemistry exam. (“If I’d been stupid, they might not have liked me. But as long as I got the 100s, they couldn’t very well protest.”)
But it was 1945, and for a woman, a career in aviation wasn’t realistic. At 20, she dropped out of college to marry Russell Mock, an intelligent, confident young man who caught her attention in high school by arguing with her about algebra and saying he had soloed a plane. Within three years, they had two sons, Roger and Gary, and added Valerie in 1960.
Still, while the Mocks settled in Bexley, a quintessential suburb, life was hardly conventional. Their personalities contrasted — with Russ, the showman extrovert to Jerrie’s introvert — but the couple shared a curiosity about the world and a set of refined tastes: gourmet cooking, classical music, travel.
Russ, an advertising executive, once traveled the country to promote Elsie the cow, the Borden mascot. Jerrie spent time producing a radio program featuring the Metropolitan Opera and a local TV show on which teenagers debated global politics. In their home, the Mocks served three-course dinners by candlelight and hosted foreign college students, who taught them their recipes and inspired Jerrie to read the Qur'an.
Jerrie Mock looks at a globe with her children Roger, Gary and Valerie.
The Columbus Dispatch, © Dispatch Printing Company / Via dispatch.com
Eventually, Jerrie began taking flying lessons while the boys were at school. After she and Russ each earned pilot licenses, they became half owners of a four-seat Cessna 180 and alternated piloting the plane for weekend and business trips.
Yet Jerrie Mock always felt she was supposed to do more. Something special. In 1962, she entered a women’s air race, for which she was insured throughout the Western Hemisphere. To take advantage of the insurance, she and Russ flew to an island off the Canadian coast, where from the hotel radio room she could hear pilots communicating their positions over the Atlantic. “I thought, My goodness, I want to do this,” she says. “It was exciting.”
One night at the dinner table, not long after the trip, Mock complained to her husband that she was bored of staying at home all day. She wanted to go somewhere. “Maybe you should get in your plane and just fly around the world,” Mock’s husband said jokingly, dismissively.
“All right,” she responded, entirely serious. “I will.”
With her family’s encouragement, Mock called the National Aeronautic Association, just hoping to obtain maps for an around-the-world trip, and learned no other woman had completed the flight. (Wiley Post set the men’s record in 1933, four years before Earhart’s attempt.)
Mock devoted more than a year to preparation, meeting with Air Force officers who secretly thought she was crazy but helped her chart 19 stops. To acquire permission for landings, she sorted through regulations and contacted foreign embassies to ensure she wouldn’t be mistaken for a spy.
Her plane, which she named the Spirit of Columbus, was outfitted with an overhauled engine, a long-range radio, and, in place of the other three seats, tanks that could hold enough gasoline to fly over the ocean. And Mock’s mother-in-law agreed to watch Roger and Gary, teenagers at the time, and their 3-year-old sister Valerie.
Mock’s husband persuaded the Columbus Dispatch to pay $10,000 toward the flight (the equivalent of over $75,000 today) in exchange for exclusive news about "the flying housewife." The front-page stories quoted Mock downplaying her flying skills — "Except for not wearing high heels, really, it’s just like driving a car." — and explained with disbelief how little clothing she planned to pack. "Housewife Calm as Takeoff Time Nears," one headline read. "VISITS BEAUTY PARLOR."
Mock’s departure in April was less than three months away when an NAA official called from Washington with a tip. Since Earhart in 1937, no woman had seriously attempted flying around the globe, especially not when World War II made gasoline limited and airspace dangerous. Although female aviators were still rare — even today, less than 7% of pilots are women — far more were flying for recreation and competition in the 1960s than in Earhart’s day. Mock had kept quiet about her plans, not wanting to inspire other women who didn’t know the record was up for taking. Yet somehow, the NAA official said, another woman had decided to fly around the world at the exact same time.
Joan Merriam Smith.
Flickr: Kemon01 / Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Joan Merriam Smith was a pro, a pilot who flew charter planes and had learned to fly before she could drive. Like Mock, the Californian grew up a tomboy who idolized Amelia Earhart. The 27-year-old claimed not to know about Mock’s plans, having dreamed for years of retracing Earhart’s journey and seeing what she had seen. Starting on March 17, the day of Earhart’s takeoff, she would fly a route 4,000 miles longer than Mock’s, but in a faster twin-engine airplane.
Mock scrambled to depart two weeks earlier than planned, feeling the pressure of what was now a race. If Smith gained a considerable lead, Mock and her husband worried that the Dispatch would pull its sponsorship, effectively canceling the flight.
Both women denied the existence of a contest, with each flying a different plane on a different route. The Dispatch, too, downplayed the situation, relegating the whereabouts of the “second aviatrix” to two-paragraph sidebars. On one of her stops, Mock told reporters, “I am not in any race with that woman.”
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But she went on to criticize Smith’s route. While Smith intended to follow Earhart’s path along the equator, Mock said she was avoiding some of the toughest terrain: “She is going just enough of the way to uphold her claim.” Meanwhile, Smith didn’t even mention Mock in her July 1964 Saturday Evening Post essay, “I Flew Around the World Alone."
Technically, the women weren’t in direct competition: If Smith had circled the world first, her flight wouldn’t have been eligible for the record books. For verification, the world-record attempt required the hiring of official landing observers and awarding of sanctions, which were granted to only one pilot at a time: Mock.
But a victory by Smith could have counted among the public and especially among pilots. A member of a leading women’s flying club, she was better respected in aviation circles: In the year Mock became the first woman to fly around the world, the prestigious Harmon Trophy for aviation achievement went to her rival.
Mock began her flight on March 19, two days after Smith’s departure, despite knowing of the storms ahead. Weather conditions over the ocean were so poor that she ended up stranded in Bermuda for a week. The earlier takeoff time also rushed plane maintenance: Without Mock’s knowledge, her husband instructed mechanics to skip replacing her unreliable brakes. When she landed in Bermuda, she had to stand on one brake to keep the plane from spinning in the wind.
But the nonfunctioning radio, she thinks, wasn’t a symptom of the hurry. The mechanics who repaired it in Bermuda found it disconnected, the ends of the wire taped neatly.
After 50 years, Mock figures she can say now what she couldn’t then: sabotage. “It definitely was not accidental,” she says.
Someone, she thinks, wanted Smith to win the race.
Robert W. Klein / AP Photo
It was the middle of the night in a country where she hadn’t planned to be, and still, Mock woke to a ringing phone. Russ Mock had tracked down his wife at a hotel in Algeria to tell her to fly faster, asking why she wasn’t in Tunisia as planned.
“Give me some stuff for a story,” he said. “The papers say that Joan’s covering 2,000 miles a day. You have to go further.”
Mock had just flown six hours from Casablanca through storms so severe that she considered an emergency water landing. When she arrived in Bône, Algeria (now Annaba), after dark, having eaten little in the air, she dealt with currency and language confusion before getting lost looking for an open restaurant. Smith was hardly a concern, especially when she’d been asleep.
“She can be all the way back home for all I care,” Mock told her husband. “If you call me again to talk about Joan, I’ll come home on an airliner.” She slammed down the phone in what was neither the first nor last time.
The pressure from Smith turned Mock’s sightseeing adventure into overnight stays in all but five locations. Unless she was waiting on weather or repairs, which allowed her time to explore, her main views were of airports and hotel rooms.
Front page of the Columbus Evening Dispatch, April 14, 1964
The Columbus Dispatch
She flew nonstop for as long as 17 hours and slept a nightly average of five — the same number of hours often required to clear the airport red tape. At each landing, she dealt with fueling and repairs, weather reports, paperwork, and customs and law enforcement in airports not used to private pilots, let alone American housewives. Reporters wanted photos and quotes about Earhart (“Do you think you’ll disappear over the ocean?”).
On top of her exhausting itinerary, Mock was supposed to wire stories to the Dispatch soon after her arrivals. But the offices where she could send cables were often closed or nonoperational, leaving Russ, a former newspaper reporter, to write pieces under his wife’s name.
Front page of the Columbus Evening Dispatch, April 16, 1964
The Columbus Dispatch
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