The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh by Winston Groom Read Free Book Online

racing car.” 8
    Eddie changed race cars again that year—to Maxwells—in his quest to find an automobile that would run consistently through an entire race without breaking down. For $25,000 he bought four race cars and set up a syndicate consisting of the owners of the Indianapolis 500 racetrack.
    He streamlined the Maxwells from the tires up; engines were overhauled and all extra weight removed, giving the cars an extra 10 to 12 miles per hour. Eddie designed a special cowl to protect drivers in rollovers. He paid the mechanics and other team members on an incentive basis from the net winnings. Days were long and tedious—seven a.m. till after dark—and Eddie introduced a phonograph to the garage so that every time work began to drag he would put on a stirring march or other fast-time music.
    Out of thirteen major races that Eddie’s team entered in 1916, his Maxwells won seven. Counting revenues from sponsors and exhibitions the profit after expenses was $78,000; h that total was not counting $60,000 Eddie had personally won. Late in the season Eddie decided to go to California to race with the Duesenberg team in Santa Monica for the American Grand Prize. There he had two fateful encounters that would change his life forever.
    The first occurred a few days before the race when he was driving through Riverside, in the Moreno Valley about halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, and he spotted a flying machine parked beside a hangar. On an impulse, Eddie turned in because he’d never seen an airplane up close. As he was peering into the cockpit, the plane’s owner, a man about his own age, emerged from the hangar and immediately recognized him from the newspapers. He introduced himself as Glenn Martin. i The plane, Martin said, was a two-seat “bomber” he had designed for the U.S. Navy, and he said to Eddie, “Would you like to take a ride?”
    Death-defying race car driver that he was, Rickenbacker had a fear of heights tracing back to the flying umbrella bicycle fiasco of his childhood. Even looking down from tall buildings made him dizzy. Also, at that point, Eddie held the airplane in low esteem. Barnstormers and stunt fliers were crashing and dying with such gruesome regularity that most Americans considered the flying machine “a deathtrap.” One would almost automatically have expected him to say no.
    Instead, he said, “Sure,” and thus began his lifelong affair with aviation. 9
    Once they were airborne Eddie had to screw up the courage to look down from the cockpit. The sensations of dizziness and fear were gone. Fascinated, Eddie marveled at being aloft, floating high above the roads and fields of the valley, while Martin hollered back, pointing out sights and landmarks above the engine’s roar. The landing unnerved Rickenbacker, because the ground had seemed to come up so swiftly, but he quickly got over it. They had been up for about thirty minutes and Eddie was so excited over the experience he couldn’t resist telling Martin about his vertigo, and wondering why it hadn’t occurred on the flight.
    “It’s because there’s nothing to judge height by,” Martin told him. “There’s no edge to look over.”
    The encounter with Glenn Martin was quickly followed by another chance meeting freighted with possibilities. Again, Eddie was driving through the countryside near Los Angeles when he passed by a cow pasture in which sat a single-seat U.S. Army biplane with a pilot standing beside it despondently staring at the engine. Eddie pulled over to see what could be done.
    The pilot was a Major T. F. Dodd of the Army Air Service, which was then so lowly regarded by the military army brass that it was part of the Signal Corps. Dodd explained that he’d had to put the plane down in the pasture because its engine had lost power. “It runs,” Dodd said unhappily, “but does not deliver enough power to keep aloft.”
    He asked Eddie if he knew anything about engines.
    Eddie said he did.
    Dodd