HEROES: Durable Man

(7 of 7)

He divided the food: four oranges. After the famed seagull lit on his head, he seized it with a steady hand. He divided the fish which were pulled in on hooks baited with its intestines. When it rained, after eight horrible, parched days, he divided the water. He was a terrible figure. Gaunt, grey-haired, aching from old wounds, covered, like all his companions, with saltwater ulcers, he never lost the furious will to live. One man tried to commit suicide—to make more room for his comrades. Rickenbacker hauled him back, and cursed him bitterly. Another prayed for death. Rickenbacker cursed him too. Taunted into survival, the dazed, tortured, half-dying men on the rafts struggled to live—to hate Rickenbacker.

All but one—Sergeant Alexander Kaczmarczyk, who was weak from a long illness—survived until they were spotted, almost by chance, by a patrolling plane and rescued. Recovering, at a U.S. island base, most of them came to believe that they owea Rickenbacker their lives. The old flyer, a man of many axioms, fell back on one of his mother's favorites: Never think of yesterday. After two weeks of rest, he went stubbornly on with his inspection tour.

Cocky Assurance. In the years since the war Rickenbacker has become a quieter man. In 1947 he drank his last highball. He still goes to cocktail parties, and stands amid the crush to babble amiably while he holds a glass of ginger ale, but his favorite bars see him no more. There is still a look of cocky assurance to his big nose, his grin, the set of his heavy brows. Rickenbacker, the battered invincible, still flies endless miles along his system, still gets up before dawn to study reports of planes, weather, passenger revenues. But his violent years have left their mark; he limps stiffly with his left leg, and at times his weatherbeaten face is lined and drawn. He still loves life. A Howard Chandler Christy portrait of the young Rickenbacker hangs, bathed in light, in the foyer of his ten-room Manhattan apartment. A British overseas cap is cocked over the young pilot's bold and insolent eyes, ' a dashing camel's hair greatcoat rests on his shoulders, and spitting aircraft fill the wild blue sky behind his head. At times, late at night, Rickenbacker stops before it. Admiringly he says, "I was quite a fellow in those days." Then, grinning: "I'll fight like a wildcat until they nail the lid of my pine box down on me."