Read The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh for Free Online

ticket to Des Moines and the Maytag-Mason Motor Company, whose chief engineer was a thirty-six-year-old automotive genius named Fred Duesenberg.
    At the newly prestigious Sioux City 300 on July 4, 1914, the Duesenberg team was so broke it couldn’t afford a garage for the cars, so Eddie drove the Duesenbergs under the grandstand, where the mechanics slept on cots and ate on credit from a local diner after promising the proprietor a share of the prize money they said they were sure to win. Even their cat, whose name was Lady Luck, deserted them.
    At some point Rickenbacker remembered a story from Swiss folklore that his mother once told him about being down on your luck: get a bat, cut its heart out, and tie it to your middle finger with red silk thread. This would make things go well. Ever since he was a small boy Rickenbacker had been superstitious and kept a collection of rabbits’ feet, buckeyes, and other charms to ward off bad luck. But the bat heart was supposed to bring good luck , a desperate move for desperate times. Rickenbacker was boarding with a local farmer (also on credit) and offered the man’s children a silver dollar for the first one who brought him a live bat. The night before the race, just as he was preparing for bed, one of the youngsters produced “a mean-looking mouse-like creature.” Early next morning Rickenbacker drove to town for a spool of red silk string and, in secret, murdered the bat, cut out what he thought was its heart, tied it to his middle finger, and assumed he was invincible.
    The Sioux City Speedway was wretched. A two-mile oval racecourse was built across the Missouri River from the city, so it was actually in Nebraska, cut out of a large cornfield, and instead of using boards, concrete, or bricks as they did at Indianapolis, the Sioux City promoters tried to create a track out of dirt and thirty thousand gallons of crude oil, which was supposed to solidify into a smooth racing surface. It did no such thing. When it was dry the cars broke up the congealed overlay into rock-hard chunks that often flew back at the drivers with terrific force. The drivers called it “gumbo.” Rickenbacker had fabricated a wire-mesh screen to protect himself and his drivers and mechanics from it, but it wasn’t foolproof, as he soon found out.
    The Sioux City Race Week began on an ominous note. On June 28 in far-off Sarajevo, Bosnia, a Serbian assassin shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The event was scarcely noticed in the American press but would have a profound effect on the life and career of then twenty-three-year-old Eddie Rickenbacker.
    Promoters of the Sioux City race had forecast as many as ten thousand spectators would show up, but when fully fifty thousand unruly race fans arrived neither the sponsors nor the city were prepared for the influx. The weather was firecracker hot when high rollers from Chicago disembarked from their private railcars and headed for the nearest saloons, which were crammed with everyone from royalty to riffraff. The Iowa Anti-Saloon League and a host of indignant evangelists set up an enormous tent to convert the sinners and buttress the faithful. But all good intentions were swamped by the hard-drinking, hard-gambling mob, which included cardsharps, prostitutes, reporters, pickpockets, and the morbidly curious, as well as the aforesaid swells, many of whom slept a dozen to a room, or in hotel lobbies, or as a last resort on sidewalks or in the woods, like hoboes.
    By day and by night, along with the boozing, they laid odds on the racing field, which included such stellar drivers as “Wild Bob” Burman b —whom the bookies were giving odds of 5 to 1—Howdy Wilcox, c Spencer Wishart, d Billy Chandler, e and the ubiquitous Barney Oldfield. The relatively little-known Rickenbacker was supremely confident in what he called “a golden period” in his life, while the gamblers put his chances of winning at 8 to 1.
    Soon after the gun went off