I was born a Cesarean section in what was then Salisbury, Rhodesia and is now Harare, Zimbabwe.
Due to the circumstances of my birth, my father gave me "Corrigan" as a middle name in honor of "Wrong Way Corrigan,” the fellow who flipped off the FAA to fly solo, and without permission, from Brooklyn to Ireland in 1938.
More people attended Douglas Corrigan’s Broadway ticker-tape parade than honored Lindbergh after his 1927 triumph.
I like the Corrigan-name zinger quite a lot, as my life has had both a theme and a plot right from the beginning.
Well, imagine my delight to find this song by the Corrigan Brothers this evening.
Apparently it’s very popular song in Ireland (especially this week!) as are both Barrack Obama and Joe Biden.
Imagine!
Oddly, my mother grew up 6 and a half blocks from Madelyn Lee Payne, Barack Obama's grandmother, in the little town of Augusta, Kansas.
It was Madelyn Lee Payne who raised Barack from the age of 10 onward.
The 1935 census says my Grandfather, Robert E. Dunlop, was the "still man" at the local refinery in Augusta, and he was making $496 a month.
Rolla Payne, Madelyn Payne's father, is listed as a "bookkeeper for an oil company" -- no doubt the same refinery as the one where my grandfather worked.
Augusta, Kansas was an oil company refinery town. The Payne's lived only six and half blocks from my mother and my grandparents.
Like my grandparents, the Paynes were Methodists. Being devout, they no doubt attended the only Methodist church in town along with my grandmother (my grandfather was not much for church attendance).
My mother died four years ago, in the Washington, D.C. house she’d lived in with my father for 49 years.
Oddly, her house was just 6 and a half blocks away from Barrack Obama’s. ❤️
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