Hero is far too modest a word to describe Eddie Rickenbacker. Racing driver, World War 1 ace, Medal of Honor winner, holder of no fewer than seven Distinguished Service Crosses, car manufacturer, Indianapolis Speedway owner, Pacific Ocean crash survivor, founder of Eastern Airlines. Not even superhero comes close.
What makes one man capable of achieving so much? Well, faced with a tough situation, Eddie would often say, “I’ll fight like a wildcat.” That mindset, tempered by enormous reserves of courage, determination, character and a penchant for taking risks, made him one of the greatest superheroes of all time—a definition that gets a little closer to summing him up.
Way before he joined the U.S. Army he was one of America’s best racing drivers. He competed in a total of 42 top races, won seven of them and was ranked third in the 1916 AAA National Championship.
Edward Vernon Rickenbacker was born to Swiss-German immigrant parents in Columbus, Ohio, on October 8, 1890. His father William was killed in a construction site accident on August 26, 1904 when Eddie was 13, so the boy left school, went to work and did a correspondence course in automotive engineering in his spare time. At 15, he marched into the Frayer-Miller car manufacturing plant in Columbus and asked for a job. Lee Frayer turned him down flat because of his age, but next morning Rickenbacker went to work for the company regardless and did such a good job cleaning its workshop that Frayer took him on.
Eddie got his first whiff of motor racing in 1906, when Frayer asked the boy to be his riding mechanic in the American Elimination Trial, from which five cars would be selected to compete in the Vanderbilt Cup. They practiced for a couple of days and, true to form, Rickenbacker felt confident, but he hadn’t reckoned on a tire that blew at 60 mph. They replaced that easily enough, but when they got going again the engine started overheating, making fatal clattering noises, and the oil pressure went through the roof so Frayer stopped the car; trial over.
Frayer-Miller went down the tubes soon after that, so Lee joined the Columbus Buggy Company in 1907 as chief car designer, taking Rickenbacker with him. By the time he was 17, the boy was running the test department and the up to 15 men who worked in it.
The 1910 Red Oak, Iowa, dirt track race was Eddie’s first taste of driving in a competitive event, but it didn’t last long. His Firestone-Columbus flew off the track and smashed into a fence, leaving Rickenbacker bruised and badly shaken, but still bent on becoming a racing driver. He jumped in at the deep end in 1911, when he became Frayer’s relief driver in the inaugural Indianapolis 500 Sweepstakes. He piloted the Red Wing Firestone-Columbus for more than 350 of the race’s 500 miles and brought it home 13th out of 40 starters. Eddie really thought his ship had come in when Frayer retired from competition just before the 1912 Indy and handed his racecar to the youngster, who promptly entered the race, but a crankshaft bearing went while he was holding fourth spot, so that was that.
The Columbus Buggy Company eventually went bust in 1912, leaving Rickenbacker without a job, so he became a professional racing driver, duking it out at Iowa country fairs until he had a run-in with the AAA and his license was suspended. So he went to work as a mechanic for the Duesenberg brothers in Des Moines, where they were building racecars for the Mason Automobile Company. After Eddie got his license back, he competed in the 1913 Columbus race. It was a 200-mile event, but the Mason only lasted 107 of them before its driveshaft broke and the youngster was out. He won his first major race in 1914 in a Duesenberg. It was the 300-mile Sioux City contest, in which he beat some of the big names of the day, including Barney Oldfield and Vanderbilt Cup winners Harry Grant and Ralph Mulford.
Photo: IMS Photo
Rickenbacker moved to Peugeot for the 1914 Corona race, but that blew up in his face when a driveshaft went after 37 laps. The Peugeots didn’t turn out to be the hyper-competitive cars Eddie thought they were, so he joined Barney Oldfield and Bill Carlson at the Maxwell Automobile Company. His first race for the new team was the 1915 American Grand Prize, but torrential rain eventually soaked through his ignition wires after only 40 of the race’s 104 3.9-mile laps and he retired again. Ironically, Dario Resta won the event in Eddie’s old Peugeot. Same thing happened in the Vanderbilt Cup race: Rickenbacker dropped out with a broken engine and Resta’s Peugeot won.
Eddie continued to campaign the Maxwell, but the 1915 Indy slipped through his fingers; in fact, he never did win that event even though he tried five times. He did win the Sioux City event for the second successive year, then went on to victory in the Omaha Derby. By this time, Maxwell had had its fill of racing, so Rickenbacker scraped enough money together, plus sponsorship, to buy the four dormant Maxwells and completely rebuild them. He won the 1915 Providence race on the new one-mile Narragansett Park circuit in his newly named Maxwell Special and finished fifth in the AAA national ranking.
Rickenbacker still ran the Maxwell Specials in 1916, when he won the 150-mile Sheepshead Bay event at an average of 96.2 mph, then he took the win in the Montamarathon-Potlach Trophy at the Pacific Coast Speedway in Tacoma, Washington, by overtaking Tommy Milton’s Duesenberg 26 laps from the end, and also won the Ascot Derby near Los Angeles in a Duesenberg. He ended up third in that year’s AAA National Championship, which was won by Dario Resta.
After training, Eddie joined the First World War American Expeditionary Force in 1917 and was attached to the new 94th Aero Pursuit Squadron after learning to fly in his spare time. He shot down his first German plane on April 29, 1918, and his fifth barely a month later to become an ace. He ended up with 26 kills—22 German aircraft and four observation balloons—and that made him the Ace of Aces.
Photo: IMS Photo
In 1930, Rickenbacker was awarded the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry in the war, to which his seven Distinguished Service Crosses for extraordinary heroism also testified so eloquently.
After the war, Eddie turned his talents to building his own cars. He founded the Rickenbacker Motor Company in 1921 and made well-styled, mid-range automobiles for six years until his company went under. In 1927 he bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and managed to keep that going through the harsh post-Wall Street Crash years. When he set up a live broadcast of the Memorial Day Indianapolis 500 it established the race as a national institution, but with the arrival of WWII he closed the circuit in 1941 and it stayed that way for the duration. In 1945, he sold the Speedway to Terre Haute businessman Tony Hulman.
Next, Rickenbacker founded Florida Airways, sold it to Pan-Am, then became VP of the General Aviation Corporation and later boss of its Eastern Air Transport, which he then moulded into Eastern Air Lines.
During the Second World War, Eddie toured U.S. bases in the Pacific. On the way from one of them, his B-17 ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean, where he and the crew drifted for 22 days without food or water before being rescued.
In 1963, Eddie retired from Eastern, of which he had become chairman and CEO, and three years later published his autobiography: it sold a quarter of a million copies. He had a heart attack in October 1972 and died of pneumonia in Switzerland on July 23, 1973.
