HEROES: Durable Man

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Heroes, like Hudson River shad, are a notably perishable commodity; no matter how brightly they may gleam when they are hauled into public view, they have a disconcerting tendency to spoil if they are left in the sun. Those who do not go gracefully to an early grave often fall easy prey to baldness, fallen arches and the horrors of earning a living. Even if they avoid relief rolls, and skid-road bars, they are still apt to end up squirting old ladies with water pistols at American Legion conventions.

By all the rules of fate and chance, that scarred and willful old warbird, Edward Vernon Rickenbacker, should have been back home in Columbus, Ohio last week with a cane, a bad temper, a book of yellowed clippings and a half interest in a suburban gas station. Instead, after 38 years of derring-do, he was one of America's most famous and successful men—not only a kind of Buffalo Bill of the gasoline age, but an intimate of rulers, and a self-made captain of industry as well.

The Survivor. The tale of his 22 days on a raft in mid-Pacific was one of the most publicized adventures of World War II. Though his record of aerial victory in World War I (21 German planes, four observation balloons) was beaten by 22 U.S. fighter pilots in the vaster air battles of World War II, most Americans, at the mention of combat in the skies, still instinctively remembered Rickenbacker's name first. There were also thousands of grey-haired citizens who remembered him as a helmeted and goggled speed demon of the U.S. automobile race tracks.

But last week, at 59, big (6 ft. 2 in.) spare, greying Eddie Rickenbacker was far more than a bemedaled old soldier with a game leg and a good press. As president and general manager of Eastern Air Lines, he was one of the shrewdest, toughest, most highly admired and ferociously damned of U.S. businessmen, and the only living human soul who had ever been able to wring consistent profits from that debt-ridden peacock of modern transport, the airline industry.

As such, he was a completely individualistic and often baffling combination of Daddy Warbucks, Captain Midnight, Scrooge and Salesman Sam. A product of McGuffey's Reader and the International Correspondence Schools, he had a fierce faith in God and in the attitudes and platitudes (an honest day's work for an honest day's pay) of the last century. He was a living, brave and battered testimonial to his credo.

He was driven by pride, rather than narrow acquisitiveness. He had a Spartan sense of duty, discipline and self-control. He was an airman's airman who respected a good mechanic as another man might respect a concert pianist, and who felt that all good pilots were touched with greatness. He liked to see other .men succeed. He had a hellraiser's humor and an odd humbleness which prevented him from posing as a man of destiny. And at his core—steely, stainless and incorruptible—was a gladiator's indomitability.