For a long time, my only awareness of Wrong Way Corrigan was that it was something my grandmother would holler whenever someone took off heading in some direction other than the one they were supposed to. If she said “time to leave” and you headed toward the bathroom instead of the backdoor, you were hauled up short with that phrase and required to explain yourself.

Somehow, I got it in my head that Mr. Corrigan was a baseball player who was famous for running the wrong direction to field fly balls. This is about as wrong way as Corrigan himself, and I am still trying to figure out where that notion came from.

The truth is that this day commemorates the transatlantic flight of a guy named Douglas Corrigan, who, in 1938, famously claimed to have accidentally flown from New York to Ireland, blaming a faulty compass and poor weather conditions, taking it so far as to say he thought he was in San Francisco when he landed.

What was his motive for lying? It’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask for permission a second time. See, Lindbergh had made the transatlantic flight 11 years earlier, and Corrigan had been one of his mechanics. Apparently deciding it was more fun to fly planes than fix them, Corrigan cobbled together a junker of a plane and flew nonstop from California to New York—and got a lot of press simply because the plane—and he—survived the trip.

Once in New York, he filed plans for a transatlantic flight, but the authorities were as freaked out by his Frankenstein jalopy as the press, and the plans were rejected. But they did say Corrigan could fly back to the West Coast—his plane was deemed safe enough to crash on land, just not in the sea. So Corrigan fired up his single-engine on July 17 at Floyd Bennett field and took off. One version of the story goes that he was told to use any runway except the one heading west, so he took off to the east and kept going. In another version, he got airborne and headed west—for a minute or two. Then he made a 180-degree turn and vanished into a cloudbank.

Twenty-eight hours later, he popped out of his plane in Dublin, asking where he was. Nobody in charge bought into his story of a busted compass, though Corrigan stuck to it. They suspended his license, so he and his boxed-up plane had to take a boat back to New York. By the time he arrived, his suspension had been lifted and he was a national celebrity.

Nobody else really bought into his story, either—I mean, c’mon. His initial plan was to fly to Ireland and he just happened to wind up there. If nothing else, surely he got a glimpse of all that ocean at some point that would have been a tipoff. And the guy was no dummy—he got his autobiography written and into stores in time for Christmas 1938, and he worked every Wrong Way marketing angle that came his way. He played himself in the movie of his life and made a bundle. He tested planes during World War II.

In 1988, he joined in the golden anniversary celebration of his famous flight. Wikipedia says Corrigan was so jazzed that event organizers keep a close eye on him to make sure he didn’t take it for a spin. For all that, he went to his grave still insisting it wasn’t a lie, it was a legitimate mistake.