Читать книгу The Jerrie Mock Story - Nancy Roe Pimm - Страница 8

Author’s Note

ONE EVENING while watching the local news, a story caught my attention. The news story celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the first woman to fly solo around the world. Jerrie Mock had flown in her eleven-year-old plane from Port Columbus and landed twenty-nine days later at her hometown airport in Columbus, Ohio. The “flying housewife” had a compass, a map, and a system of dots and dashes to circumnavigate the globe. The longest leg of her flight took over seventeen hours, and at one point she had to stay awake for thirty hours. A war was going on. She flew over shark-infested waters. She landed in and took off from foreign countries with many different cultures and beliefs. Incredible, amazing, and brave were words that popped into my mind.

I always thought Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly around the world. And as I started asking around, I found most folks think so. Not many had heard of Jerrie Mock. In 1964, the year Jerrie made history, so many stories were competing for the headlines: The Civil Rights Act had just passed. The Beatles came to America and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. The United States had just entered the war in Vietnam. The US and the USSR were in the middle of the space race.

When Jerrie Mock arrived home, she received a hero’s welcome, and her story appeared on the front page of the local newspapers. She received numerous awards and recognition from high officials, even President Johnson! So why and how had Jerrie Mock been forgotten? Why didn’t she have a prominent place in the history books? Why hadn’t anyone ever heard of her?

I couldn’t get Jerrie Mock’s story out of my head, so I picked up the phone and gave her a call. “Airplanes were made to be flown,” she said matter-of-factly. “You just got to use common sense, point it in the right direction, and be sure you have plenty of gasoline. The hardest part was planning; the flying was easy.” I told her she was brave and daring. She laughed. “I was just having a little fun in my plane,” she said. I tried to convince her that it was much more than that. I told her I would be honored to write her biography for young readers. I loved her story, an inspirational tale about believing in childhood dreams. It’s something I talk about when I give author visits in schools. What’s life without dreams and what’s better than making dreams come true?

While researching her story, I set out to find the airplane she had flown. I went to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, an air-and-space museum in Virginia. My husband, Ed, and I searched for quite some time before we spotted the small red-and-white plane high above our heads, tethered to the ceiling. I had hoped to have a look inside the plane in order to see all the custom-made gas tanks and other adjustments that had been made for the long-distance flight, but that simply wasn’t possible.

When I visited Jerrie, she sat in her recliner with a stack of books piled high on the table. At age eighty-eight, she spoke of her lifelong love of reading. As a young girl, she had read Nancy Drew mysteries, and, to that day, she still loved a good suspenseful story. Clearly a genius and a mathematical whiz, she pointed to her head while speaking about flying in races, and how she had made calculations to get an advantage over the competition. Her eyes sparkled as she recalled stories from long ago with amazing detail and passion. When I clearly had no idea who had been an enemy of Christopher Columbus, she pointed her finger at me and said, “Read your history books!” Jerrie still had an interest in history and geography, and she kept up with the news and current events. She asked about popular books kids were reading today, and she told me she hoped the younger generation knew the importance of reading books and of having a dream. During our visit, she referred to her book, Three-Eight Charlie, and asked me to include passages from this book she had penned in 1970. Her gift of writing was as brilliant as her gift for flying.

Soon after completing her flight she was quoted as saying, “I hope . . . that somewhere here and there my just doing something that hadn’t been done will encourage someone else who wants to do something very much and hadn’t quite had the heart to try it.” With these words, and her life story to back them up, Jerrie Mock reminds us that even ordinary people can do extraordinary things. So work hard, put your heart into it, and follow your dreams!