Jerrie Mock, who as a relatively untested pilot accomplished in 1964 what Amelia Earhart could not — becoming the first woman to fly solo around the world — died on Tuesday at her home in Quincy, Fla., near Tallahassee. She was 88.
Her grandson Chris Flocken confirmed her death.
When she took off on March 19, 1964, from Columbus, Ohio, Ms. Mock was a 38-year-old homemaker and recreational pilot who had logged a meager 750 hours of flight time. She returned there on April 17 — 29 days, 11 hours and 59 minutes later — after a 23,000-mile journey over the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea and the Pacific, with stops in the Azores, Casablanca, Cairo, Karachi, Calcutta, Bangkok and Honolulu, among other places.
She was stalled by high winds in Bermuda and battled rough weather between Casablanca and Bone, Algeria. She navigated 1,300 miles over the Pacific from Guam to tiny Wake Island, three miles in diameter, without the benefit of ground signals. Between Bangkok and Manila, she flew over embattled Vietnam.
“Somewhere not far away a war was being fought,” she wrote later, “but from the sky above, all looked peaceful.”
Ms. Mock and her husband, Russell, were half-owners of the plane, an 11-year-old single-engine Cessna 180 named the Spirit of Columbus (evoking the Spirit of St. Louis, the plane Charles Lindbergh flew in becoming the first to cross the Atlantic solo 37 years earlier).
The Mocks’ plane had been modified for the journey. Three of its four seats had been removed and fuel tanks were installed in their place. And the radio and navigational equipment had been augmented, although as she recounted in her 1970 book, “Three-Eight Charlie” (a reference to the plane’s serial number, which ended in 38C), she soon discovered that a crucial radio wire had been disconnected, leaving her cut off from the ground during the first leg of the trip, to Bermuda.
That summer, Flying magazine asked Ms. Mock why she had undertaken such a treacherous journey alone.
“It was about time a woman did it,” she said.
The first circumnavigation of the globe by a solo flyer is generally credited to Wiley Post, a Texan whose trip, in 1933, began and ended not quite eight days later at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. Four years later, Earhart, trying to do the same and flying with a navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared over the Pacific and into legend.
Ms. Mock had competition when she made her flight. On March 17, the 27th anniversary of Earhart’s departure and two days before Ms. Mock took off, Joan Merriam Smith, a more experienced pilot flying a more powerful plane, embarked from California on her own planned flight around the world.
The women contended that they were not racing, but Ms. Mock’s husband, an advertising executive who recognized the commercial possibilities of his wife’s venture, persisted in urging her to press ahead during her trip.
At one point, Ms. Mock told her husband over the phone, “If you call me again to talk about Joan, I’ll come home on an airliner,” and hung up.
In the end, Ms. Smith, whose flight path was longer, had mechanical problems with her plane and bad luck with weather, and finished her journey on May 16. She died less than a year later when a small plane she was flying crashed in the mountains of California.
Ms. Mock’s feat has largely been overlooked in popular history; she is not an inductee of the National Aviation Hall of Fame, in Dayton, Ohio. But she was celebrated at the time. The Columbus Evening Dispatch, her hometown paper and one of the trip’s sponsors, splashed her return across the front page with the headline “Jerrie Does It; Sets Global Air Mark.”
In a White House ceremony, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented her with the Gold Medal Award on behalf of what is now the Federal Aviation Administration. She received a congratulatory telegram from Senator Stephen M. Young of Ohio, who declared that “there may be some doubt about which nation will produce the first person to reach the moon, but historians will always know that the Buckeye State produced the first woman to make a solo aircraft flight around the world.”
Another telegram came from Muriel Earhart Morrissey, Amelia’s sister. “I rejoice with you,” she wrote.
Ms. Mock did not care for speechmaking or any trappings of fame.
“The kind of person who can sit in an airplane alone is not the type of person who likes to be continually with other people,” she told the website BuzzFeed this year, around the 50th anniversary of her historic flight.
She nonetheless agreed to many public engagements, mostly to repay the sponsors of her trip, and appeared on television several times.
“You left your husband alone for 29 days,” the actor Orson Bean, a panelist on the quiz show “To Tell the Truth,” said to her when she appeared as a guest. “What did he do? I mean, who cleaned the house and all?”
Ms. Mock was born Geraldine Lois Fredritz on Nov. 22, 1925, in Newark, Ohio. Her father, Timothy, was a power plant executive; her mother, the former Blanche Wright, was distantly related to Orville and Wilbur Wright, the aviation pioneers. When Geraldine was 7 her parents took her to a local airport for a short airplane ride; enthralled, she declared she wanted to be a pilot. She grew up idolizing Earhart.
“I did not conform to what girls did,” she said. “What girls did was boring.”
She studied aeronautical engineering at Ohio State University, but left before graduating to marry Mr. Mock, who was also interested in flying. They settled in Bexley and had three children.
Ms. Mock said her around-the-world trip had come about because of an offhand remark by her husband after she said she was bored. She wanted to do something, go somewhere, she said.
“Maybe you should get in your plane and just fly around the world,” her husband said.
“All right,” she said she replied, “I will.”
Ms. Mock gave up flying in 1968 because it got too expensive, her grandson Mr. Flocken said. Her marriage ended in divorce. Her son Gary died in 1990; her son Roger died in 2007. She is survived by a daughter, Valerie Armentrout; a sister, Susan Reid; 12 grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren.
Ms. Armentrout was asked if her mother was disappointed that her fame had been fleeting.
“Disappointed?” she said. “No, not at all. She didn’t do what she did for fame or fortune. She liked the idea of what was going on in other parts of the world, and she wanted to see it for herself.”
No comments:
Post a Comment