18 Feb 2019

Amelia Lost

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“Sometimes it’s hard to tell fact from fiction.”

So begins Candace Fleming’s Amelia Lost, in her foreword called “Navigating History.” Fleming wants her reader to know–up front, right from the start–that there was much she unearthed in her research that she had to leave out. Many a “telling incident or charming anecdote” turned out to be untrue: myth.

The “oft-repeated story” of Earhart seeing her first plane at the Iowa State Fair, 1908, could not have been true. There were no barnstormers just four-and-a-half years after Kitty Hawk, Fleming reminds us. Earhart mis-remembered.

Thus does Candace Fleming set the tone for her captivating biography of the iconic aviator. Reader beware, she says: expect no hero-worship; myths may be shattered.

 

One truth: Three alcoholic men played important roles in Earhart’s life and career. (And we wonder why women worked so hard to bring Prohibition into being.) As her father’s career in the railroad took off, life for the family was good. For a while. Then the perks turned corrosive. Fleming explains: “Soon he was drinking at lunchtime…then all afternoon…then staggering home from work two or three times a week.” “Dad’s Sickness,” as one of Fleming’s headings put it, brings Earhart’s on-the-upper-end-of-middle-class family to hard times. The parents separate yet Dad reappears in a later chapter, as good-naturedly supportive of Earhart in her teens as he was before alcoholism. To her credit, Fleming neither elides this episode nor passes judgment on the father.

Two heavy drinkers accompanied her on milestone flights, too: the Atlantic in 1928 and the ill-fated around-the-world attempt in 1937. Bill Stutz piloted in the first: “There is a madness to Bill,” wrote Amelia when Stutz went on a bender while fogged in at Halifax, “which is not in keeping with a pilot who has to fly.” Fred Noonan navigated on the second: “She knew he was a drinker,” Muriel Earhart said of her sister, “but she forgave him for it. She felt she had a particular understanding of the problem.” I would say so.

Another truth: aviation record-setting costs money. Fleming dedicates a large sidebar to “Earhart Enterprises,” the business and marketing side of Amelia Earhart. “I make a record [flight] and then I lecture on it. That’s where the money comes from. Until it’s time to make another record.” Image was as important as achievement, Fleming tells us. Her publishing-world eventually-to-be-husband worked behind the scenes to stir up ballyhoo and keep her name before the public. She endorsed products, as had become  in the 1920s: Kodak film, Stanavo engine oil, Hudson automobiles, and, though she never smoked, Lucky Strike cigarettes. [The ones my grandmother started smoking at that time and which would kill her forty-five years later.] A “donation” of $10,000 from the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association helped underwrite her record-setting flight from Hawaii to California.

News of this kind drew criticism. Aviation writer Alford Williams took her to task over another of her efforts: “Amelia Earhart’s ‘Flying Laboratory’ is the latest and most distressing racket that has been given to a trusting and enthusiastic public. There’s nothing in that ‘Flying Laboratory’ beyond duplicates of the controls and apparatus found on board every major airline transport….”

Hard truth: On at least one occasion Earhart and her lover-publicist George Putnam were, “Not Very Nice.” When British aviator Lady Mary Heath was scheduled to give lectures in the United States, Putnam convinced theater owners to cancel their contracts and hire Earhart instead. The friendship between the two aviators was a casualty of this underhandedness.

Fact: Amelia brushed off attempts to bring her up to speed on her plane’s radio communication system. Fleming reports that her radio instructor, Joseph Gurr, was “stunned” that she kept putting him off and ultimately gave him only an hour of her time. Her negligence was costly in the extreme. Nothing was more important in her final hours than establishing radio contact with the Itasca off Howland Island.

Another fact: An airfield on the spit of land that was Howland Island in the Pacific was funded by taxpayers (without their knowledge) on the authority of President Roosevelt (whose wife was one of the aviator’s biggest fans).  The two-week search that followed Earhart’s disappearance cost taxpayers an additional $4.9 million (about $60 million today). This in the height of the Depression. It crossed my mind more than once that Amelia Earhart was both foolish and selfish.

And yet…

Three-quarters of the way through the book, I read the following words: “Women, [Earhart] believed, should be encouraged to take chances. They should look beyond the comfort and security of marriage and instead ‘dare to live.'” On the next page, these about Earhart and her students at Purdue University: “Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Amelia led the discussions. ‘They centered around Miss Earhart’s belief that women…really did have choices about what we could do with our lives,’ recalled one student. ‘Study whatever you want,’ she counseled us girls. ‘Don’t let the world push you around.'” In another context these words might have sounded hackneyed to my ears. In the context of Fleming’s narrative, they carried a power that moved me. Was $5 million spent merely on one woman’s quest, or was it, rather, an investment in the cause of millions of Americans? Of course, it was the latter. Earhart inspired untold numbers of women to do what they had been told they couldn’t–to the immense benefit of the nation as a whole.

 

After completing the book, I flipped back the foreword with a deeper understanding of, and a new appreciation for, Fleming’s initial admonition about the —- of truth. These sentences stuck out:

  • “She was a celebrity with an image to maintain and almost everything she told the public was meant to enhance her image.”
  • “So Amelia Earhart (along with her husband George Putnam) took an active role in mythologizing her own life. She led the public to believe that her famous tousled hair was naturally curly, when in fact she took a curling iron to it each day.”
  • “Amelia Earhart was so much more than a pilot. She was a savvy businesswoman (and cutthroat competitor when necessary);…” And Fleming enumerates the professional accomplishments I had just finished reading about

But she ends, of course, with Earhart’s most enduring achievement, captured by the words of Eleanor Roosevelt. They come at the end of the foreword and, more important, of my experience with this important book: “She helped the cause of women by giving them a feeling that there was nothing they could not do.”

Fleming, Candace. Amelia Lost: The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart. New York: Schwartz & Wade Books, 2011: viii, 19, 54, 100, 59, 79, 85, 68, 92, 90, 105, 83-84, viii-ix.

6 Feb 2019

Eddie Rickenbacker, Ladies’ Man

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The Chicago Tribune declared him “a speed-mad, matrimony insulated-bachelor.” He “has but one love,” it said, “and that the thoroughbred of steel with which he pursues prize money.” Whenever he was asked if he had a girl, Eddie would insist, “I have always had one, the most wonderful sweetheart in the world, my little mother.” Really? Was he such a achievement-focused celibate? Was he really such a mama’s boy? In fact, the historical record shows clear glimpses of an actual human beneath the intensity he usually showed to the world. A human who, like the rest of us, felt sexual attraction.

As young as ten years old, Eddie “had this little sweetheart,” Blanche Calhoun. He would take walks with her after Sunday School and give her pictures that he had painted. She remained important to him for years. When he was promoted to head salesman and manager of Columbus Buggy Company, it was Blanche he chose to impress with his large salary. Somewhat clueless, he bought her a diamond ring and was surprised to learn the implications his gift carried. He skipped town even faster than you could say “Firestone-Columbus,” the name of his company’s new automobile.

A year earlier in Texas, Eddie’s eagerness to get back to town for a date with a girl led to a desperate attempt to revive his company automobile…which led to an unexpected solution to the overheating problem he had been sent to Texas to solve…which led to his promotion…which led to…well, a life that garnered at least five different biographies.

During his “speed-mad, matrimony-insulated” years, ages 22-26, he did, in fact, have a social life. He swore off alcohol and cigarettes, and made it a rule to retire by ten o’clock on race nights. (He was no Barney Oldfield!) But Eddie was striver and a climber. He wasn’t above schmoozing; he was wise enough to nurture the contacts he made. Many proved useful over the next four decades of his professional career. In L.A. he spent time on the Sennett set with Roscoe Arbuckle and Mabel Normand. He met Clifford Durant, son of G.M. founder, William Crapo Durant. More significantly, he met Cliff’s wife, Adelaide. She was destined to be one of the three most important women in Eddie’s life.

But first: the war. Recognizing that he was taking part in the most monumental event of his generation, Rickenbacker began keeping a journal in March 1918 to document his part in it. Accounts of aerial combat forms the bulk of the diary, yet references to attractive women are surprisingly numerous: seventeen in all over eight months of journal-keeping. They start on third entry: Eddie described his date as a “French maiden dark and rather small but has a sweet disposition as most French girls have.”

In July and August, suffering from an undiagnosed mastoid infection, Rick spent six weeks in hospital. Predictably, he developed crushes on his nurses: “Was visited by Miss Chase, a nurse here and a very sweet girl. Am hoping she will have dinner with me after I’m better. Have seen her before and have always wanted to meet her. As you see, fate is still kind.” And: “My little girlfriend came to the room and we had a very interesting chat. She’s a little Dear. Certainly would be a happy boy to have such a girl wonder about me now and then.” Then, in one of his longest sustained commentaries in the entire diary: “While sitting on the balcony listening, a little girl who is nursing here came up and ask me to go down with her. Would I? Gee, ten years of my life for the chance. Have seen her only a few times before but always came into me a thrill such as has been unknown in my past life. Then, after dinner she bought me some ice cream. Hardly let myself feel she may care. (Yet)”

An accurate diagnosis and effective surgery allowed Rick to rejoin his squadron in time for the St. Mihiel Offensive beginning September 12. Over the next eight weeks, he was promoted to commanding officer of his squadron and tallied twenty official kills against the enemy, on route to becoming America’s Ace of Aces. At the same time–somehow!–he was able to pursue a mini-romance with actress Lois Meredith–“that enchanting vision,” as one reporter described her.

He first saw her in a show at Rembercourt Aerodrome held in one of the hangars. Meredith, a modest success on stage and screen, was in a troupe of six American performers, entertaining members of the A.E.F in the war’s final weeks.  Three days later, Rickenbacker was introduced to the young actress at an officers’ party. His entry for the day: “Am very fond of Lois Meredith and know she is in favor of my acquaintance.”

Rick met her three times over the next two weeks, driving up to Fleury or down to Bar-le-Duc on days when pursuit patrols were rained out. He saw her twice more while on leave in Paris during the final weeks of the war. They dined at Maxim’s and even went shopping together. The former Columbus street urchin splurged on a greatcoat for 1,450 francs (probably about $4,000 today!). After the armistice, Lois Meredith exited the Eddie Rickenbacker story for good.

And Priscilla Dean entered it. Back in the States, Dean had told a reporter that she was “affianced” to the flying ace and papers ate up the story. “A hasty introduction” at the 1916 Grand Prize “led to a sturdy friendship in which lurked the germs of love,” gushed the reporter. When Dean bought her own motor car, the gallant Eddie showed her “how to adjust the carburetor.” Now the race driver was America’s Ace of Aces. Dean cashed in on her brief connection and wrote him a letter. An avid correspondent, Eddie responded perhaps a bit too effusively, using language eerily similar to some of his earlier diary entries (see above): “Gee, I’d give some years of my life for just one week in dear California…,” and, “Gee, I wish you were here to nurse me a wee bit.” After he saw the article, Eddie hustled this one back as fast as he had the diamond ring to Blanche Calhoun a decade earlier.

It wasn’t clear what Eddie would do with himself after the war. He had reached the highest peaks in the worlds of both auto racing and pursuit flying. What was there left for him to accomplish? Eddie would come up with something. Early on in his quest, he ran into Adelaide Durant on the streets of New York. Her husband had revealed himself to be an abusive drunk. Eddie was an attractive, if slightly rough-on-the-edges, war hero. The divorce took two years to finalize, but in September, 1922, Eddie and Adelaide were wed.

They took a six-week honeymoon to Europe, and for Eddie, at least, it was everything he imagined a honeymoon could be. Arriving in France, he wrote, “It’s just a dream. I wonder at times if it can be true, there seems so much happiness in life.” (There was life after the thrill of war, and it was good.) Upon returning to the States, he wrote, “I have never been happier in my life and I hope Adelaide feels the same way.” He felt as if the life before him would be an extended second honeymoon, “for we are returning to Detroit and our little home, which…is going to be a real love nest.” It sounds to me like the striver was at last ready to settle–settle down, become a husband and father, maybe even a bit of a homebody.

He didn’t. He returned to the mistress he was never able to give up: work. Work of the kind that is completely absorbing, that could bring him recognition and contribute substantially to the world. To assist him in this work he hired the woman who was one of the three most important in his life: Ms. Margaret Shephard. For forty years and more, Sheppy was Rickenbacker’s most trusted aide. She accompanied him in the office all six or seven days of the week. She typed almost every official word he wrote. She covered for many of the mistakes he made.

There is no evidence of sexual feelings between employer and employee. If anything, Sheppy played a kind of maternal role for Rickenbacker (despite her younger age and his actual mother’s continued existence). Eddie had always adored his mother. She had interceded on his behalf against his father’s rages, and, after his father’s death, he strove to look out for her. He paid off the mortgage on her house at about the same time he bought a diamond ring for Blanche Calhoun. Sheppy looked out for the adult Eddie into his dotage, and Eddie always treated her as family. Looking back, William Rickenbacker, the Captain’s elder son, declared Sheppy to be “as much a member of the family as I am.”

And Adelaide? Sexual intimacy between husband and wife must have been relatively rare in the Rickenbacker marriage. (He didn’t have time! As he responded to a reporter who asked him if he thought aviation would ever take the place of sex, “It has for me son.”) Even so, the two looked out for each other, as much as mother and son had. Adelaide’s squeaky-wheel persistence was as instrumental to her husband’s Pacific raft rescue as Eddie’s gutty determination. She prodded the government to extend its search and rescue operation three more critical days, which made the difference in his (and the crew’s) ultimate survival.

In their eighties, both husband and wife declined. Eddie underwent emergency surgery for an aneurysm. Adelaide was gradually going blind. The best ophthalmological surgeon Eddie could locate was in Switzerland so they boarded a plane for the Continent. Soon after arrival, Eddie contracted pneumonia and died.

Good thing Sheppy, his aide of forty-eight years, was on hand to arrange affairs and see that Adelaide, his wife of fifty-one years, returned safely to the United States with his ashes.

Sources:

Images:

29 Jan 2019

Ham Coolidge, Gentleman Ace

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He was no Eddie Rickenbacker. He did not grow up poor, was not forced to drop out of school and work on factory floors after his father’s untimely death. He did not need boundless energy and ambition just to escape the clutches of financial insecurity. Far from it. Hamilton Coolidge was born to both security and privilege.

When he entered the Hat-in-the-Ring Squadron in April, 1918, he was a graduate of an elite East Coast boarding school, on leave from Harvard, and the close friend of Quentin Roosevelt. Sounding like Jay Gatsby, he admonished his younger brother in a letter to “get husky and wise at Groton this year, old boy.” He appears to have had the natural talent that often accompanies the well-born, too. At least one of his comrades thought him one of the two best aviators in the squadron.

Fortune knows no favorites, though, and Coolidge had a string of bad luck in his early months. He had to make the first forced landing during training at Issoudun in December 1917, clipping a tree with his wing tip. “Poor old Ham,” wrote fellow aviator Douglas Campbell. “Didn’t get a scratch himself, but the machine was all smashed up, and he has been badly kidded ever since.”

As members of the 94th and 95th squadrons began racking up victories against Boches fliers in the May and June, Coolidge remained winless. Even when he teamed up with Jimmy Meissner to bring down an enemy plane he did not receive official credit, “as we were too far inside their lines for our observation balloons to see it,” he explained. But Coolidge never griped about his ill luck. He understood that it was all in the game. “Conditions are very seldom right for a good combat at equal odds.” If one or the other side is outnumbered they invariably turn tail and head for their own side of the line. Besides, he recognized that he was in good company. “Some of our best pilots have never had the luck to be in a position where they could have shot a Boche down.”

We know so much about Ham Coolidge because he was such a diligent correspondent. “I must write fast and briefly,” he opened to his mother on October 5, before going on to pen a fifteen-hundred-word letter. (His letter of September 15 was closer to two thousand words.) He had an obvious love for each member of his family and wrote each one as often as war would allow. “Beloved Mother,” “Mother Dear” “Dearest Mammy,” are some of the ways this warrior of the air greeted his mother in his letters.

The letters are rich in detail about the mechanics aerial combat, and they are satisfying for the light they shed on their author. The overriding sense we get of Ham Coolidge is one of humility. He is generous in his praise of others, and revealingly honest about himself. Telling of his latest scrape, when he and eight others were ambushed by a formation of “eighteen more Boches,” he writes, “I don’t mind saying I was thoroughly scared. …fortunately our Spads are very fast and that is what saved us.” (Note: not superior aerial ability.) In a later, one-on-one dogfight, Coolidge admits matter-of-factly, “I…managed things so unskillfully that I found I was the goat.”

Coolidge is even modest about his modesty. That is, he does not overindulge his self-deprecation. Nor is he afraid to share his excitement at taking part in an otherwise horrifying war: “The end of the scrap would have been sad had we been fighting with human beings [instead of planes?], but I frankly confess that a thrill of pleasure came over me as I saw the flames burst out.” There are many moments like this, Coolidge sharing the blow-by-blow of aerial combat: “We circled, twisted, and dived and always the black bursts appeared at the spot where we had been only a fraction of a second before. It was absolutely thrilling.” He obviously is keen to share his exploits with his family, but he is equally reluctant to have them shared in the wider community. “Lu, for goodness’ sake,” he begs his sister, “be a sport and don’t talk about the junk I write in these letters.” After all, “there are a few thousand other men in the air service all doing the same thing.”

In mid-July Coolidge lost his Harvard buddy, “Q,” as he called Quentin. But in early August he finally broke through with his first official kill. (“…but why make a fuss about it. People are doing it every day….”) Then the Allies went on the offensive in September, and Coolidge came into his own. After a particularly satisfying balloon-strafing mission he explained his elation, saying, “I felt as if we had just won a Yale game!” In a single sortie on October 3, he scored three victories in a matter of minutes. (“…it was due to no cleverness or bravado on my part…”) He became an ace and the American pursuit pilot with the second most official victories after Eddie Rickenbacker. He was promoted but felt keenly uncomfortable about it, saying, “I don’t know any conceivable reason why I should have been made a Captain while our Commanding Officer, a man with eighteen official Boches…and admittedly one of the best C.O.’s on the front, remains a lieutenant.” Coolidge was being disingenuous. He well knew how he and the other Ivy leaguers had given Rick a hard time in their early days at Issoudun. The issue was class then, and it was class now. But Coolidge had lived and flown with Rick for six months, and his views had expanded and changed.

Ham Coolidge only outranked his C.O. a few weeks. Rick was soon promoted to Captain. In the meantime, there were rumors of the end of the war, and Coolidge felt an unbidden awkwardness: “This peace talk is awfully bad for a fighter, because when a man starts to get ‘careful’ of himself, he stands the best chance of getting killed.” He assures his mother that her “Hammy will forget about [the rumors]” and carry on as before. He got killed anyway. On a routine protection patrol, escorting bombers on their return from Germany, Captain Coolidge’s Spad took a direct hit from an anti-aircraft shell. It had been at least five months since he and his comrades had accustomed themselves to “Archies,” their concussions, buffeting their planes into disconcerting rolls and yaws. They had long since lost their terror of Archies and relegated them in their minds to mere nuisance. Nevertheless, on the morning of October 27, the “black burst” did not miss. This time the Archie got him. It was plain bum luck. In his war memoir, Fighting the Flying Circus, Eddie Rickenbacker explained the tragedy succinctly: “For no other American pilot, and but one or two other aviators during the whole course of the war were shot down from on high by and Archie in full flight.”

The best surviving photo of Ham Coolidge shows him looking over his right shoulder from the cockpit of his plane. His leather pilot’s jacket rides high up his neck, but his head is clear of goggles or hood, and his hair is neatly combed. He is smiling, a half-dimple in his cheeks. His dark eyes, looking just askew of the camera’s gaze, radiate warmth. Ham Coolidge was a gentleman in every sense of the word. Born to privilege, he recognized his duty to serve. He felt no need for glory but rather was eager to share credit with others, including God. “The feeling I have on looking back on three victories in an hour is not on of triumphant power. It is rather a feeling, stronger than ever, that we mortals are mere specks of dust on the wind, blown about at His pleasure….” This was not the kind of attitude one needed to become America’s Ace of Aces. It was not the mindset of a man who would become president and CEO of one of the country’s most important companies.

Not like Eddie Rickenbacker.

Rick was not a gentleman in the narrow sense. His education came so obviously from the city streets, the shop floor, and the highly competitive world of automotive racing; not the rarified halls of Groton and Harvard. Rick was self-taught and had the unseemly (to a gentleman) air of a striver. Rick was not the most skilled pilot in the squadron, but he was the most single-mindedly focused. Rick worked harder than anyone and had an unquestioned ability to lead. He cared deeply about the men of the 94th and they, in turn, respected him boundlessly. Rick needed their respect. His ambition was driven by a need for attention and a need to make his mark on the world. (When a visiting American reporter showed up at the Rembercourt airfield, Rick invited him to stay with the squadron for a few days. He pointed to an empty cot, indicating that it was available, Captain Coolidge having been killed just that morning. Ouch!) Yet Rick had high praise for Coolidge in Fighting the Flying Circus. Coolidge, he wrote, was “on of the top score aces and one of the most popular men in the service. …He possessed all the qualifications of leadership and a brilliant career in any profession he might have chosen to adopt.”

Ham Coolidge, had he lived, would be hardly more remembered than he is now. He would have returned to the United States, begun a career, built a family, lived a quiet life. He might have done important things; he surely would have done them well, as Rickenbacker suggested. But he would have shunned attention. He would not have become an “American hero” as Rickenbacker did. The world is made of all kinds of people. We can be grateful for the Rickenbackers of the world, but equally so for the Ham Coolidges.

Sources:

 

10 Jan 2019

Timing is (Almost) Everything

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Biographies of Eddie Rickenbacker bear titles and subtitles such as “Enduring Courage,” “An American Hero of the Twentieth Century,” “Rickenbacker’s Luck.” Would these books and these epithets have been written had things happened, not so much differently as, at different times?

If his father had died earlier, when Eddie was just a child, would he have felt such a need to take over the mantle of provider for the family? If he had been older, already entered in the work force, would  his drive to succeed have been as intense?

What is beyond question is that he was born at just the right time to become a path-setter in both the automotive and aviation fields. In 1906, at the age of fifteen, Eddie worked elbow-to-elbow with experienced machinists building motor cars from the ground up. He learned craft every part that went into their machines (except for the rubber tires). Problem solving and engineering ingenuity came with the job description.

Automotive engineering led to racing, and by 1916 Eddie was a national figure, finishing third in the AAA standings. An opportunity to drive a British-made Sunbeam (and possibly win the next year’s championship) brought Eddie to the UK at a critical time. Brookland’s Speedway had been commandeered by the Royal Flying Corps for its pilot training center. Rick (as he was becoming known) was intrigued, especially when he saw planes fly down the Thames, like motor cars down a race track. While working with Sunbeam, unrestricted U-boat operations resumed in January; the Zimmerman Telegram was revealed and American diplomatic relations with Germany revoked in February. Rick hustled home by steamer before war could be declared. When it was, in April, Rick made flying for his country his primary goal.

Rick distinguished himself in the air just as he had done on the track. Through hard work and single-minded focus, by balancing fearlessness with prudence, ambition with humility, Eddie went on to become a squadron commander and America’s Ace of Aces. Bad luck kept him from acing as soon as he would have liked, but good luck kept him alive after making numerous early mistakes. Was it bad luck when he was grounded by ear pain in July and again in August? Eddie’s biographer believes that Rick’s recuperation in hospital allowed him time to evaluate his performance and make mental adjustments to his tactics. Missing nearly eight weeks during the hotly-contested Chateau-Thierry campaign greatly reduced the odds of a fatal or incapacitating wound ending his war career.

Returning home a hero after the war, Captain Eddie (as he became popularly known) experienced a prime case of bad timing: Commercial aviation did yet not exist to employ his talents. Captain Eddie went back to automotive engineering, this time as the designer of a passenger car for the mid-market buyer. One of his innovations, four-wheel brakes, was apparently ahead of its time. The marketing disaster that ensued led to his company’s bankruptcy. (In truth, this was less a case of bad timing than of the venality of his competitors.)

An American airline industry did eventually take off, as it were, and Captain Eddie did maneuver his way to the top of its corporate ladder. By creating his own opportunities and taking advantage of events as they occurred, Rickenbacker made himself the owner and chief executive of one of the nation’s Big Four airlines. Yet here, too the timing of his birth in history was as important (almost) as Eddie’s perspicacity and single-minded ambition. That is, he lived at a time when a self-educated grade school dropout could still rise to the top of a corporation. Though he brought two of the twentieth century’s most defining technologies into prominence, Rickenbacker is more often seen as a product of the late nineteenth century, an embodiment of Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches–or at least of street-urchin-to-national-hero-and-corporate executive. Rickenbacker was a passionate believer in the American Dream because he had lived it. Unfortunately, the American Dream was losing its luster for many Americans in the last third of the Ace’s life.

Indeed, by 1950 Rickenbacker seemed to outlive his time. As the country adapted to a new economy and adopted a new meaning of “liberal” in the aftermath of the Depression, Rickenbacker began to feel out of step with his world. More and more, he spoke out about the values that had always motivated him: self-reliance, hard work, and freedom. But fewer and fewer people listened; more and more called him a crank. He was eventually pushed out of “his” company, and for the first time in almost sixty years, Rickenbacker found himself with time on his hands. It was not a condition he was at all comfortable with. He quickly created a project to occupy himself: the organizing of his papers and the (ghost-) writing of his autobiography. For a full year and more he dictated his story to his ghostwriter, reliving in his mind the glory years of his past.

But all good things must pass, and Rickenbacker had seven more years left to live. Good timing would have shaved off at least five of them.

Sources:

Lewis, W. David. Eddie Rickenbacker: an American hero in the twentieth century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Rickenbacker, Eddie V. Fighting the Flying Circus. New York: Doubleday, 1965 (1919).

Rickenbacker, Edward V. Rickenbacker. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.

Ross, John F. Enduring Courage: ace pilot Eddie Rickenbacker and the dawn of the age of speed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014.

Serling, Robert J. From the Captain to the Colonel: An Informal History of Eastern Airlines. New York: Dial Press, 1980.