** The first chapter from the newly released book, The Many Lives of Eddie Rickenbacker **
When he was about twelve years old, Eddie Rickenbacker tried to “fly” a bike off a barn roof. Not so far away, the Wright Brothers were developing what would become the world’s first self-powered aircraft. Eddie’s flying machine was a little more primitive.
He found an old bike and removed the tires so the metal rims would speed down the corrugated metal roof. “Steel against steel,” he said. To the handlebars, he tied a large umbrella, the kind that street peddlers use to mount on their wagons. Eddie didn’t know what would happen when he landed, but he and his partner, Sam Wareham, dumped a pile of sand below the eaves to break their fall, just in case. Sam would go second, but he never got his chance. The umbrella popped, Eddie crashed, and the bike was a total loss. Thanks to the sand pile, Eddie was just shaken up.
What kind of a kid rides an umbrella-bike off a twenty-five-foot roof?
One with a lot to prove, certainly. A boy grasping at greatness even at the risk of failure. The kid on the barn roof was more than a little reckless, but also smart enough to take precautions, just in case. He was, above all, unafraid of “learning the hard way,” no matter the pain. (And what could be more painful than a crash-landing from twenty-five feet?) That was the kind of boy Eddie Rickenbacker was. Those were the traits that shaped the kind of man he became.
Eddie Rickenbacker’s disastrous first flight ended in a crash-landing, but it did not stop him from becoming a giant in the field of aviation when he grew up. That first flight might have killed him, but it was just one of dozens of crack-ups, near misses, and brushes with death that marked his long and productive life. It would be a life so full and so
often saved from disaster, one could be forgiven for thinking it was many, many more than just one.
Edward Rickenbacker was born October 8, 1890, in Columbus, Ohio, the third of eight children of William and Lizzie Rickenbacher. Mary and Bill came before Eddie, who was followed by Emma, Luise (dead before her third birthday), Louis, Dewey, and Albert. His parents started their lives as Wilhelm Rickenbacher and Liesl Basler in the German-speaking region of northwest Switzerland. Each, separately, emigrated to America for opportunity. Liesl sought independence from a large, confining family. Wilhelm dreamed of starting his own construction business. Each chose Columbus because of its large German-speaking population. To better fit into their adopted country, they Americanized their first names to William and Lizzie.
(Years later, during the war with Germany, Eddie changed the spelling of his last name. He swapped the “h” for a second “k” to make it appear less German. For clarity, this book will use the spelling Rickenbacker later adopted, even when writing about his earlier years.)
In Columbus, Lizzie and William met, married, and built a family together in their own home, two miles southeast of downtown. “The little house on Livingston Avenue,” as Eddie called it, was the end of the line at that time, the outer limits of the city. No pavement covered the street. No gas or running water reached the inside of its walls—certainly no electricity did. The Rickenbacker home was surrounded by empty lots and scattered houses which gave way, on the south and east, to farmland all the way to the horizon and beyond.
Alas, William’s American Dream kept slipping from his grasp. More than once, he tried to start his own business, but each time it failed. In and out of a handful of brewery and building jobs, he remained a wage laborer. Lizzie took in laundry to add to their income, but hard times were the Rickenbackers’ “constant companions,” as Lizzie put it. They made do with little and grew or raised what they could not buy with money. The children all chipped in. They hoed and weeded the garden, harvested its potatoes, cabbages, and turnips. They picked grapes from the vines, gathered eggs from the chickens in the “barn.” Eddie looked after the goats, staking them in empty lots to graze.
He learned to hustle for other things the family needed, or he wanted. Sometimes that meant stealing. There was an especially good walnut tree on a farm down Alum Creek. He and his big brother, Bill, would go down with a sack and, like squirrels, stock up for winter. Once Eddie fell from a high branch and was “knocked senseless . . . for about
an hour.” Other times, the brothers scrounged coal dropped along the tracks or swiped it from coal cars. Twice Eddie was almost run over by a switching car but was rescued at the last second by Bill.
More often, hustling meant working as many odd jobs as he could find: setting up pins at the local bowling alley; delivering papers for the Columbus Dispatch; hauling jugs of water and beer to farm workers; collecting rags, bones, and scrap metal to sell to the junkman. Eddie insisted he didn’t mind the work. He called it “a privilege.”
School was mostly not a privilege. Classmates mocked his German accent, calling him “Dutchy” or “Kraut.” One year, they ridiculed his mismatched shoes: brown and rounded on one foot, yellow and pointed on the other. “As far as my studies were concerned,” Eddie said, “I had no trouble with them. The only difficulty I had was because of the mischief I got into.” He said he got into a lot of fights and played hooky whenever he could get away with it (and even when he couldn’t). He was “sort of the leader”11 of the Horsehead Gang, which took its name from the sign on the local horse track, called the Driving Park, down the street. The gang built a tree house of scavenged lumber where they hung out and smoked cigarettes, undisturbed by adults. One time, the gang went up and down Miller Avenue breaking streetlamps, like common hoodlums. William gave Eddie a severe thrashing when the police showed up at the door. Another time, they took rides on a loading cart down the tracks at the local gravel pit. The cart ran over Eddie’s leg and gave him a serious gash.
Mr. and Mrs. Rickenbacker worried about Eddie’s misbehavior. “You’ll wind up in reformatory and be a jailbird,” they warned. William beat him, in frustration. Lizzie wept, in desperation.
Young Eddie began to think of himself as “the black sheep of the family,” but he was not only that. He had a sensitive side, too. He was, he said, “crazy about painting watercolors,” and “particularly fond of flowers and scenery and animals.” He developed a crush on a girl in Sunday school and painted pictures for her. He was “sweet on” his third-grade teacher, Miss Alexander, too. In the spring, he brought her flowers picked from neighbors’ gardens on the way to school: tulips, lilacs, and peonies, each kind as it came into season. In time, Miss Alexander grew suspicious, and the neighbors began to complain. Eddie received two thrashings for his thievery, one at school and one
at home.
Eddie showed a creative side, too, and a budding interest in speed. He and his friends designed “push-mobiles”16 out of discarded boards and baby carriage wheels. They laid out a large dirt track and held races. And, of course, he designed an umbrella-bike to “fly” off a barn roof. It didn’t work the way he planned, but at least it showed he was thinking.
Unknown to young Eddie, trouble was brewing in his world—trouble more serious than any he and his friends could think up. After years of trying to become his own boss, William remained a common laborer, working for wages. He wasn’t getting ahead, and he wasn’t pulling his family out of poverty. Frustration and resentment built up
inside him.
On a hot July day, while taking a lunch break with the sidewalk-laying crew, William lost his cool. An unemployed man strolled by, asking for a handout, and William was insulted. “If I had any dinner to share with any person I would share it with my children,” he growled. Words escalated into threats, threats into actions. The other man took up a heavy tool—in self-defense, he later said—and bashed William across the head. Later that day, Eddie learned his father was in a coma in the hospital. William clung to life for a month before ultimately giving up his struggle.
The parental support William had provided, along with his income, however modest, vanished with his unexpected death. The night after the funeral, Eddie woke to hear his mother quietly sobbing. Walking downstairs, he saw her seated at the kitchen table, head in her hands. The sight was enough to banish whatever mischief still existed in
his thirteen-year-old self. “Mama,” he promised, “I’ll never make you cry again.”
The next day Eddie dropped out of school and went to work. His days of troublemaking were over. It was time to become a man.
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