Eddie Rickenbacker

Edward Vernon Rickenbacker, born Edward Rickenbacher on October 8, 1890, in Columbus, Ohio, was an American fighter pilot in World War I, a Medal of Honor recipient, a racing driver, an automotive designer, and a long-time head of Eastern Air Lines. With 26 aerial victories, he became the most successful and most decorated United States flying ace of the war. His life stretched from the horse-drawn streetcar years of his childhood to the age of major air travel, and he had a place in both worlds.

Rickenbacker was the third of eight children of German-speaking Swiss immigrants, Lizzie Basler Rickenbacher and Wilhelm Rickenbacher. The family lived on East Livingston Avenue in a small house without running water, indoor plumbing, or electricity. As a boy, called Edd by his parents, he worked before and after school, helped tend the family’s garden and animals, delivered papers, set pins at a bowling alley, and sold scavenged goods. He gave most of what he earned to his mother.

His early years were marked by danger, work, and restlessness. He survived a collision with a horse-drawn streetcar, a fall into an open cistern, rescues from a coal car, a near-fatal return into a burning school building, and a badly sliced leg from a quarry cart ride. Later, while preparing his autobiography, he came to see these close calls as signs that God had saved him for a higher purpose. He also had an inventive streak, painting watercolors, trying to design a perpetual motion machine, building pushcarts with the Horsehead Gang, and attempting to “fly” a bicycle fitted with an umbrella from a barn roof.

When Rickenbacker was thirteen, his father was injured in a brawl and died after nearly six weeks in a coma. Rickenbacker dropped out of the seventh grade and went to work full-time, lying about his age to get around child labor laws. At the Oscar Lear Automobile Company in 1905, he took an engineering course by correspondence, and chief engineer Lee Frayer gave him more responsibility in the workshop. By sixteen, he was supervising men as chief testing engineer at the Columbus Buggy Company. By nineteen, he was directing a regional agency from Omaha, responsible for sales, distribution, and maintenance across four states.

Automobile racing carried him into public view. He entered races to draw attention to his company’s car, crashed in his first event, then won many dirt track races, including five of six at Omaha’s Aksarben Festival. He drove in the first Indianapolis 500 as relief driver for Frayer, later raced on his own, and worked long days with the Duesenbergs developing a Mason race car. That mix of mechanical skill, nerve, discipline, and hunger for responsibility helps explain the man who later became America’s leading ace of World War I. His words still carry force because they came from a life tested by poverty, machinery, speed, war, and survival.