‘As the plane turned onto the taxiway, three trucks full of soldiers careened around a corner from another taxiway and slammed to a stop within inches of the plane,’ wrote Geraldine Frederitz Mock. Guns in hand, the soldiers leaped from the trucks and surrounded the airplane. Accustomed to seeing military planes piloted by men, the Egyptians were apparently staggered when they saw a woman at the controls of the 1953 Cessna 180, dubbed Spirit of Columbus and nicknamed ‘Charlie.’ In the cockpit was Mock, a 38-year-old mother of three from Bexley, a Columbus, Ohio, suburb.

It was 1964, and ‘Jerrie’ Mock — who would later chronicle her adventures in the book Three-eight Charlie — was on the sixth leg of her historic flight around the world. During her flight from Tripoli to Cairo, she had accidentally landed at a secret military base instead of at the Cairo airport. Despite that incident — which ended peacefully — and several other scary moments (ice on the wings, sand in the engine and an antenna motor that burned out), Mock would eventually return to Columbus Airport on April 17, becoming the first woman to fly around the world solo. She completed the trip in 29 days, 11 hours and 59 minutes. Upon landing, she was greeted by Ohio’s Governor James A. Rhodes and a mob of fans. Dubbing her ‘Ohio’s Golden Eagle,’ Rhodes proclaimed April 18 Jerrie Mock Day.

Geraldine Frederitz grew up at a time when young girls were expected to play with dolls and learn household chores. But because she wasn’t allowed to venture across the street to the area where most of the other girls in her neighborhood lived, she actually ended up playing plenty of boys’ games like cowboys and Indians, and decided those were much more fun. Although her mother refused to buy her little girl the toy train she so much desired, she eventually gave up the idea of teaching Jerrie to knit, a chore the child loathed.

At school, Jerrie refused to learn embroidery and resented the fact that the boys were allowed to go to mechanics class but she was not. When she was around 12, Jerrie was surprised to learn that women could only work for five hours in factories before taking a break, under Ohio’s Women’s Protective Laws. In a Columbus Dispatch article, she later said, ‘I was never going to abide by man-made laws that said women couldn’t do something.’

Frederitz determined early on to go well beyond the narrow boundaries of her hometown. ‘I was stuck in a little town called Newark, where no one went anywhere,’ she later recalled. ‘I also grew up in an age where there was no television and you could only learn about the world from geography books. I had no idea what it was like in other parts of the world but I wanted to be different than everyone else and find out.’

Frederitz caught the flying bug at age 7, when she took her first ride in a Ford TriMotor with her parents. Even though the ride only lasted 15 minutes, it made quite an impression. She told everyone who would listen that when she grew up she would fly around the world. Flying may have been in her blood. Her mother’s maiden name was Wright, and Mock had heard she might have been related to the Wright brothers in some way. ‘I remember my aunt telling me about how she got invited to tour the Wrights’ bicycle factory,’ she later recalled. The youngster was also impressed by Amelia Earhart’s highly publicized feats. As a result, Jerrie took a preflight course during her high school years (the only other female in the course dropped out after the first session).

Marriage to Russell Mock in 1945 and motherhood temporarily interrupted Jerrie’s flying dreams and ended her college education. She had been attending Ohio State University, the only woman then enrolled in its aeronautical engineering program. In addition to raising a family, for five years Mock co-produced an educational television program for local schools.

When Mock finally took her first flying lesson in 1956, it was immediately obvious that she was a natural pilot. She soloed after only nine hours and 15 minutes of instruction. In 1958 she earned her license. Mock learned to fly by landmark navigation, since at the time pilots were not legally required to fly with radios. She quickly became dissatisfied with the simple routes most Ohio pilots flew and was later disappointed to learn that no one in Columbus could teach her how to fly across oceans. ‘I plotted more complicated routes to fly than experienced pilots,’ she recalled. ‘Even the old-timers asked me how I navigated.’

In 1961 Mock became the first woman licensed by Ohio to manage an airport, Price Field in Columbus, a job she held for about a year. On Sundays she was there alone, which meant fueling airplanes, tying them down, and even doing despised household chores like making coffee. ‘The male instructors did not like a woman telling them what to do,’ Mock recalled. ‘I did not worry about it and ignored them.’ Mock also managed Logan County Airport in Lincoln, Ill., for a few months to help out a friend, flying back and forth from Columbus to do so.

Although she only had 700 flying hours before she embarked on her round-the-world adventure, most of that time was spent flying long distance — to the Bahamas, Canada and Mexico. In contrast, Mock later met an instructor who had accumulated thousands of hours of flying experience but none of it was long distance. While flying to Mexico, she had to learn the hard way that radio stations could go off the air. It prepared her for similar conditions on her world flight.

Several years after earning her license, Mock told her husband that she was bored with being a housewife and wanted to do something exciting. He jokingly suggested she fly around the world. The joke stopped when Mock contacted the National Aeronautic Association (NAA) in 1962 and found out that a woman had never flown solo around the world. She had taken it for granted that a woman had already done so. After all, that was Amelia Earhart’s intent in the 1930s, when she and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared in the Pacific. It immediately became Mock’s goal.

Mock soon discovered that in Columbus, U.S. Air Force personnel were the only people who knew what was needed to get her started. They agreed to help her out on an unofficial basis. She also received valuable information from two brothers — mechanic John Peck at Price Field, who had been Eddie Rickenbacker’s personal mechanic, and Robert Peck, an engineer at Purdue University. Brigadier General O.F. ‘Dick’ Lassiter of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), a family friend, also gave her advice.

Next year, the Columbus Dispatch agreed to be a sponsor (thanks to her husband’s advertising connections) and to fund most of the trip. Then she needed to plot a route, gain permission to fly across countries, and have observers and timers appointed by the NAA at each stop to document landings and takeoffs for establishing official records. ‘I visited each embassy in Washington, D.C., to get clearance,’ Mock later recalled. ‘The actual flying was a lot less complicated than putting together all these little details.’

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