Newark native Geraldine “Jerrie” Mock, the first woman to fly solo around the globe, has died in her sleep at her home in Quincy in northern Florida. She was 88.
Mock was 38 and a full-time mother of three living in Bexley when she took off from Port Columbus on March 19, 1964. A licensed pilot for only seven years who had never flown farther than the Bahamas, Mock crossed both oceans in the Spirit of Columbus, an 11-year-old Cessna freshly painted to cover cracks and corrosions.
The last she heard from the Columbus control tower: “Well, I guess that’s the last we’ll hear from her.”
There were mechanical problems, storms and communication breakdowns. She mistakenly landed at a restricted air force base in Egypt and was detained until darkness fell.
In Saudi Arabia, the 5-foot brunette exited the plane to a silent crowd that patiently waited for the pilot to emerge. When they realized she was the pilot, the people erupted in cheers, appreciating the oddity that a woman was the flier.
“There’s no man!” they exclaimed.
Mock arrived back in Columbus 29 days later on the night of April 17, 1964, to a cheering crowd of 5,000. There were local accolades, some television appearances and a medal from President Lyndon B. Johnson.
As the 50th anniversary of Mock’s flight approached, her sister, Susan Reid, of Newark, helped raise $48,000 for a bronze statue that in September 2013 was dedicated at The Works, a museum in Newark.
A similar statue was unveiled in April at Port Columbus.
By then Mock had retired to Florida, in poor health but still modest about having “a little fun in my airplane.”
“There were dozens of women who could have done what I did,” Mock said in a recorded message played to the Columbus crowd, “All I did was have some fun. Statues are for generals, or Lincoln."
Bill Kelley was at the Port Columbus unveiling. A history buff, Kelley had pushed for 30 years for the statue, for which Mock’s sister was the model.
“He wanted her in flats (shoes),” his wife, Mary, said. But Mr. Kelley deferred to her and to Reid. who insisted that Mock be portrayed wearing the short, tapered “kitten heels” she always put on when she got out of the plane.
To Cliff Kelling, the statue looked just like the homemaker who had entrusted her safety to him and other Lane Aviation mechanics who prepared her plane for the flight.
“You kind of wonder who’s going to take a single-engine aircraft that’s got some wear on it and fly it around the world,” Kelling, a pilot and retired aviation-mechanics professor, said at the time. When told the pilot was a woman, “All I could do was admire her.”
Why she was never mentioned with the likes of other aviation heroes is often attributed to the times: President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated the previous fall, the Beatles had just arrived in America, and the Vietnam conflict was heating up.
Kelling attributed it to male chauvinism and the fact that Mock made it home alive.
“Amelia Earhart was lost, and that was news,” he said. “Jerrie Mock wasn’t lost, and that wasn’t news.”
At the Port Columbus unveiling, Mock’s daughter, Valerie Armentrout, said that her mother finally “will take her rightful position with Eddie Rickenbacker and (astronaut) Sally Ride.”
Growing up in Newark, Geraldine “Jerrie” Fredritz wanted something different. “I did not conform to what girls did,” she once said, adding, “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 Earhart, her heroine, she expanded her goal from flying across Ohio.
“I wanted to see the world,” she said. “I wanted to see the oceans and the jungles and the deserts and the people.”
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