The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (7 page)

Eddie’s father was old-fashioned, a firm believer that beatings were a part of a boy’s education. These were administered with such regularity that Eddie was once thrashed, following the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, merely because he questioned the notion of his own mortality and eternity. In particular, Eddie became suddenly dismayed by the thought that if he died the world would simply go on without him, and he would be forgotten, and that would be the end of it and of him. William Richenbacher’s reasoning for beating him was that abstract concepts such as these were better left to him and other adults rather than occupy important time in a ten-year-old’s mind.

His mother, Lizzie, was a practicing Christian who saw that the children attended Sunday services at a German-speaking Protestant church, read them the Bible daily, and insisted they kneel to say prayers before bedtime. History does not give us Eddie’s reaction to such fervent religiosity—especially Lizzie’s allegiance to the ominous Twenty-third Psalm—but it served him well in later life, as we shall see.

All the while Eddie’s parents were keen to instill in the children how lucky they were to be Americans, born in the land of freedom and opportunity. They told stories of life back in Europe, where opportunities were rare and rules were strict and countries were almost always at war; where if you were not born of wealth there was scant chance you could ever acquire it in your lifetime. Most men toiled in the fields or factories, while women were hired help, basically little better than serfs. They weren’t just preaching sunshine patriotism either. In 1898 when the Spanish-American War broke out, Eddie’s father tried to enlist as a private in the army but was declared ineligible because of the size of his family. Eddie was only eight then, but he never forgot how his father would pound into the children that they had to “fight for their freedom.”

By mid-century Columbus, Ohio, was a bustling manufacturing city teeming with 125,000 citizens, a large number of them immigrants, a city of smoking factories and clanking rails, chemicals, fertilizers, livestock, and above all breweries. At an early age Eddie became a newsboy, rising before dawn to hawk copies of the
Columbus Dispatch
on street corners. He and his brothers scavenged for coal lumps by the railroad tracks and brought them home for fuel for the kitchen stove or sold them for precious pennies. They likewise foraged for animal bones that they would then sell to the local rag and bone man, who’d pay by the pound and grind them up for fertilizer.

“Occasionally, somebody would shoot a horse,” Rickenbacker said. In those days they ate horse meat, and for a boy the bones were worth a small fortune. A cow’s carcass was even better.

The rag and bone man, Rickenbacker claimed, had crooked scales, and so Eddie’s remedy for this was to soak the bones in muddy water before handing them in. Because bones are porous, his bones always weighed more than the other kids’, he informed an interviewer, with profound satisfaction sixty years afterward, parlaying the occasion into a disquisition on the value of a penny. At that point Rickenbacker had been, for nearly forty years, president and CEO of Eastern Air Lines, one of the nation’s premier businesses.

When he was eight, at a gravel quarry near his home, young Eddie Rickenbacker had one of his many brushes with death that involved an infatuation with speed. He’d become the leader of a crew of borderline juvenile delinquents known as the Horsehead Gang. The quarry was closed for Saturday when the gang entered the premises and spied a hundred feet down at the bottom of the pit the small metal cart on rail tracks that was used to haul the gravel to the top.

The pit was as deep as a ten-story building, but somehow the boys managed to drag the cart to the top themselves and secured it with chocks of wood, right at the lip of the pit. “It was like a ski jump,” Rickenbacker later said, “except there was no landing place.”

The gang climbed into the cart. Eddie knocked the chocks from under the front wheels before scrambling aboard and they began their descent into the pit. Gravity took over and the cart lurched down the incline, faster and faster, until it wobbled out of control and flipped over.

The rest of the gang was thrown clear but Eddie, being in front, was mauled by the cart, which ran him over as he was being thrown out, then bounced down along the tracks until it crashed at the bottom of the pit. Eddie was “a mess,” bloody and bruised and his leg laid open to the bone, a scar he carried to the grave. One wrong bounce and it might have been his skull or his neck but it wasn’t. The Rickenbacker luck was just beginning.

He built a racing car of the Soap Box Derby variety out of wood and baby carriage wheels. But there were no hills in Columbus as there were in Akron where the official Soap Box Derby was held, at least not in Eddie’s neighborhood, and so the car became what he called a “pushmobile,” in which a second boy would run behind with his hands on the driver’s shoulders to propel the vehicle. They would race these contraptions down paved streets, drivers and pushers alternating and, barring breakdowns and accidents, the winner was nearly always the strongest and fastest team. Eddie, who had described himself as “puny” as a youngster, began to fill out in adolescence, becoming wiry and muscular.

When Eddie was thirteen his father died. Newspaper accounts say William Rickenbacher succumbed several weeks after being struck on the head by a blunt instrument during a fight with a fellow worker at a construction site in Columbus.

The night of the funeral Eddie couldn’t sleep and went into the kitchen, where he found his mother at the table with her head in her hands, crying. Sitting beside his mother (in his father’s chair, he suddenly realized), Eddie promised that he would abandon his wild behavior and be a burden to her no longer. True to his word, next morning instead of going to school he went out and found a job.

He would have been in the seventh grade, but instead Eddie Rickenbacker found employment on the twelve-hour night shift of the Federal Glass factory, marching freshly blown glass tumblers to the tempering ovens for three dollars and fifty cents a week.
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Working twelve hours a shift six days a week was not only disagreeable for a thirteen-year-old but also deadly.
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One night he quit in mid-shift, but by seven that same morning he had found another job in a steel-casting company for twice the pay. Three months later he found work capping bottles in a brewery, while setting pins in a bowling alley on the side. In time, the hops used in brewing gave him headaches, and so his next employment found Eddie working in a stone yard. After a few months of cutting marble he became so proficient that he cut a headstone for his own father’s grave, an accomplishment that he remained proud of all his life.

Around the time Eddie turned fifteen he was enveloped by an epiphany. A man appeared in Columbus with a brand-new two-passenger Ford turtleback roadster. Eddie had seen horseless carriages before but nothing like the sleek, polished little speedster—all for $500.

Eddie asked for a ride and with it acquired a lifetime infatuation with all things mechanical. The internal combustion engine began to exert “an irresistible pull” on the teenaged Eddie, and a desire to look under the hood of that Ford and find out what made it tick.

Not far from home was a small bicycle shop that was in the process of converting into a garage and repair works for the newfangled automobile. Eddie accepted a job as cleanup boy at reduced wages of seventy-five cents a day. Back then, “horseless carriages,” as they were called, were powered by three types of engines—steam, which could be explosive; electric, which required constantly charged batteries; and the gasoline engine.

Eddie learned to drive by parking the cars customers kept in the garage, which led to his first personal encounter with the vagaries of the internal combustion engine. One afternoon he was driving somebody’s one-cylinder Packard around the garage and neglected to check the oil. Suddenly the engine completely seized up. Eddie panicked, thinking he had ruined the automobile. He gingerly opened the hood, stared at the weird things inside, and deduced that the piston had stuck. He unbolted the crankshaft and, sure enough, the piston was stuck tight in the cylinder casing, which was dry as a bone. Eddie took a big gamble: he put a crowbar behind the connecting rod and levered with all his might. Instead of bending or breaking the connecting rod, to Eddie’s immense relief the piston finally broke loose. He poured a can of motor oil into the cylinder, turned the hand crank to work it around, reassembled the casing, and, presto, the car ran fine.

Thus began what Rickenbacker described much later as some of his “happiest days.” His obsession with engines led him to an institution of higher learning, namely the International Correspondence School in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which offered a mail-order course in mechanical engineering, with emphasis on the automobile and the internal combustion engine. It was a tough curriculum presented at college level, and the first lesson nearly did him in. He had to learn how to study and, moreover, learn how to think.

The bicycle-auto garage job lasted only eight or nine months before Eddie was ready to move on. He wanted to go where automobiles were actually made, and that turned out to be the Frayer Automotive Company, owned by Lee Frayer.

In the days of the burgeoning automobile business after the turn of the century there were car manufacturing companies on nearly every city block—Columbus alone had more than forty. Each company made practically everything itself—frames, bodies, and engines and all their accoutrements: carburetors, cams, pins, axles, valves, rings, flywheels, rods, pistons, blowers, tanks, and so forth. Eddie’s first job at Frayer, like his previous one at the bicycle shop, was cleaning up the place, but that did not last for long.
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It soon became apparent to workmen, and then to their supervisors, that they had something special in young Eddie Rickenbacker, who had a gift, almost a prescient way with engines. An old Dutchman taught him how to build a carburetor, and Lee Frayer began to move him through the process. After carburetors, it was engine assembly, bearings, all the phases up to and including assembly of the chassis. One morning, months later, Frayer said to him, “Eddie, I want you to go into the engineering department now.” That was his brave new world—designing and setting specifications for automobiles.

By the early 1900s there had arisen a great national interest in automobiles, and with them automobile racing. Americans were obsessed with speed (by 1906 the automobile record was approaching 100 miles per hour) and also morbidly fixated on the gruesome wrecks, which were all too frequent, and hardly a week went by during racing season that some young man’s life wasn’t snuffed out on the track. In that sense auto racing in the early twentieth century was not too far removed from the Roman arena and its gladiatorial combat.

The greatest of all these early races in the United States was the Vanderbilt Cup with an estimated 250,000 spectators, a grueling three-hundred-mile, five-hour grind in Nassau County, Long Island, and the borough of Queens, New York. First prize was the fabulous Vanderbilt Cup itself, an enormous sterling silver goblet weighing thirty pounds, and $10,000 in prize money.
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Winning this prestigious event had become more than Lee Frayer’s dream; it was his lifeline. Frayer’s company was in financial trouble, and only a miracle such as the prize money from the Vanderbilt event could save him. Frayer intended to enter three cars in the race, which was to be held October 16, 1906. One of the cars he would drive himself, and he had found two other race car drivers. A month before the race, the three cars and a team of Frayer mechanics were loaded on the train to New York. Eddie had been there to help, and as the last car was being put on board Frayer said to him, “Eddie, how long would it take you to run home and get your bag?”

He didn’t need to be asked twice, hightailing it back to the depot with his father’s ragged old duffel “traveling bag.” It was going to be quite an adventure for a fifteen-year-old boy who’d never been out of Columbus, Ohio, and it only got better the morning after they arrived when Frayer handed him a leather driving helmet and a pair of fancy Zeiss goggles. “I want you to be my riding mechanic,” Frayer said, and began instructing him in his duties.

The driver, Frayer explained, has to pay full attention to the road and the race. Eddie, as the mechanic, was to monitor the oil and gasoline pressure, pumping them up if pressure got low, as well as watching the tires. Tires frequently came apart during races; none would last more than a hundred miles and Eddie was to keep a close watch for telltale signs. In addition, Eddie was to keep an eye to the rear and bang Frayer once on the knee with his fist if a car was coming up to pass. The tapping system was developed because they would be unable to hear each other over the roar of the mufflerless engine. Two bangs meant a passing car.

On the second day of practice they had a wreck. The brakes failed and they missed a curve and hit a ditch, bounced out of it, and hit a sand dune. The car turned over and threw both of them clear, aghast but unhurt except for cuts and bruises.

Next day doing seventy down a stretch they flew through a flock of guinea hens crossing the road. Feathers and fowl burst everywhere. One bird was sucked into the large blower in front and the Frayer race car became a one-man poultry processing plant: “We picked him up, killed him, feathered him, broiled him, and carved him up all in a split second,” Rickenbacker said.

On September 22 the elimination race was held.

As they entered a curve Frayer pushed the car too hard and a rear tire exploded; they fishtailed before control was regained and stopped to change the tire. No sooner had they gotten under way than Rickenbacker saw the engine temperature was in the red zone. He noticed a faint knocking that steadily grew and the car began losing speed. He had squeezed the oil pressure up, but the knocking grew louder and other cars began to pass. Through some leak, the engine oil was gone, as well as the race, the money, the cup, and Frayer’s auto racing enterprise. Frayer pulled to the side of the road and turned off the ignition. “We’re through” was all he said.