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

Rickenbacker and his mechanic Eddie O’Donnell f were proceeding as planned, armed with the dried-out bat heart. Their car was not as fast as some of the others, but Eddie made up for it on the turns, which he had thoroughly mapped out in his mind, as usual.
    Toward the end of the race Rickenbacker was in a two-man duel for the lead with his friend Wishart, who was driving one of the cars that was faster than the Duesenberg on the straightaways. As Wishart pulled ahead he created a virulent stream of gumbo that spattered the Duesenberg from grille to windscreen and often bounced lethally overhead, causing the drivers to duck.
    With five laps to go, Rickenbacker regained a slight lead, but when he looked at the oil gauge he noticed the pressure had fallen. He nudged O’Donnell as they went into a curve, but when they came out on the straightaway the pressure was even lower. “What in the hell is the matter with Eddie?” Rickenbacker thought, but when he managed to glance over his heart sank. The mechanic was sprawled in his seat, either dead or unconscious from a big chunk of gumbo that had struck him in the forehead.
    Rickenbacker made a decision not to stop, and on the next stretch he leaned over himself and made a few pumps of the oil bulb, which was good enough until O’Donnell at last came to and was able to resume his duties. They won the race by forty-eight seconds, and with the $10,000 Eddie won plus $2,500 from a third-place win by another Duesenberg racer the team checked into first-class rooms in the best hotel in town and dined on meals fit for a king.
    Rickenbacker had now broken into the big-time race car circuit as a serious player, and his photograph, grinning and mud-spattered, was flashed on sports pages from coast to coast and foreign lands as well. Also, as was the custom of the day, sportswriters gave Rickenbacker half a dozen sobriquets, most of them a nod to his Germanic-sounding name: “The Dutch Demon,” “Baron Von Rickenbacher,” the “Big Teuton,” and so forth. A racing writer even published a two-stanza poem about Eddie in the magazine Motor Age in which he referred to him as “That Deutscher, Rickenbacher”—all of which would cause Eddie a good deal of trouble before long.
    R ICKENBACKER PLACED IN THE MONEY in two other major races that season, and two minor ones as well, and was rated the sixth best driver in the country. This accolade was tempered by the death of Spencer Wishart, who was killed a few weeks after the Sioux City event when he smashed into a tree on the fourteenth lap of a race in Elgin, Illinois.
    When the season was done Rickenbacker looked to his immediate future. He liked the Duesenberg team but had lost confidence in the company’s ability to build a car that could withstand the rigors of a long race. After Sioux City, on several occasions he was forced to drop out of races because of mechanical troubles. Also there was the constant worry of financing.
    Eddie left Maytag-Mason Motors in November 1914 and took one of the big Peugeot racers he had come to admire to California to drive in the three-hundred-mile Point Loma race in San Diego on Thanksgiving Day. He remained in California and in January 1915 he won the Los Angeles Grand Prize and the Vanderbilt Cup—which was held in San Francisco that year—and established new records in winning at Providence, Sioux City, and Omaha, where his average speed was 93 miles per hour. He continued to rely on the superstition of tying a dead bat’s heart to his finger, the bats being supplied by his brother Albert, who would ship them to him in a cigar box via rail express.
    Eddie went on to win a second championship at the Sioux City Speedway, but tragedy struck halfway through the race. Eddie was attempting to pass Charlie Cox, who moved over as required, but then swerved back to avoid another car, causing Rickenbacker’s Duesenberg to slightly strike Cox’s left rear wheel. It was enough to send Cox’s Ogden