The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (8 page)

Frayer may have been out of the racing business but he soon landed on his feet as chief engineer of Clinton DeWitt Firestone’s
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Columbus Buggy Company, with a thousand-man workforce, one of the largest in the country, which had started putting out electric-powered horse buggies and now wished to build a full-fledged automobile. Frayer brought the now seventeen-year-old Eddie Rickenbacker with him as chief of design at $20 a week, with a dozen grown men under him.

Eddie had shown himself to be a mechanical genius, and he was so personable at smoothing over problems that Firestone made him a sales manager, opening dealerships throughout Texas, at the princely sum of $125 a month. The new job not only allowed Eddie to contribute significantly to his family’s support, but it also helped him pay off the mortgage on their home. He continued moving up in the company, becoming a branch manager in Omaha, with another hefty raise in salary. Satisfying as this was, though, no amount of money or power could slake Eddie Rickenbacker’s lust for speed.

By 1910 he was nineteen years old, a strapping six feet, two inches tall, and ruggedly handsome with a head of rich black hair, a square jaw, conspicuous dimples, a prominent nose, and dark penetrating eyes. In small midwestern towns of the day, dirt track auto racing was immensely popular. Lee Frayer had produced a sleek little Firestone roadster that Eddie determined would be perfect for such events and add to the luster of the Firestone brand if he began winning races.
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He stripped one of the roadsters down to its essentials, removing its body and fenders, and installed an extra gas tank in the rear. He had the car painted white, which would become his racing trademark, and had a pair of white coveralls made to match.

The first event Rickenbacker entered was a twenty-five-mile county fair contest in Red Oak, Iowa. Most of his competitors were fellow car salesmen and dealers, trying to promote their products and win some prize money at the same time. The day before the race Eddie arrived in Red Oak and drove alone on the track, round and round, until he had memorized the dimensions of every curve and calculated the fastest safe speed at which it could be taken. When he was finished, Eddie knew when to brake, when to accelerate, and when to coast or float along the entire track, a practice that would set him apart during his entire racing career.

Eddie lost at Red Oak but he quickly strung together victories at Omaha and Columbus.

In the weeks before each of his races Eddie practiced at the track so many times he could take the curves “blindfolded.” Not only was he consistently a winner in these races, but people would come up to him afterward and say, “I want that car,” which made him doubly successful.

B
Y 1911
THE
I
NDIANAPOLIS 500
had become the foremost automotive event in the world and featured some of the greatest drivers of the day: Ray Harroun, Bob Burman, Louis Chevrolet, Barney Oldfield, and Art Greiner. With Rickenbacker and Frayer alternating as drivers in Frayer’s powerful new Red Wing Special, Eddie was driving about halfway through the race when just ahead of him Greiner’s wheel disintegrated and the car pitched, sending Greiner’s mechanic through the air to his death and breaking Greiner’s arm. Harroun won with an average speed of 74.69 miles per hour
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and the Frayer-Rickenbacker Red Wing placed eleventh—just out of the money but not a bad start for beginners in a big-time race.

It was the first time Rickenbacker had come face-to-face with death on the racetrack, but if he was unnerved he didn’t show it. It was also the first time that Rickenbacker fully absorbed the sordid bloodlust of the crowd. There was no mistaking the fervent, electrified exhortations for “More speed! More speed!” and “Faster! Faster!” As one observer put it, here was the “ugliest animal sound in all nature: the frenzied screaming, yelling, howling of men and women who in their lust for thrills and blood had torn their garments of human dignity to shreds.”
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The drivers knew this, but auto racing was a big-time sport, with major paydays, which made front-page news.

After Indianapolis, Eddie found it difficult no matter how much money he was making to go back to selling cars and dirt track racing in the sticks. After another year he resigned from Firestone’s company and purchased a one-way ticket to Des Moines and the Maytag-Mason Motor Company, whose chief engineer was a thirty-six-year-old automotive genius named Fred Duesenberg.

At the newly prestigious Sioux City 300 on July 4, 1914, the Duesenberg team was so broke it couldn’t afford a garage for the cars, so Eddie drove the Duesenbergs under the grandstand, where the mechanics slept on cots and ate on credit from a local diner after promising the proprietor a share of the prize money they said they were sure to win. Even their cat, whose name was Lady Luck, deserted them.

At some point Rickenbacker remembered a story from Swiss folklore that his mother once told him about being down on your luck: get a bat, cut its heart out, and tie it to your middle finger with red silk thread. This would make things go well. Ever since he was a small boy Rickenbacker had been superstitious and kept a collection of rabbits’ feet, buckeyes, and other charms to ward off bad luck. But the bat heart was supposed to
bring good luck
, a desperate move for desperate times. Rickenbacker was boarding with a local farmer (also on credit) and offered the man’s children a silver dollar for the first one who brought him a live bat. The night before the race, just as he was preparing for bed, one of the youngsters produced “a mean-looking mouse-like creature.” Early next morning Rickenbacker drove to town for a spool of red silk string and, in secret, murdered the bat, cut out what he thought was its heart, tied it to his middle finger, and assumed he was invincible.

The Sioux City Speedway was wretched. A two-mile oval racecourse was built across the Missouri River from the city, so it was actually in Nebraska, cut out of a large cornfield, and instead of using boards, concrete, or bricks as they did at Indianapolis, the Sioux City promoters tried to create a track out of dirt and thirty thousand gallons of crude oil, which was supposed to solidify into a smooth racing surface. It did no such thing. When it was dry the cars broke up the congealed overlay into rock-hard chunks that often flew back at the drivers with terrific force. The drivers called it “gumbo.” Rickenbacker had fabricated a wire-mesh screen to protect himself and his drivers and mechanics from it, but it wasn’t foolproof, as he soon found out.

The Sioux City Race Week began on an ominous note. On June 28 in far-off Sarajevo, Bosnia, a Serbian assassin shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The event was scarcely noticed in the American press but would have a profound effect on the life and career of then twenty-three-year-old Eddie Rickenbacker.

Promoters of the Sioux City race had forecast as many as ten thousand spectators would show up, but when fully fifty thousand unruly race fans arrived neither the sponsors nor the city were prepared for the influx. The weather was firecracker hot when high rollers from Chicago disembarked from their private railcars and headed for the nearest saloons, which were crammed with everyone from royalty to riffraff. The Iowa Anti-Saloon League and a host of indignant evangelists set up an enormous tent to convert the sinners and buttress the faithful. But all good intentions were swamped by the hard-drinking, hard-gambling mob, which included cardsharps, prostitutes, reporters, pickpockets, and the morbidly curious, as well as the aforesaid swells, many of whom slept a dozen to a room, or in hotel lobbies, or as a last resort on sidewalks or in the woods, like hoboes.

By day and by night, along with the boozing, they laid odds on the racing field, which included such stellar drivers as “Wild Bob” Burman
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—whom the bookies were giving odds of 5 to 1—Howdy Wilcox,
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Spencer Wishart,
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Billy Chandler,
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and the ubiquitous Barney Oldfield. The relatively little-known Rickenbacker was supremely confident in what he called “a golden period” in his life, while the gamblers put his chances of winning at 8 to 1.

Soon after the gun went off Rickenbacker and his mechanic Eddie O’Donnell
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were proceeding as planned, armed with the dried-out bat heart. Their car was not as fast as some of the others, but Eddie made up for it on the turns, which he had thoroughly mapped out in his mind, as usual.

Toward the end of the race Rickenbacker was in a two-man duel for the lead with his friend Wishart, who was driving one of the cars that was faster than the Duesenberg on the straightaways. As Wishart pulled ahead he created a virulent stream of gumbo that spattered the Duesenberg from grille to windscreen and often bounced lethally overhead, causing the drivers to duck.

With five laps to go, Rickenbacker regained a slight lead, but when he looked at the oil gauge he noticed the pressure had fallen. He nudged O’Donnell as they went into a curve, but when they came out on the straightaway the pressure was even lower. “What in the hell is the matter with Eddie?” Rickenbacker thought, but when he managed to glance over his heart sank. The mechanic was sprawled in his seat, either dead or unconscious from a big chunk of gumbo that had struck him in the forehead.

Rickenbacker made a decision not to stop, and on the next stretch he leaned over himself and made a few pumps of the oil bulb, which was good enough until O’Donnell at last came to and was able to resume his duties. They won the race by forty-eight seconds, and with the $10,000 Eddie won plus $2,500 from a third-place win by another Duesenberg racer the team checked into first-class rooms in the best hotel in town and dined on meals fit for a king.

Rickenbacker had now broken into the big-time race car circuit as a serious player, and his photograph, grinning and mud-spattered, was flashed on sports pages from coast to coast and foreign lands as well. Also, as was the custom of the day, sportswriters gave Rickenbacker half a dozen sobriquets, most of them a nod to his Germanic-sounding name: “The Dutch Demon,” “Baron Von Rickenbacher,” the “Big Teuton,” and so forth. A racing writer even published a two-stanza poem about Eddie in the magazine
Motor Age
in which he referred to him as “That Deutscher, Rickenbacher”—all of which would cause Eddie a good deal of trouble before long.

R
ICKENBACKER PLACED IN THE MONEY
in two other major races that season, and two minor ones as well, and was rated the sixth best driver in the country. This accolade was tempered by the death of Spencer Wishart, who was killed a few weeks after the Sioux City event when he smashed into a tree on the fourteenth lap of a race in Elgin, Illinois.

When the season was done Rickenbacker looked to his immediate future. He liked the Duesenberg team but had lost confidence in the company’s ability to build a car that could withstand the rigors of a long race. After Sioux City, on several occasions he was forced to drop out of races because of mechanical troubles. Also there was the constant worry of financing.

Eddie left Maytag-Mason Motors in November 1914 and took one of the big Peugeot racers he had come to admire to California to drive in the three-hundred-mile Point Loma race in San Diego on Thanksgiving Day. He remained in California and in January 1915 he won the Los Angeles Grand Prize and the Vanderbilt Cup—which was held in San Francisco that year—and established new records in winning at Providence, Sioux City, and Omaha, where his average speed was 93 miles per hour. He continued to rely on the superstition of tying a dead bat’s heart to his finger, the bats being supplied by his brother Albert, who would ship them to him in a cigar box via rail express.

Eddie went on to win a second championship at the Sioux City Speedway, but tragedy struck halfway through the race. Eddie was attempting to pass Charlie Cox, who moved over as required, but then swerved back to avoid another car, causing Rickenbacker’s Duesenberg to slightly strike Cox’s left rear wheel. It was enough to send Cox’s Ogden Special rocketing out of control, smashing through the fence, flipping over, and bouncing high in the air before coming down to crush both Cox and his mechanic, killing them instantly.

After that incident, Eddie took stock. He woke up one night in his hotel room with a terrible dream that he was in the midst of a crash from which there was “no possible escape.” Nothing he’d ever experienced was so terrifying, and as he sat up in bed shaking he began to recount and relive his many brushes with death. Then it began to dawn on him just how fortunate he was that although he had come within an eyelash of death more times than he could count he was still alive.

This led to another epiphany, a revelation that the Lord had somehow saved him for “some special purpose,” though he knew not what. Nevertheless he decided that he must prepare himself both spiritually and physically for the challenge.
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That night, Rickenbacker said sixty years later, and every night thereafter, when he was able, he got down on his knees to pray, as his mother had taught him. To strengthen his body, Rickenbacker swore off cigarettes and alcohol (a pledge that was not long maintained) and developed a special physical exercise regimen performed for fifteen minutes every morning when he woke and every night before he went to bed. He kept this up, he claimed, well into his seventies.

He also designed a strict self-improvement program, starting with the practice of carrying with him every day a pocket dictionary to look up words gleaned from men in “higher positions,” whom he had begun to meet as he worked his way up the race car circuit. For some reason, he also gave himself a middle name—which his parents had somehow neglected to bestow upon him—“Vernon,” because he liked the sound of it and the way it looked on paper. And he drew up a whole “booklet of rules,” a sort of life guide he swore to abide by, beginning with: “Always conduct yourself as a gentleman.”