‘Wrong Way’ Pilot Flies Off Course, Into History

Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan blamed it on the clouds and a faulty compass. That’s how he wound up in Ireland on his way to California, he insisted.

Never mind that he’d sought permission for a transatlantic flight and twice been denied. Aviation authorities said his rickety craft would never make it across the ocean.

Despite a cockpit door “latched” with wire and extra fuel tanks obscuring his vision, he landed safely near Dublin.

But really, Corrigan maintained from 1938 until he died in 1995, he intended to fly from New York to Los Angeles that day.

“I made a mistake,” he said.

His feat caught the fancy of a world in the grip of prewar tension and the Depression. People chose to believe it was Corrigan’s way of thumbing his nose at authority.

Here’s what three leading pilots told The Times in 1938:

* “It was a spectacular, courageous stunt -- something I’d not wish to do.” -- J. Hamilton “Ham” Lee, United Airlines.

* “Young Corrigan’s flight is quite a commentary. It makes the ocean seem pitifully small, when one man in a 9-year-old plane could cross it so neatly with no instruments.” -- Dudley Steele, Union Air Terminal.

* “I know how old that plane is, and I marvel that the kid could make a flight like that. It serves to show, however, that such things may become commonplace one day. Great going!” -- Charles Badd, pilot and aviation broker.

But Doug Corrigan Jr., a retired Santa Ana investor and the eldest of Corrigan’s three sons, believes his dad.

“Nobody believes it was an accident,” he said in an interview. “My father got tired of explaining it, and I didn’t bug him about it.”

But a few years before his father’s death, the younger Corrigan said, he asked; his father insisted “it was a mistake.”

“He had no reason to lie by then,” the son said.

*

The aviator was born Clyde Corrigan in Galveston, Texas, in 1907, the Irish American son of a railroad engineer and a teacher.

His parents divorced when he was a teenager and, in 1922, his mother moved the family to Los Angeles. When she died the following year, Corrigan and his brother, Harry, and his sister, Evelyn, went to live with an aunt and uncle in Santa Monica.

Clyde changed his name to Douglas, which his mother had begun calling him after his favorite actor, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

But Clyde/Douglas’ idea of fun wasn’t a night at the movies; it was tinkering with everything that had moving parts.

In 1927, as a young grease monkey at Ryan Airlines in San Diego, he helped build Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis. Later that year, Lindbergh became the first person to solo nonstop across the Atlantic.

The young mechanic and the famous pilot would become lifelong friends.

Corrigan determined to emulate Lindbergh: He wanted his own plane, and he wanted to fly across the Atlantic.

It took him eight years to perfect his flying and to save $310, which he spent on a secondhand single-engine Curtiss Robin. His pals called it a “crate”; he called it “Sunshine.”

“Why, it took Doug 13 days to fly the ship back from New York where he bought it,” mechanic and friend Larry Conner of Downey told The Times in 1938. “On the way home, Corrigan landed in cow pastures, fixing the plane at night with the aid of a flashlight.”

Corrigan and his buddies spent three years rebuilding the engine. “Doug never spoke more than five words all day, but we did learn he had the Atlantic hop in mind,” Conner said in 1938. “To save money for the flight, he would eat half a pecan roll and drink a half bottle of milk for breakfast and finish the remainder off for supper.”

In 1937, Corrigan flew Sunshine nonstop from Long Beach to New York, intending to keep going to Ireland. The Department of Commerce refused permission, saying his plane wasn’t airworthy. (He had asked before -- in 1936, his son thinks -- and received the same answer.) Dejected, he returned home.

Then in July 1938, he was fired from his job at Northrop Aircraft in Hawthorne for “absent-mindedly” failing to supply his Social Security number despite warnings, a company spokesman told The Times in 1938.

Thus liberated from labor, Corrigan headed east in his rebuilt wreck. By now, nearly a dozen pilots had duplicated Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing.

In New York on July 17, 1938, he loaded up with 320 gallons of gas, two boxes of fig bars, two chocolate bars, a quart of water and a 10-foot pole to “club” ice off the wings. Twenty-eight hours after he disappeared into the clouds, he landed near Dublin.

He blamed it on a navigational error caused by a broken $8 compass and cloud cover. “Honest, I meant to go to California,” he told the press in a radio interview from Ireland.

“Lindbergh was the only one who would later say his explanation was plausible,” said a friend of Corrigan’s, John Underwood. “But [Lindbergh] never said he believed him.”

Underwood, 73, of Glendale, is a pilot and author. He wrote about aviation’s early days in “Madcaps, Millionaires and ‘Mose.’ ”

“He was a man who always did things his way,” Underwood said in a recent interview. “I don’t think he ever took anyone’s advice, except maybe Charles Lindbergh.”

Corrigan became an instant celebrity in Ireland and the world. When asked if he’d consider flying in an air race, he told the London press, “No sir, I might aim at the equator and hit the pole.”

Within weeks, Corrigan and his crated-up plane sailed into New York to a ticker-tape parade. He received medals, awards and keys to cities across the nation.

A backward-running watch and a Texas airport were named for him. In Los Angeles, trolley seats were reversed in his honor and Corrigan’s pal, Monty Mason, wrote him a song, “Nonstop Corrigan.”

After a few weeks of East Coast fanfare, Corrigan flew Sunshine home. He arrived in Long Beach on Sept. 10, greeted by a crowd of thousands.

Two days later, Los Angeles gave him a parade, with schoolchildren yelling his name. The Goodyear blimp hovered overhead, dragging a banner that read: “Western Safety Conference Greets Corrigan.”

Next, Corrigan went to the Ambassador Hotel for lunch in his honor. Courses were served in reverse, from dessert to soup.

Magazines competed for Corrigan’s exclusive story, and E.P. Dutton and Co. rushed into print his autobiography, “That’s My Story.”

Warner Bros. offered him roles and producer Hal Roach groomed him. RKO Pictures bought the book rights for $60,000, Underwood says. Corrigan starred as himself in the 1939 film “Flying Irishman.” The movie flopped, and so did his film career.

In 1939, on the first anniversary of his hop to Ireland, Corrigan took another flight -- into matrimony. He wed his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth Marvin, a Texas schoolteacher.

In World War II, Corrigan joined the Air Transport Command, flying Atlantic crossings. He also flew as a test pilot for Douglas Aircraft.

In 1946, he tried his hand at politics. A teetotaler, he ran on the Prohibition Party ticket for state Senate with the slogan, “Soak the drunks with higher taxes.” He lost.

Corrigan bought a 20-acre orange grove in Santa Ana, building a green stucco house with a mailbox facing the wrong way. He and his wife reared their three sons there and stored Sunshine in the garage.

Corrigan’s wife died in 1966, and six years later, his youngest son, Roy, died in a plane crash on Catalina Island. Corrigan was shattered, Underwood said.

In 1988, he and his intrepid craft appeared at the Hawthorne Municipal Airport’s Air Faire to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his “wrong way” flight.

“An Irish airline flew him to Ireland for another celebration,” Underwood said.

Then he returned Sunshine to his Santa Ana garage.

The orange grove is long gone, but Sunshine is still there. Doug Jr. watches over it.