HEROES: Durable Man

(2 of 7)

Life With Father. The indomitability had cropped out in him early, though not in the sense approved by Horatio Alger. He was the third child (in a family of five boys, three girls) of a Swiss-born construction contractor named William Rickenbacher.* Father Rickenbacher was a big, black-haired man with a violent temper and a deep belief in the cultural influences of a razor strop. Eddie, on the other hand, was driven by an unconquerable urge to make up his own rules and see that everybody else played by them. "I was just ornery," he says.

The results of this clash of ideologies were one-sided. Though his father alternately thrashed him and treated him with puzzled affection, Eddie went his own way. He smoked, cigarettes by the time he was in the first grade, led a gang of roughnecks who specialized in swiping coal from railroad yards, and got into so many fights that he seemed to be trying to cultivate two permanent black eyes. But when his father died, he got a job as an apprentice glass blower at $3.50 a week, quit school, and tried his best to fill the old man's shoes. He was twelve at the time.

Internal Combustion. He was all sorts of things in the next three years—a foundry worker, a monument polisher (he carved his father's tombstone), a brewery hand, a railroad roustabout. But in 1905 he got a job in a garage, and fell in love forever with the internal-combustion engine.

He was on the road to fame & fortune at 16. Lee Frayer, manager of the Frayer-Miller Automobile Company, advertised his product by racing it. He took tough, skinny, worshipful Eddie Rickenbacker, already a crack mechanic, to Garden City, Long Island, to ride with him in the Vanderbilt Cup Race. Eddie found it an intoxicating experience. For the next six years —grease-stained, speed-mad, and thirsting for glory like an Osage brave—he crisscrossed the continent as a combination car salesman, trouble shooter, racing mechanic and dirt-track driver. Then, at 22, he hit for the big time on his own.

Rickenbacker eventually collected three Duesenbergs, plus a pound of good-luck charms, and a team of drivers, mechanics and pitmen to lead to the racing wars. It was a hard and dangerous life—Rickenbacker was almost beaten to death by flailing rubber when he blew a tire at 90 miles an hour at Galveston, and missed death by inches at St. Paul when his car somersaulted three times in the air.

He was equal to his trials. "It taught me to scheme," he says. "You didn't win races because you had more guts—you won because you knew how to take the turns and baby your engine. It wasn't all just shut your eyes and grit your teeth."

Rickenbacker became a headliner. In five years of trying, he never came in better than tenth in the soo-mile race at Indianapolis, but he set a new world speed record—134 m.p.h.—with a Blitzen-Benz at Daytona Beach. When the U.S. entered World War I he was making $40,000 a year, was one of three top U.S. drivers and a prime celebrity.