The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (9 page)

These were fairly reasonable resolutions, and they reflected the one overarching feature of Rickenbacker’s character to this point, which was an almost superhuman determination to succeed at whatever he decided to do. Armed with all this positive new philosophy, Rickenbacker now set out to become the best race car driver in the world.

I
N 1916
E
DDIE TORE UP THE TRACKS
, and one of his specialties was the somewhat dubious tactic of purposely skidding into sharp turns on dirt courses in order to stir up an impenetrable cloud of track dust that temporarily blinded the drivers behind him and caused them to slow down. Barney Oldfield was particularly indignant over this ploy, but Rickenbacker remained self-possessed and wore with pride the additional moniker “King of Dirt,” making jokes with newspaper reporters about “leaving ’em in my dust.”

He had so far been faithful to his resolutions; after work or a race, instead of carousing in the saloons with the other drivers, Eddie went back to his hotel and generally ordered supper from room service with some of his crew. Unlike many of his comrades he did not go for loud clothing. Instead, he was soft-spoken and courteous, and off track he wore conservative business suits. He kept away from crowds, avoided publicity and women, wanting no distractions from his racing. Nevertheless, he was a target for hundreds of mash notes from female fans and was constantly dogged by “engagement” rumors. For example, he received this telegram from a Miss Irene Tams, a movie actress whose latest hit,
Lola
, was described thusly: “With the help of an electric ray machine a scientist brings back to life his daughter killed in a car crash, but fails to revive her soul.” From the Seminole Hotel in Jacksonville, Florida, she telegraphed Rickenbacker proposing a “leap year marriage” to him.
^g

Eddie replied with a profusely flattering letter that ended this way, however: “A women is only a woman, but my soul mate is a racing car.”
⁸

Eddie changed race cars again that year—to Maxwells—in his quest to find an automobile that would run consistently through an entire race without breaking down. For $25,000 he bought four race cars and set up a syndicate consisting of the owners of the Indianapolis 500 racetrack.

He streamlined the Maxwells from the tires up; engines were overhauled and all extra weight removed, giving the cars an extra 10 to 12 miles per hour. Eddie designed a special cowl to protect drivers in rollovers. He paid the mechanics and other team members on an incentive basis from the net winnings. Days were long and tedious—seven a.m. till after dark—and Eddie introduced a phonograph to the garage so that every time work began to drag he would put on a stirring march or other fast-time music.

Out of thirteen major races that Eddie’s team entered in 1916, his Maxwells won seven. Counting revenues from sponsors and exhibitions the profit after expenses was $78,000;
^h
that total was not counting $60,000 Eddie had personally won. Late in the season Eddie decided to go to California to race with the Duesenberg team in Santa Monica for the American Grand Prize. There he had two fateful encounters that would change his life forever.

The first occurred a few days before the race when he was driving through Riverside, in the Moreno Valley about halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, and he spotted a flying machine parked beside a hangar. On an impulse, Eddie turned in because he’d never seen an airplane up close. As he was peering into the cockpit, the plane’s owner, a man about his own age, emerged from the hangar and immediately recognized him from the newspapers. He introduced himself as Glenn Martin.
ⁱ
The plane, Martin said, was a two-seat “bomber” he had designed for the U.S. Navy, and he said to Eddie, “Would you like to take a ride?”

Death-defying race car driver that he was, Rickenbacker had a fear of heights tracing back to the flying umbrella bicycle fiasco of his childhood. Even looking down from tall buildings made him dizzy. Also, at that point, Eddie held the airplane in low esteem. Barnstormers and stunt fliers were crashing and dying with such gruesome regularity that most Americans considered the flying machine “a deathtrap.” One would almost automatically have expected him to say no.

Instead, he said, “Sure,” and thus began his lifelong affair with aviation.
⁹

Once they were airborne Eddie had to screw up the courage to look down from the cockpit. The sensations of dizziness and fear were gone. Fascinated, Eddie marveled at being aloft, floating high above the roads and fields of the valley, while Martin hollered back, pointing out sights and landmarks above the engine’s roar. The landing unnerved Rickenbacker, because the ground had seemed to come up so swiftly, but he quickly got over it. They had been up for about thirty minutes and Eddie was so excited over the experience he couldn’t resist telling Martin about his vertigo, and wondering why it hadn’t occurred on the flight.

“It’s because there’s nothing to judge height by,” Martin told him. “There’s no edge to look over.”

The encounter with Glenn Martin was quickly followed by another chance meeting freighted with possibilities. Again, Eddie was driving through the countryside near Los Angeles when he passed by a cow pasture in which sat a single-seat U.S. Army biplane with a pilot standing beside it despondently staring at the engine. Eddie pulled over to see what could be done.

The pilot was a Major T. F. Dodd of the Army Air Service, which was then so lowly regarded by the military army brass that it was part of the Signal Corps. Dodd explained that he’d had to put the plane down in the pasture because its engine had lost power. “It runs,” Dodd said unhappily, “but does not deliver enough power to keep aloft.”

He asked Eddie if he knew anything about engines.

Eddie said he did.

Dodd spun the prop and the engine caught. Eddie quickly determined that the problem lay in the ignition system; upon further inspection he saw that a coupling had slipped off the magneto, which powered the plane’s electrical system. Eddie reinstalled the coupling and the engine performed splendidly. Rickenbacker didn’t know it but he’d made a friend who would change his fortunes at a most opportune moment.

*
(re-vers-moh) “Suddenly zooming up, then throwing the airplane over on to one wing, and kicking the tail around to the rear,” i.e., reversing direction.

†
In today’s money, worth $91.20.

‡
Glass blowers had an exceptionally high mortality rate, the causes of which were not well understood at the time. It was later attributed to toxic chemicals in the glass, especially colored glass.

§
Roughly $250,000 in today’s money.

‖
A cousin to the Firestone who started the motor tire empire.

a
Harroun eschewed having a mechanic ride with him—a first for this race—and in his place installed a gadget that proved to be a rearview mirror, according to Eddie, “The first one ever seen.”

b
Burman was killed in a racing accident in 1916.

c
Wilcox did not survive a race car crash in 1923.

d
Wishart died in a crash the following September.

e
Chandler was killed on the racetrack in 1924.

f
O’Donnell died in a racing wreck in 1920.

g
It was a custom of the times that in leap years women were permitted to propose to men.

h
About $1.5 million today.

i
Glenn L. Martin was president of the newly formed Wright-Martin Aircraft Company, founded with Wilbur and Orville Wright. Over the years it would merge into the giant Martin Marietta and eventually the Lockheed Martin aeronautics and aerospace conglomerate.

C
HAPTER
3

THE MAN WITH THE OUTSIDE LOOP

O
N THE FOGGY MORNING
of September 24, 1929, at Mitchel Field on New York’s Long Island, U.S. Army First Lieutenant James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle, already one of the world’s most famed aviators, strapped himself into the seat of a Consolidated NY-2 U.S. Navy training plane, stuck his head under a canvas hood, and, with no view whatsoever of the outside world, taxied, took off, flew around, and landed, using nothing but the crude navigational instruments beneath his shroud. By this singular, decisive feat Doolittle advanced aviation into the modern age, in which weather would no longer be a controlling factor in flying.

Doolittle started a colossal revolution; previously, pilots had been taught to mistrust instruments and fly by their instincts, to get the “feel of the plane”—in other words, to fly by seat of the pants. Pilots invariably let bravado get the better of them, and thousands of aviators worldwide perished in fog, rainstorms, blizzards, cloud banks, and dark of night during the nearly quarter century after the Wright brothers’ historic first flight.

Those were the days when flying was among the most dangerous of occupations. For example, thirty-one of the forty pilots hired by the U.S. Postal Service to deliver airmail between 1919 and 1926 were killed in crashes. “It was pretty much a suicide club,” one of them remarked later. Charles Lindbergh was one of these airmail pilots, but somehow he escaped death or serious injury, though he had to bail out of a crashing plane more than once. The most perilous aerial affliction was vertigo, which often comes on when a pilot cannot see the ground, usually because of fog or clouds. It confuses the senses, leading the flier to mistrust his instincts and his instruments (if he has them) and become unbalanced, sometimes thinking he is turning right when he is turning left, or climbing when he is actually losing altitude or stalling.
^*
By 1929 a handful of farsighted flight pioneers had concluded that “aviation could not progress until planes could fly safely day or night in almost any kind of weather.” Foremost among these was Dr. Jimmy Doolittle, recently armed with a PhD in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1928, already world famous as a test pilot and aerial racer, Doolittle was lent by the army to head up a group of fliers and scientists financed by Guggenheim money at Mitchel Field
^†
near Hempstead, Long Island, to investigate and provide solutions for “blind flying conditions” and “aircraft spin control.”

The day after Doolittle made his flight, the story’s headline in the
New York Times
read, “Blind Plane Flies 15 Miles and Lands: Fog Peril Overcome.” That was a bit of a stretch, but it would not be off the mark to say that Doolittle’s feat was a giant leap forward for the viability of commercial aviation.

J
AMES
H
AROLD
D
OOLITTLE WAS BORN
in Alameda, California, on December 14, 1896.
¹
His father, Frank Henry Doolittle, a carpenter, was descended from protestant Huguenots who fled religious persecution in France and settled in New England in the late 1700s or early 1800s. In the mid-1890s he married Doolittle’s mother, Rosa Cerenah Shephard, a strong-willed, twenty-six-year-old beauty of “sturdy pioneer stock.” James was their only child and their means were modest.

Frank Doolittle turned out to be one of the dreamers and wanderers who were constantly on the make for adventure and fortune. Less than six months after James Doolittle was born his father joined the frantic stampede known as the Klondike Gold Rush. Bad luck overtook him from the start when he lost all of his carpenter’s tools in a shipwreck on his way to the Yukon. He then made his way to Nome, Alaska, an Eskimo fishing village on a vast and treeless plain, bound by the bleakness of the Bering Sea.

Flakes of gold had been discovered along oceanfront beaches and the banks of the river that washed out of the distant mountains, and—much to the amazement and dismay of the Eskimos—an immense tent city soon materialized around Nome as thousands arrived to sift the sands for gold. Frank Doolittle prospected among them and put his carpentry skills to use as well, and in due time he sent for James and his mother, who arrived by steamer, after a trip of eight days and three thousand miles, in the summer of 1900.

Nome quickly became a typical gold-rush town, with an overabundance of gamblers and prostitutes. There was carpentry work for James’s father to perform; by the time James was five the town boasted a bank, three churches, six whorehouses, and twenty saloons. The next year a schoolhouse was added, which was where James—now known as Jimmy, learned to fight. Being the shortest boy in his class, Jimmy was subjected to teasing and provocations by his older, taller mates, and soon he gained a reputation for defending himself from insults.