They all thought Nat Doole, the idealistic farmer in Lucky Country, was mad. He was also English, out of his depth, and come from a long tradition of dreamers and pioneers – people who either didn’t look before they leapt or had a very different take on life in the first place.
When most sensible people would cross the Sahara in a fully equipped four-wheel drive stocked with refrigerated beer, an Englishman would rather give it a go with a wheelbarrow full of water and an umbrella. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
Doomed enterprises and ill-conceived plans, you can always guarantee some daft bugger’s going to put their hand up while all around shake their heads. The following is a list of the five craziest mad dogs of all time.
1. Douglas ‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan
On 17 July 1938, 31-year-old aviation pioneer Douglas ‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan took off from an airfield in Brooklyn, New York, cheered on as he bravely headed for California. Strapped into a modified Curtiss Robin, he carried two chocolate bars, two boxes of fig bars, a quart of water and most importantly a map with his route from New York to California marked out.
It was a foggy morning. Corrigan flew into the haze and disappeared. Twenty-eight hours later he landed in Dublin.
2. General John Sedgwick
A case of hubris if ever there was one.
Sedgwick fell at the beginning of the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, on May 9, 1864. His corps was probing skirmish lines ahead of the left flank of Confederate defenses and he was directing artillery placements. Notorious for being a kind of ‘Colonel Kilgore’ figure who simply believed he would not die, he famously strutted around battlegrounds oblivious to the whizzing of shells and bullets around him.
Confederate sharpshooters were about 1,000 yards away and their shots caused members of his staff and artillerymen to duck for cover. Sedgwick strode around in the open berating his men and was quoted as saying, ‘What will you do when they open fire along the whole line? I am ashamed of you. They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance!’
Seconds later he keeled over with a bullet hole below his left eye.
3. Sir George Sitwell
Now here was a spree of madness. A keen gardener, after becoming annoyed by the wasps in his garden Sitwell invented a pistol for shooting them.
He also came up with the novel idea of paying his son an allowance based on the amount paid by one of his forebears to his son during the Black Death, and then trying to pay his son’s Eton school fees with produce from his garden, presumably without wasps attached, or if they were they were riddled with bullet wounds.
Sir George then had all the cows on his estate stenciled in blue and white in order to make them look better and hung a notice on the gate of his manor declaring: “I must ask anyone entering the house never to contradict me or differ from me in any way, as it interferes with the functioning of my gastric juices and prevents my sleeping at night.”
4. Jemmy Hirst (1738 – 1829)
James ‘Jemmy’ Hirst was so famous an eccentric in his own time that King ‘Mad George’ III summoned him to tea. When he received the invitation Hirst declined. stating that he was training an otter to fish.
Jemmy loved animals. While at school he kept a pet Jackdaw and trained a hedgehog to follow him around. He later trained his bull to behave like a horse. Jupiter the Bull would draw his carriage about the village and Hirst even rode him in foxhunts, using pigs that he had trained as hunt dogs. He regularly blew a horn to invite the poor to his home for free food, which was served out of a coffin, and when he finally died he requested twelve old maids to follow his coffin to the grave, as well as a bagpiper and a fiddler to play happy music.
5. Larry Lawnchair Walters
Larry’s Walters’ boyhood dream was to fly, but fate conspired to keep him from his dream. He joined the Air Force, but his poor eyesight disqualified him from the job of pilot. After he was discharged from the military, he sat in his backyard watching jets fly overhead.
Disgruntled, he purchased 45 weather balloons from an Army-Navy surplus store, tied them to his tethered lawnchair and filled the 4′ diameter balloons with helium. Then he strapped himself in with some sandwiches, cans of Miller Lite, and a pellet gun.
Larry’s plan was to sever the anchor and lazily float up to a height of about 30 feet above his back yard, where he would enjoy a few hours of flight before coming back down. But things didn’t work out quite as Larry planned.
When his friends cut the cord anchoring the lawnchair to his Jeep, he did not float lazily up to 30 feet. Instead, he streaked into the LA sky as if shot from a cannon, pulled by the lift of 42 helium balloons holding 33 cubic feet of helium each. He didn’t level off at 100 feet, nor did he level off at 1000 feet. After climbing and climbing, he leveled off at 16,000 feet.
At that height he felt he couldn’t risk shooting any of the balloons, lest he unbalance the load and really find himself in trouble. So he stayed there, drifting cold and frightened with his beer and sandwiches, for more than 14 hours. He crossed the primary approach corridor of LAX, where Trans World Airlines and Delta Airlines pilots radioed in reports of the strange sight.
Eventually he gathered the nerve to shoot a few balloons, and slowly descended. The hanging tethers tangled and caught in a power line, blacking out a Long Beach neighborhood for 20 minutes.
Larry climbed to safety, where he was arrested by waiting members of the LAPD. As he was led away in handcuffs, a reporter dispatched to cover the daring rescue asked him why he had done it. Larry replied nonchalantly, ‘A man can’t just sit around’.
