Tied with a Bow

Douglas Corrigan was born in Galveston in 1907, the son of a construction engineer and a school teacher. He dropped out of school to work in construction. Douglas took flying lessons at age eighteen. In 1938 he flew from Long Beach to New York. His flight plan had him returning to Long Beach, but instead, he continued on to Ireland, earning the nickname “Wrong Way Corrigan.” He’d been denied permission to fly to Ireland, and Douglas insisted his transatlantic stunt was the result of a navigational error. In 1941, H.R. Knickerbocker wrote: “You may say Corrigan’s flight couldn’t be compared with Lindbergh’s. In a way, his was the more audacious of the two. Lindbergh had the best plane money could buy. Corrigan had nothing but his own ambition. His plane was a wretched looking jalopy. The engine hood was a mass of patches. The door behind which Corrigan crouched for twenty-eight hours was fastened together with baling wire.”