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Charmed Life of Captain Eddie Rickenbacker

The America's WWI Ace of Aces Edward Rickenbacker became president of Eastern Air Lines, he said: "I will always keep in mind that I am in the greatest business in the world ..... and I can serve humanity more completely in my line of endeavor than in any other. Reprinted from an article in the January, 1999 issue of Aviation History written by C.V. Glines.

He was called America's Ace of Aces during World War I, the highest scorer of American aerial victories over the Germans.  He could just as easily have been labeled the "luckiest man alive," however, since he survived--by his own count-- 135 brushes with death during his exciting lifetime.

Edward Vernon Rickenbacker was born in Columbus, Ohio, on October 8, 1890.  The son of Swiss immigrants, he was the third of eight children.  

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His parents christened him Edward Rickenbacker, but he later added Vernon as a middle name "because it sounded classy" and changed the spelling of his last name to Rickenbacker so it would be less Germanic.  He answered mostly to "Rick" but would be best known during laters years as "Captain Eddie."  His father was a day laborer, and life was not easy for a lad who spoke with an accent that reflected his parent's household language. 

Young Rickenbacker was admittedly a bad boy who smoked at age 5 and headed a group of mischievous youngsters known as the Homestead Gang, but he was imbued with family values by frequent applications of a switch to his posterior by his strict father.  One of his axioms that he followed all his life was never to procrastinate. 

At age 8, he had his first brush with death when he led his gang down a slide in a steel cart into a deep gravel pit.  The car flipped over on him and laid his leg open to the bone.  He quit school at 12 when his father died in a construction accident, and he became the major breadwinner for his mother and four younger siblings.  He said in his memoirs, "That day I turned from a harum-scarum youngster into a man serious beyond my age."  He sold newspapers, peddled eggs and goat's milk, then worked in a glassmaking factory.  Seeking more income, he worked successively in a foundry, a brewery, a shoe factory and a monument works, where he cared and polished his father's tombstone. 

Engines became young Rickenbacker's passion, and he found a job that changed his life in 1906 when he went to work for Lee Frayer, a race car driver and head of the Frayer-Miller Automobile Co.  Frayer liked the scrawny, scrappy lad and let him ride in major races as his mechanic. 

Rick later went to work as a salesman for the Columbus Buggy Co., which was then making Firestone-Colubus automobiles.  He joined automobile designer Fred

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