Fast Eddie

He was born in Columbus, Ohio, on October 8, 1890, the son of Swiss immigrants who worked with their hands and didn’t waste words. His name was Edward Rickenbacher then, and before his life was done he’d outfly, outdrive, outlive, and outwork nearly every man of his generation. The country came to know him as Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, the toughest pilot who ever stared through a gunsight, the man who would survive two plane crashes, a month on a raft in the Pacific, and more boardroom battles than a dozen Wall Street tycoons. He was America’s original self-made hero, a symbol of what sheer willpower can do when nothing else is left.

Columbus in 1900 was a city of smoke, streetcars, and soot. Eddie’s father, Wilhelm, was a stone mason who spoke little English and believed in hard discipline. When he was killed in a construction accident, Eddie was fourteen and the man of the family overnight. School ended right then. He sold papers, fixed cars, and taught himself mechanics by breaking engines apart and putting them back together until they purred again. He was accident-prone, nearly electrocuted, burned, and drowned before he was twenty, and every time he’d grin and say, “Guess the good Lord has other plans for me.” He took correspondence courses in engineering, learned to drive when cars were still a novelty, and by nineteen he was chief engineer and test driver for the Firestone-Columbus Motor Company. He drove the company president’s cars faster than any sane man would, and when the president protested, Eddie told him, “If you’re afraid of the machine, it’ll kill you.”

That kind of nerve made him famous on the racing circuit. Between 1911 and 1917 he became “Fast Eddie,” a headline regular at the Indianapolis 500 and the early AAA races that turned dirt ovals into danger zones. He drove Peugeots, Duesenbergs, Maxwells, and Sunbeams, running at speeds that left spectators gasping. He wasn’t reckless, just fearless. “Speed’s not the enemy,” he once said, “it’s the doubt that’ll kill you.” He won seven major races, finished third overall in 1916, and earned more than forty thousand dollars a year, an enormous sum in those days. Reporters loved him. So did mechanics, who swore he could fix an engine blindfolded. But when war swept across Europe, even a celebrity racer couldn’t escape suspicion. His name sounded German, and an overzealous Los Angeles newspaper called him “Baron Rickenbacher, the Kaiser’s agent on wheels.” When he arrived in England to race for the Sunbeam team, Scotland Yard detained him as a possible spy. It was a humiliation he never forgot. When he came home, he changed the spelling of his name to Rickenbacker and told friends, “No one’s ever going to call me a traitor again.”

The Great War drew him in like gravity. He tried to enlist as a pilot, but the Army wanted college degrees, not grease-stained mechanics. So he joined as a driver, ferrying officers across muddy French roads. He drove generals, engineers, and one day a future ace who took him to see an airfield. From the moment he saw a Spad roar down the grass and leap skyward, he was hooked. “That’s freedom,” he said. He wrangled a transfer to the Air Service, partly by fixing engines no one else could, partly by pestering every officer who would listen. In September 1917 he began flight training in France, learning in rickety Nieuports under the tutelage of French ace Raoul Lufbery. Lufbery taught him how to fight, not just fly. “The secret,” Lufbery told him, “is knowing when not to pull the trigger.”

When Rickenbacker joined the 94th Aero Squadron — the “Hat in the Ring” outfit — he was 27, older than most pilots and tougher than all of them. He scored his first kill on April 29, 1918, his fifth a month later, and by autumn he was the leading American ace. He flew every patrol he could, sometimes three a day, and led by example rather than speech. In September 1918 he took command of the squadron. His rules were simple: never attack without at least a fifty-fifty chance of success, break off if it’s hopeless, and know the line between courage and stupidity. “Cowardice,” he said, “is contagious, but so is good sense.” He finished the war with twenty-six confirmed victories — twenty-two planes and four balloons — more than any other American pilot. His record stood until World War II. On the morning of November 11, 1918, he took his Spad up one last time, flying over No Man’s Land as the guns fell silent. Below, soldiers threw helmets in the air and hugged across the trenches. He was the only man in the sky to see the war end.

When he came home, the parades and interviews came fast. He received eight Distinguished Service Crosses, later upgraded to the Medal of Honor by President Herbert Hoover for single-handedly engaging seven enemy planes on September 25, 1918. France pinned on the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. America pinned on the title “Ace of Aces.” But Eddie never stayed still long. “The only way to coast,” he told reporters, “is downhill.”

He turned to business and invention, selling his memoir Fighting the Flying Circus and preaching the promise of air travel. In 1919 he launched the Rickenbacker Motor Company, determined to build a car “worthy of its name.” It was ahead of its time, with a tandem flywheel and four-wheel brakes. Too far ahead, perhaps. Rival automakers spread rumors that four-wheel brakes were dangerous, and customers believed them. By 1927 the company was bankrupt, leaving Rickenbacker with a quarter-million dollars in debt. He took it on the chin, called it a lesson, and went right back to work. That same year he bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for seven hundred thousand dollars, installing new grandstands, improving safety, and broadcasting the race on radio for the first time. He sold it in 1945, but the track still bore his mark: speed married to discipline.

He couldn’t stay away from airplanes. In the late 1920s he founded Florida Airways, which failed after a hurricane and a real-estate collapse, but the experiment introduced him to a larger dream. He joined General Motors, pushed them to invest in aircraft manufacturing, and by 1935 he was running Eastern Air Lines, the struggling descendant of Pitcairn Aviation. Three years later he bought the company outright for $3.5 million. At its helm, he turned Eastern into one of the “Big Four” carriers of American flight, famous for its punctuality and bare-bones efficiency. He once told his pilots, “There’s no such thing as a perfect flight, only one where nothing goes wrong.” His management style was iron-fisted and unapologetic. Mechanics called him “Old Man Captain.” Passengers called him dependable. He turned Eastern into the first national airline to make a profit solely on passenger fares, and he did it during the Great Depression. When the Roosevelt administration handed the U.S. mail routes to inexperienced Army pilots, Rickenbacker erupted. “This is legalized murder!” he thundered after several of them crashed. He was never shy about his politics — a conservative in an age of government expansion, a believer in merit over favors. Even his enemies respected him.

Then came the crashes. In February 1941, while flying as a passenger on an Eastern DC-3, he went down near Atlanta. The wreckage scattered through pine trees. Rescuers found him mangled, with a fractured skull, a crushed pelvis, and an eye nearly torn from its socket. Doctors thought he was dead and covered him with a sheet. Hours later he stirred. “I’m not finished yet,” he whispered. It took months to recover, and every step was agony. Yet by the next year he was walking, talking, and volunteering for war work. When people asked how he survived, he shrugged. “I just refused to die.”

In October 1942, he nearly tested that claim. The War Department sent him on a secret mission to deliver a message from General Henry Stimson to General Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific. He boarded a B-17 Flying Fortress that never made it. A faulty navigation instrument sent them hundreds of miles off course. The fuel ran out, the engines sputtered, and they ditched into the Pacific. Eight men clung to three small life rafts. For twenty-four days they drifted under a merciless sun. Rickenbacker rationed water by the drop, caught fish with his bare hands, and prayed aloud each morning. When one of the younger men despaired, Eddie barked, “There’ll be no dying on my watch.” They lived on rainwater, seabirds, and courage. One man drank seawater and died. The rest endured until a Navy plane spotted them. When they pulled Rickenbacker aboard, he had lost forty pounds but refused a stretcher. “Get the others first,” he said. A week later, he completed his mission to MacArthur. The Navy redesigned its survival gear because of that ordeal — adding fishing kits, mirrors, and proper maps. Rickenbacker wrote Seven Came Through about it, turning disaster into instruction. He’d later say the sea taught him more about leadership than any boardroom ever could.

After the war, he returned to Eastern and steered it into the jet age — or tried to. He bought modern aircraft like the Lockheed Constellation and Douglas DC-7, expanded routes into Canada, Bermuda, and Mexico, and merged with Colonial Airlines. Eastern became synonymous with dependability, a no-frills airline that moved the country efficiently. But the times changed faster than he did. The public wanted luxury and glamour. Competitors unveiled jetliners while Rickenbacker hesitated. Profits slipped, and in 1959, after a series of clashes with the board, he was forced out as CEO. Four years later he resigned as chairman. “You can’t lead if you start following the mob,” he told reporters as he walked out of the office for the last time.

He spent his final years speaking, writing, and defending the principles he believed had built America — courage, individual effort, faith. He joined conservative causes, lectured against communism, and wrote his autobiography in 1967. He also co-created the comic strip Ace Drummond, which brought aviation adventure to a generation of boys who would later fly in Vietnam. Through it all, he remained loyal to his wife, Adelaide Frost Durant, whom he’d married in 1922. She had met him long before the war when she was married to another racer. They adopted two sons and stayed together through every triumph and tragedy. She was his equal in strength, and when he suffered a stroke in 1972, she stayed by his side. He died a year later, on July 23, 1973, in Zürich, Switzerland, at eighty-two. He was the last living Medal of Honor recipient from the Army Air Service. He was buried back home in Green Lawn Cemetery in Columbus, the same city that had sent him into the world with little more than grit. Adelaide took her own life four years later, unable to live without him. Their headstones lie side by side, simple and unadorned.

Today, Eddie Rickenbacker’s name still flies. His childhood home stands as a National Historic Site. The Miami causeway that leads to Key Biscayne bears his name, as does Rickenbacker International Airport and the Air National Guard Base in Ohio. He’s in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame, the Automotive Hall of Fame, and the National Aviation Hall of Fame. The Air Force Academy’s class of 2004 chose him as their exemplar. His story has been told in films, books, and even guitars — the Rickenbacker brand founded by his cousin in 1931 still carries that electric hum of innovation. His raft ordeal appears in the Alcoholics Anonymous book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions as a parable of shared endurance: when survival depends on everyone doing their part.

What made him different wasn’t luck or genius. It was resolve. He believed in getting up, every single time. “Courage,” he said, “is doing what you’re afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared.” He lived by that creed from his first race to his final flight. He stared down fear, failure, and fate itself, and won. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker proved that the American spirit isn’t built on comfort or chance. It’s built on the stubborn will to keep flying, even when the engines fail. And if he could see the world today, he’d probably just smile that thin mechanic’s grin and say, “Keep your hands on the controls, boys. We’re still climbing.”