Jerrie Mock

Geraldine "Jerrie" Mock — American aviator who became the first woman to fly solo around the world — died in Quincy, Florida, on September 30, 2014. She was eighty-eight. Born Geraldine Lois Fredritz on November 22, 1925, in Newark, Ohio, she learned flying as a young mother, then in 1964 pointed a single-engine Cessna 180 nicknamed Spirit of Columbus — tail number N1538C, "Three-Eight Charlie" — into a twenty-nine-day circumnavigation that newspapers treated as both stunt and milestone. She navigated by radio, maps, and stubborn cheer, landing in places where a lone woman pilot still looked like a plot twist. The flight earned federal recognition and a place in aviation history beside more heavily sponsored expeditions. Later she wrote Three-Eight Charlie, raised a family, and eventually settled in Florida's Panhandle, preferring quiet competence to perpetual celebrity. She died at home in Quincy; her ashes later flew in a Cessna 180, a last sentence written in the same grammar as her greatest trip. Ohio airfields taught basics; the equator taught patience. She flew as if the planet were a problem solvable with fuel stops and nerve. She died in Quincy on September 30, 2014. Somewhere a small plane's compass is still swinging true over open water. Mock's gift was practical daring — making the globe feel local enough to circle alone. Notice Nearby keeps the death date so September 30 remembers the Ohio aviator who proved a Cessna and a clear plan could hold the whole world.