Just before the coast disappeared into sea and sky, Jerrie Mock switched on her airplane’s long-range radio and found only silence. She tried again and again, leaning her ear to the speaker, and still heard nothing, not even static.

When Mock departed from Columbus that morning, she had heard the tower controller’s voice on a loudspeaker. “Well, I guess that’s the last we’ll hear from her,” he told the crowd gathered to see her off to Bermuda. He was joking, but suddenly his words had the ring of truth.

In an aircraft not much larger than a cargo van, surrounded by gasoline tanks, Mock was completely alone, navigating to a speck of an island with a compass and paper charts. Unable to report her positions or call for help, she could have become another Amelia Earhart: a woman trying to circle the world, lost at sea, never to be found.

Yet Earhart was a full-time aviator with a passenger who served as navigator; Mock was a full-time mother of three flying solo. Earhart had crossed both oceans; Mock, a licensed pilot for only seven years, had never flown farther than the Bahamas. Compared with Earhart’s brand-new, twin-engine airplane, Mock’s single-engine Cessna was 11 years old, with fresh paint covering the cracks and corrosion.

Suddenly — and suspiciously — cut off from communications, Mock considered turning back. She wasn’t flying around the world to become rich or famous. Initially, she hadn’t even realized she could set a record. Her original impetus for making the trip: She was bored.

But in the months before her takeoff, the flight had become much larger than a housewife with a dream. As Mock’s ambitious husband secured her sponsorships and media coverage, another woman — more experienced, with a faster plane — announced that she’d attempt the same flight. As she headed toward the Bermuda Triangle, Mock had to ignore the danger and keep flying, feeling pressured to win a race she had never intended to enter.

Twenty-nine days later, when she finished the flight on April 17, 1964, Mock could have been America’s sweetheart, a household name. On stops from Morocco to Saudi Arabia to Guam, the barely 5-foot brunette had stepped out of her plane in a blue skirt and sweater set and said demurely, as she still does now, “I just wanted to have a little fun in my airplane.”

“She has kind of pretty, all-American looks, and I think when they make the film, Doris Day will play her part,” panelist Orson Bean declared when Mock appeared on the game show To Tell the Truth shortly after the flight.

But the last 50 years have produced no Hollywood movie, no legend, and, until recently, not so much as a statue of Mock in her small hometown. Elsewhere in Ohio — the so-called birthplace of aviation — the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton doesn’t include her. Committee members who vote for inductees, according to one who added Mock to the ballot in 2003, don’t recognize her name.

While history has largely forgotten Jerrie Mock, she never wanted much attention, not even 50 years ago. And not now, at 88, when she’d prefer that her life be remembered for what it was then and not for what it’s become.