The Jerrie Mock Story - Nancy Roe Pimm (2016)
Happy Mother's Day to all who celebrate. And to those who celibate I say, where would you be if your mother had that attitude? There's something my mother would say, referring to my own 'bad attitude' and referring to herself in the third person. She believed you can control and change your attitude whenever you want. More than 50 years later, I've learned that is the only thing you CAN control in life. I've also learned that it's not as easy to change as it sounds. And I now understand how that explains why she herself had 'bad attitudes' often and that we are all flawed but the honor, grit and soul is in the trying. I think I'm finally giving my mom a break.
My mom was a 'doer,' a word she used often.
'Be a doer. Don't be a watcher,' she would say to me and pretty much anyone else. Well, Jerrie Mock was a doer. She was also a housewife not unlike my mother. In 1964, my mom was 43 and lived in Cleveland with her husband and 5 children. Jerrie Mock was 38 and had 3 children and lived outside of Columbus. On March 14, my mother had me at Lakewood Hospital. 5 days later, Jerrie Mock took off from Columbus and became the first woman to fly solo around the world. She had been flying for only 7 years and had never flown further than the Bahamas. To contrast, Amelia Earhart was a professional barnstormer who had crossed both oceans before her attempt to circle the globe in a state-of-the-art twin-engine plane with a navigator on board. Jerrie flew a single-engine Cessna that was 11 years old, by herself.
Despite these little time and geographic coincidences and a mother who was 'women's lib' before there was such a thing, I had never heard of Jerrie Mock until I happened upon her biography in one of those tiny book houses some people put in their front yard, although this one lives in front of our local liquor store and has a great revolving collection. I am somewhat of an aviation buff and couldn't believe I did not know her story. Maybe because it's kind of not all that compelling. She was not charismatic like Amelia Earhart. She wore a skirt and a blouse in the plane, not an aviator suit. But she wasn't glamorous. Just a regular gal from rural Ohio. I don't get it. Is that why she's not a household name? There are only a couple books about her and there is no documentary or film adaptation. This book is not that well-written and her personal accounts are not terribly exciting. She landed. She slept. She met the officials. She had some great food. She checked on her plane. She talked to or received a telegram from her asshole husband who told her to keep going because another woman was trying at the same time. She kept going.
Almost 30 years passed between Earhart's famous attempt and Jerrie Mock's success. There must have been others during that time but I couldn't find anything about their attempts. There is barely anything about Jerrie Mock. A brand new book just came out, 'Queen of the Clouds,' about her and Joan Merriam Smith, the other woman attempting to circumnavigate at the same time. I haven't read it but the title isn't promising. It's sure to have more details than this book for kids, so I'm going to check it out.
I know that most things our mothers do get taken for granted. But this is ridiculous. This typical Midwestern mom was the first woman to fly around the world BY HERSELF in a SINGLE-ENGINE plane with only 7 YEARS of flying experience and not only didn't crash but didn't get killed along the way. She landed in some countries where women didn't do such things, for example. And she flew over Cambodia and Vietnam while the war was raging below. The book mentions the war with one line. Maybe that's why I never heard of her - overshadowed by the upheaval our country was going through - JFK had just been assassinated four months before her flight and the Civil Rights Act was signed four months after. Well, my daughter knows about Jerrie Mock now and she knows about my mom, too, though they only met briefly and Lucy does not remember her. But I tell her stories about my mom. Like the one about how with the right attitude you can do whatever you want.
