Durable Man

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Heroes, like Hudson River shad, are a notably perishable commodity; no matter how brightly they may gleam when they are hauled into public view, they have a disconcerting tendency to spoil if they are left in the sun. Those who do not go gracefully to an early grave often fall easy prey to baldness, fallen arches and the horrors of earning a living. Even if they avoid relief rolls, and skid-road bars, they are still apt to end up squirting old ladies with water pistols at American Legion conventions.

By all the rules of fate and chance, that scarred and willful old warbird, Edward Vernon Rickenbacker, should have been back home in Columbus, Ohio last week with a cane, a bad temper, a book of yellowed clippings and a half interest in a suburban gas station. Instead, after 38 years of derring-do, he was one of America's most famous and successful men--not only a kind of Buffalo Bill of the gasoline age, but an intimate of rulers, and a self-made captain of industry as well.

The Survivor. The tale of his 22 days on a raft in mid-Pacific was one of the most publicized adventures of World War II. Though his record of aerial victory in World War I (21 German planes, four observation balloons) was beaten by 22 U.S. fighter pilots in the vaster air battles of World War II, most Americans, at the mention of combat in the skies, still instinctively remembered Rickenbacker's name first. There were also thousands of grey-haired citizens who remembered him as a helmeted and goggled speed demon of the U.S. automobile race tracks.

But last week, at 59, big (6 ft. 2 in.) spare, greying Eddie Rickenbacker was far more than a bemedaled old soldier with a game leg and a good press. As president and general manager of Eastern Air Lines, he was one of the shrewdest, toughest, most highly admired and ferociously damned of U.S. businessmen, and the only living human soul who had ever been able to wring consistent profits from that debt-ridden peacock of modern transport, the airline industry.

As such, he was a completely individualistic and often baffling combination of Daddy Warbucks, Captain Midnight, Scrooge and Salesman Sam. A product of McGuffey's Reader and the International Correspondence Schools, he had a fierce faith in God and in the attitudes and platitudes (an honest day's work for an honest day's pay) of the last century. He was a living, brave and battered testimonial to his credo.

He was driven by pride, rather than narrow acquisitiveness. He had a Spartan sense of duty, discipline and self-control. He was an airman's airman who respected a good mechanic as another man might respect a concert pianist, and who felt that all good pilots were touched with greatness. He liked to see other .men succeed. He had a hellraiser's humor and an odd humbleness which prevented him from posing as a man of destiny. And at his core--steely, stainless and incorruptible--was a gladiator's indomitability.

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.

"Daredevil Dutchman." He was one of the first to enlist. The British government was partly responsible. He had gone to England in 1916 to consult with Sunbeam Motors, Ltd., and had discovered, to his astonishment, that his name made him an object of suspicion. The British--who had read U.S. sport pages and had discovered that he was called the "Happy Heinie," the "Daredevil Dutchman," and the "Wild Teuton"--detained him on arrival, took his shoes apart looking for messages, and scrubbed his chest with lemon juice in the hope of developing secret writing. When he returned to the U.S. a British agent followed him.

Seven weeks after the U.S. declared war, Rickenbacker was sworn in as a sergeant, went overseas as a driver attached to General Pershing's staff. He had a stroke of luck--he was assigned to drive Billy Mitchell around France in a Hudson Super-Six. He badgered the famed airman for a chance to fly. Mitchell finally gave in.

Ostracized. He lied about his age (he was almost 27--two years over the limit for airmen), took 17 days of training, soloed--grandly tearing off the whole undercarriage of his plane on his return--and got a lieutenant's commission and a pilot's wings. The dashing young college men of the 94th Aero Squadron, to which he was assigned, were not pleased. Rickenbacker was a celebrity and proud of it; he knew engines and said so; he was tough, uncouth, domineering, profane, full of advice and often oil-stained. He was pointedly ignored.

He shot down his first German plane, an Albatross single-seater, on April 29, 1918. He dove his Nieuport out of the sun until he was less than 150 yards from his quarry before he opened fire.

More victories followed. Rickenbacker hunted with coldness and logic, refusing to fight unless he had every advantage. He cruised just above stalling speed to save his fuel and engine for crucial moments. He was not a fancy pilot, but he was an awesome fighter. The race tracks had given him a marvelous judgment of speed and distances and a chilled steel nerve; in the words of one old squadron mate: "I've seen him go in so close he could hit the other ship with a baseball, before he pressed the trigger."

On the ground, he checked his engine himself. For fear of jamming his cranky guns in combat, he examined every bullet himself before he loaded his machine-gun belts. When he went on leave he engaged in some of the most spectacular binges Paris had ever seen, but when he was flying he was a strict teetotaler--even though many of his mates drank hard at night against the chances of quick death at dawn. On Sept. 24, 1918 he was commissioned a captain and put in command of the squadron.

Recalling the event last week, Manhattan Insuranceman Reed Chambers, another immortal of the 94th, said: "By then [the squadron] had begun to love him. I don't know how to explain it. [At first] he was just an uneducated, tough bastard who threw his weight around the wrong way . . . But he developed into the most natural leader I ever saw."

Hat in the Ring. He began with a dramatic gesture. Before breakfast on his first day of command, he attacked singlehanded seven German planes and shot down two--a feat which won him the Congressional Medal of Honor.

The 94th Squadron was caught in the pressures of the final, convulsive effort of the war. Pilots were being pushed to the ends of their resources. They flew at heights above 20,000 feet without oxygen; they had no leaves, virtually no rest, no recreation. They went on their deadly missions from muddy pastures in cranky and underpowered planes which ran out of gas in less than two hours. They also got killed or wounded fast--only three original members were left when the new C.O. took over.

Rickenbacker, a flamboyant figure in pink britches, a fancy non-regulation tunic, and the shiniest British boots in the A.E.F., set an amazing pace. He kept two Spad pursuit ships, each bearing the number 1, and the famed hat-in-the-ring insigne. He landed one, gulped coffee, and took off in the other, often flew six or seven hours a day. His haggard young men followed, and celebrated their adventures with a squadron ballad:

I'm a villain, a villain, a -villain; A dirty, dirty villain.

I leave a trail of blood where'er I go. I take delight, in stirring up a fight, And mashing little babies in the head, 'til they're dead . .

When the Armistice was declared, Rickenbacker was the U.S. "ace of aces," and the 94th was the leading U.S. squadron. The boys of the 94th greeted the great news with a roaring bender. When it was over, Rickenbacker was discovered out in the rain, wrestling with an enlisted man--they were giggling and stuffing mud into each other's mouths.

Never Count on the Crowd. Rickenbacker came home to a hero's welcome. He was not dazzled. "When I was racing," he said last week, "I had learned that you can't set stock in public adoration or your press clippings. By the time I was 26, I'd heard crowds of 100,000 scream my name but a week later they couldn't remember who I was. You're a hero today and a bum tomorrow--hero to zero, I sometimes say.

Never count on the crowd to take care of you."

Yet when called upon to speak at a huge banquet in his honor at the old Waldorf-Astoria, he was terrified. He mumbled a few ungrammatical phrases and sat down. Then he went back to his hotel and wept with rage. Next day he hired one_ Madame Amanda, a Metropolitan Opera voice coach, to teach him how to talk. He got Damon Runyon to write him a speech. He memorized it, studied grammar, went on a 40-night lecture tour (at $1,000 a night) and conquered his fears.

He turned down a $100,000 offer to appear in a movie. He didn't want easy money --he wanted to build the "great American car." With three Detroit automobile men, he formed the Rickenbacker Motor Co. His dream child, the six-cylinder Rickenbacker automobile, was unveiled in New York in 1922. After four years, the Rickenbacker flopped. It was too advanced, and the automobile industry "beat my head in"--in part with advertisements warning the public that four-wheel brakes (with which no automobile but the Rickenbacker was equipped) were dangerous.

The company went broke in 1926, leaving Rickenbacker a quarter of a million dollars in debt. He was 36, married (to Adelaide Frost, ex-wife of the late millionaire racing driver Cliff Durant) and had a son. But he could not bear the thought of going into bankruptcy. He resolved to pay off the huge debt (he eventually did--"It made me feel right"). Then he raised $700,000 more, and bought the Indianapolis Speedway.

At the same time he went to work for General Motors, and became an officer, successively, of a list of its aircraft subsidiaries. Rickenbacker coursed the country as a public speaker. His Speedway press parties, held on the eve of the 500-mile Memorial Day race, were Homeric--whisky flowed until dawn, and Rickenbacker called for order by hammering the table with a baseball bat.

Captain Eddie. His love affair with Eastern Air Lines began in 1935. He was delighted when G.M. chose him to run it --it was one of the sickest limbs of a sick industry, but its territory was dotted with cities, from New York to Miami, and it was almost devoid of competition. When G.M. decided to sell it, three years later, he rounded up $3.5 million in 30 frantic days, and bought it with the triumphant air of a boy getting his first bicycle.

He made it a one-man airline, and he made it pay. Captain Eddie--as he is known around the Eastern system--flew 200,000 miles during his first year as president. He not only poked his nose into every airplane, every ticket office, every hangar and every repair shop, but, in time, left an embodiment of himself in all of them through a series of posters. These bear a picture of him, the words "Captain Eddie Says:"--and various Rickenbacker-ish homilies on the value of thrift, safety and patriotism. Some of his employees refer to the poster picture as Big Brother--but they all respect him.

Remembering the beating he had taken at the hands of the automobile industry, he fought his competitors for every minute advantage. Once when Braniff bid a low $0.00001907378 a mile for airmail subsidy, Rickenbacker got the bid by offering to fly the mail for nothing. He adopted a policy of waiting for other lines to use new aircraft--and risk crashes--before adopting them himself. He insisted on personally checking every expense item over $100, swore that he would never pay a dividend on Eastern's stock (he has 100,000 shares, is the largest stockholder) as long as the line owed the banks a dollar. He adopted a policy of gathering the line's executives together at semiannual meetings and hazing them unmercifully as they reported. Sample: "Now that's a hell of an alibi, if I ever heard one ... By comparison with what we know could be done, we smell to high heaven. Now put this on your Must List . . . memories are awfully short, especially yours . . ."

He capitalized on his own popularity, toiled at making friends for Eastern with every after-dinner speech, newspaper interview and casual handshake. He also collected an array of enemies. Organized labor hated him.--for his wartime criticism and his free-enterpriser's independence --almost as bitterly as it hated Senator Robert A. Taft. Its feathers were not smoothed when Rickenbacker reminded them that he had been a working stiff too, and had been glad to get a dollar a day._

Many of his customers railed at him for making them sit three abreast on his Constellations and using DC-35 on runs which they felt deserved better service.

But Eastern expanded steadily, from 22 planes, 923 employees, and 3,692 route miles in 1937 to 90 planes, 7,778 employees, and 9,930 miles today. It developed an admirable safety record. And, to the horror of the industry (which not only had to endure the ignominy of loss, but listen to Rickenbacker crow), he made profits every year. In 1947, when other lines lost a record total of $20 million. Eastern made $1,300,000. A fortnight ago he happily announced that it had made $1,968,000 in 1949) Eastern's fifteenth successive year in the black.

But in 1941, Rickenbacker's airline almost killed him.

Death in the Night. One overcast night in February, aboard a regularly scheduled DC-3 which was making its approach to Atlanta, he looked out of a window and saw automobile lights so shockingly close that he felt he could touch them. A few seconds later, as he bawled at passengers to get to the rear of the cabin, the big ship smashed into a hill with a doomlike roar. When silence fell, Rickenbacker was pinned down over the body of a dead steward by the weight of wreckage.

He stayed conscious all night although he had a shattered pelvic bone, half a dozen broken ribs and a broken leg; one eyelid had virtually been torn away. Gasoline dripped steadily. He called reassurance to the living (seven were dead), sent some of the walking injured for help, and yelled warnings against lighting matches. When he got to a hospital, nine hours after the crash, he felt a familiar languor--what he calls the "warm, soft sensation of death."

Then he heard the radio voice of Walter Winchell announcing that he was dying.

He says: "I began to fight. They had me under an oxygen tent. I tore it apart and picked up a pitcher. I heaved it at the radio and scored a direct hit. The radio flew apart and Winchell's voice stopped. Then I got well." Sixteen months later, at the request of his old friend General "Hap" Arnold, he went off on an inspection tour of World War II air bases in the Pacific, and found himself face to face with death once more.

Twelve hours after leaving Honolulu he was strapped into a seat in a lost B-iy, staring out of a porthole at the ocean coming closer, and yelling, "Fifteen feet ... ten feet . . . five feet . . ." as its pilot strained to ditch the Bi; in the trough between two long swells. The plane hit like a car running into a stone wall. Water cascaded in. In two minutes, the plane's eight dazed and bleeding men were afloat on tiny rubber rafts under a brazen sky.

For 22 days he was the flotilla's Captain Bligh. The pilot, 27-year-old Captain William Cherry, was in command, and Rick-enbacker's friend, Colonel Hans Christian Adamson, 52, was the ranking officer. But the old warbird--dressed in a grey felt hat, business suit, shirt, tie and high-laced shoes--gave orders.

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."

-The name was originally Reichenbacher. Eddie changed it to Rickenbacker during World War I, a process which newspapers described as "cutting the Heinie out of his name." He added the middle name Vernon after testing a long list to meter them for class.

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