Jerrie got her first ride in an airplane when she was 7-years-old. After fifteen minutes in the sky, she announced that when she grew up, she would fly around the world.

“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.”

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Right away, gender-stereotypes raised their ugly heads. Her school assigned boys to mechanics class and sent her to learn embroidery, which she refused to do. 

In middle school she heard about the Ohio Women’s Protective Laws that imposed work restrictions on women. These included maximum working hours, bans on night work, seating requirements, weight-lifting limits, and minimum wage provisions. Meant to protect women, the laws kept them from advancing and earning equal pay to men.

“I was never going to abide by man-made laws that said women couldn’t do something.”

“Nobody was going to tell me I couldn't do it because I was a woman,” said Mock, who wore a skirt and blouse on her around-the-world flight, putting on high heels when disembarking at stops. 

Starting college in 1943, Jerrie became Ohio State University's only female aeronautical engineering student. Though she wanted to be a pilot, Jerrie married a pilot, left school and became a housewife, a common path women took in the 1940s. She and her husband Russell Monk had three children.

But she did not give up her desire to fly. After beginning lessons in 1956, she quickly proved to be a natural pilot, soloing after less than ten hours of instruction. Two years later she earned her license, using landmarks for navigation rather than relying on radios.

“I plotted more complicated routes to fly than experienced pilots,” she recalled. “Even the old-timers asked me how I navigated.”

Not only could Jerrie handle airplanes, in 1961, she managed Price Field in Columbus, responsible for fueling airplanes and tying them down,  “The male instructors did not like a woman telling them what to do,” Mock recalled. “I did not worry about it and ignored them.” 

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Jerrie with her children Roger, Gary and Valerie, 1964.

To get permission to travel through foreign airspace, Jerrie went to Washington D.C. and visited embassies for the 21 countries where she planned to stop over. For official records, she arranged for observers and timers to document all her takeoffs and landings.

The Columbus Dispatch help fund Jerrie's trip and she brought a typewriter on the adventure to write letters and articles for the newspaper. On March 19, 1964, Jerrie boarded her red-and-white single-engine Cessna called Spirit of Columbus and started the engine.

“The tiny plane raced down the runway and literally leaped into the air, eager to explore the world,” Jerrie recalled in her memoir, Three-Eight Charlie. “How I loved my beautiful plane!” 

But Jerri had some naysayers. She'd never flown over an ocean before and had only clocked 750 hours flying time. As she lifted into the sky, she heard the tower controller on the radio, “Well, I guess that’s the last we’ll hear from her,” he said.   

On the 23,000 mile flight she met with only minor mishaps including ice on the wings, sand in the engine and and a burned out antenna motor. 

“Scared? Let's not use the word scared,” she told a reporter with a laugh. “Airplanes are meant to fly. I was completely confident in my plane; I trusted it completely. I had plenty of gas, a good engine. You just kind of used your head.”

Jerrie touched down back home at the Columbus airport on April 17, 1964, 29 days, 11 hours and 59 minutes later. The first woman to pilot an aircraft solo around the world.

Thousands came out to greet her and newspapers across the country carried her story. “It didn’t seem right that these people should say such wonderful things about me,” she wrote. “I just went out to have fun and to see the world.” 
 

Even so, a few weeks later, she visited Washington D.C. again. This time to get a medal from the president, Lyndon B. Johnson.

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