Happy Friday!
I hope that you had a great week! It's hot and sunny in Dallas after a week of rain (which is unusual in July).
Today we celebrate a birth anniversary and yesterday's anniversary of a wild tale. Margaret Brown, also known as "The Unsinkable Molly Brown," because she survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. She was born in 1867 to Irish immigrants in a 3-room cottage in Hannibal, Missouri, close to the Mississippi River. She never went by "Molly" – she was called Maggie by her family. She left for Colorado at age 18 with two of her four siblings and her brother-in-law and worked sewing carpets and draperies. She met and married John "J. J." Brown in 1886. J.J. was a mining engineer and his company literally struck gold in the Little Jonny Mine in 1893, resulting in a substantial financial windfall for the Brown family.
Margaret became active in Denver society, determined to advance the lives of women through education and philanthropy. She spoke French, German, Italian and Russian fluently and lobbied for women's right to vote. She and J.J. separated in 1909 because their social priorities were so different, and her monthly "allowance" allowed her to continue her local activities and travel.
While in Europe, after learning that her eldest grandchild was ill in Denver, Margaret booked passage on the first available ocean liner which happened to be the Titanic. After striking an iceberg the night before, Brown helped other passengers board lifeboats, and she abandoned ship on lifeboat #6. More than 1500 of the 2,224 people on the ship perished. She became known as Molly, and "Unsinkable" for her efforts to evacuate the ship, taking an oar in her lifeboat and encouraging the crew to go back and save more passengers, which they did not do based on orders from the Quartermaster. After being rescued, she and other first-class passengers organized to provide basic necessities and counseling to second and third-class passengers who survived.
Brown ran for a U.S. Senate seat in 1908 but aborted her campaign to become the director of the American Committee for Devastated France and the work with the Red Cross in France during WW1. She helped organize a Women's Rights Conference in Rhode Island in 2014. She was also a theater enthusiast. She died at age 65 and her autopsy showed a brain tumor. She was buried next to J.J., who she continued to admire and praise despite their separation. She was truly unsinkable and was immortalized in an eponymous Broadway musical.
Douglas Corrigan's notoriety occurred on July 17, 1938. He was born in Galveston, Texas and his given name was Clyde Groce Corrigan, which he changed to Douglas as an adult. He was interested in flight as a child. His parents divorced and he lived with his mother and two siblings in Los Angeles, quitting high school before graduating to work in construction. Corrigan began taking flying lessons at age 18 and made his first solo fight on March 25, 1926, after taking 20 lessons. He worked at an airplane factory in San Diego and assembled parts of Charles Lindbergh's plane, the Spirit of St. Louis. After Lindberg's success, Corrigan decide to duplicate it and fly to Ireland, home of his ancestors.
His employer moved to St. Louis in 1928, but Corrigan remained in San Diego as a mechanic for the newly formed Airtech School. He performed stunts during his limited flight time during work hours which did not resonate well with his boss so he performed them further south where no one could see him. He moved around a lot as a mechanic and started passenger service on the east coast with a friend of his (Steve Reich) in 1930. He bought a 1929 Curtiss Robin OX-5 monoplane in 1933, flew it home to California and started modifying it for a transatlantic flight.
Corrigan applied for permission to make a nonstop flight from New York to Ireland in 1935 which was rejected. Two years later, his aircraft was still deemed unsafe for the trip. He made further modifications to the plane and was granted an experimental license for a transcontinental flight with a conditional return. He flew from California to New York in 27 hours and the plane developed a gas leak at the end of the flight, filling the cockpit with fumes. He planned to return to California without repairing the leak.
On July 17,1938, he went to Floyd Bennet Field in Brooklyn and asked the manager, Kenneth Behr, which runway to use. He was instructed to avoid taking off to the west and Behr wished him "Bon Voyage". Corrigan departed from runway 06 and kept going east. He claimed to realize his error after flying 26 hours – I guess it was hard to see that he had been flying over a huge body water all that time. He also claimed that his feet became cold after 10 hours because the cockpit floor was full of gasoline – he punched a hole in the floor with a screwdriver to drain the fuel away from an exhaust pipe to avoid an explosion. He arrived in Dublin on July 19 after flying 28:13 hours with two chocolate bars, two boxes of fig bars and a quart of water.
Although he broke his flight plan big time, "Wrong Way Corrigan" basically received a slap on the wrist and was honored with a ticker tape parade on his return to New York; more people attended his parade than Lindbergh's. He also received a ticker-tape parade in Chicago. Corrigan later wrote his autobiography, That's My Story, published in December 1938. He endorsed "wrong way" products including a watch that ran counterclockwise, and played himself in the movie The Flying Irishman, making a ton of money. He retired from aviation in 1950 to an 18-acre orange grove in Santa Ana, California with his wife and three sons, one of whom died in a private plane crash in 1972. At the time of his death in 1995, he still maintained that he made the transatlantic flight by accident.
Cheers to two colorful personalities! May you be inspired to do good and make your dreams come true. Have a very nice weekend!
Deb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrOC3R_6jog