The photo hanging above the old Victrola, old even from 1960, has always intrigued me. Born illiterate and having made little effort to remedy it, I was unable to read the inscription but being six I decided this man in the picture, dressed in a military aviator’s uniform and a smile smirk I saw crazy shit, was my hero. I had walked past this photo countless times at my grandfather’s house, but on this day the movers erase the memories, making it a poignant moment, even though I had yet to learn word.
My grandfather, Joe Berge, had passed away, and as my Uncle Mart lifted the photo from his hook, leaving a faint rectangular ghost on the wallpaper, I asked, “Who is this?” “My uncle replied without disturbing the White Owl cigar which constantly clenched his teeth:” Eddie Rickenbacker. Captain Eddie. Best American ace in WWI. Won the Medal of Honor. Your grandfather knew him ”, and he read the inscription:“ To Joe, from your friend, Captain Eddie, ”then he packed America’s ace of aces in a crate and loaded it into a Plymouth wagon. 56, there like a hearse to remove my thin connection to this aviation legend.
Edward Vernon Rickenbacker, Adolph Rickenbacker’s distant cousin of Rickenbacker guitar fame, is why I think the 1918 SPAD XIII was the most beautiful single-engine aircraft ever built. I suspect I’ve ruffled the feathers of Nieuport and Spitfire, and I probably shouldn’t let my Aeronca Champ, an airline companion for 40 years, learn that I have a crush on a much older aircraft.
SPAD is an acronym for Aviation Company and its Derivatives Where Deperdussin Airplane Production Company. Confuses? The same goes for French investors when the company’s founder, Armond Deperdussin, a silk merchant keen to sell shipments of fabrics to the growing aviation market, was charged with fraud in 1913. With his name struck off the company’s stationery, all agreed to call a SPAD a SPAD.
Return to aeromantic lust. Who could see two wings, a slender fuselage with an adorable pug nose around a Hispano-Suiza V-8, and oh-so-French tail feathers flapping from the naughty rest in the grass, and do you think of SPAD as just a machine? The army, perhaps since this beauty’s main mission was to transport machine guns into the air so that 20-year-olds on the paths of glory could blast the hell out of the other Sky Knights in Fokkers. All because a teenager in 1914 shot an Austrian Archduke in Bosnia, when Eddie Rickenbacker was a 24 year old racing car driver who had never been on a plane and might have had a hard time finding Sarajevo on a map.
But the duke was dead. Millions of people would die avenging costumed Habsburgs, as the air force passed from Farman biplanes over Brooklands, UK to very beautiful creations of increasing utility and lethality. And Rickenbacker went on to become America’s top hunting ace, leading to postwar stardom and ultimately president and co-owner of Eastern Airlines. Yeah, it’s as dead as the Archduke, but in its day it was as glamorous as TWA, Pan Am, Braniff… The lesson being that nothing lasts forever. Except my recollection of Captain Eddie’s portrait.
Rickenbacker turned his pre-war racing fame and wartime hero status into post-war marketing successes and a few failures. During WWII he barely survived a DC-3 crash in Georgia and 24 days on a raft after locking up a B-17 in the Pacific. The latter inspired the bestseller, “Seven Came Through,” which included tips for making seabird sushi. And, oh yes, he even started an automotive business: The Rickenbacker Motor Company.
With visions of being the next Edsel Ford, entrepreneurs of the 1920s rushed into the auto industry; like the high-tech companies in the 90s, many of which failed in equally inglorious ways. WebVan anyone? Captain Eddie was a flagship with strong motorhead credentials, so it was only natural to tie the race driver-to-auto fighter pilot. He recruited a squadron of engineers to figure out where all the bolts and pipes should go, and that’s where Joe Berge stepped in. An engineer, he had worked in the early years of the automotive industry and held a series of patents which are of no value today. Whore. His specialty was instrumentation, speedometers and the like, and Rickenbacker cars needed gauges.
More than a pretty face on promotional material, Eddie Rickenbacker embraced the technology of his car’s construction, and Joe spent enough hours with him to glean the signed portrait when his contract expired. The Rickenbacker made its debut with some success in 1921 and six years later followed the path of the Hupmobile. The what? Find an old $ 10 bill from 1928-2006. The square backside car parked in front of the Treasury building is usually identified as a Hupmobile but could be a Ford Model A. Personally I think a Ford Trimotor would have been more appropriate. .
Rickenbacker died in 1973, still a hero. Joe Berge died in 1960, a hero to me, unknown to most. Later I saw my Uncle Mart at a family reunion. He was a pilot and I asked him if he had a portrait of Captain Eddie. “Yeah, in my garage,” he replied beyond what I’d swear to be the same cigar decades earlier. “Do you want it? I’ll send it to you.” Before he could reach the post office, Mart died.
More years passed and I asked Mart’s son if he knew the portrait. “Yeah,” he replied, sounding remarkably like his father. “It’s in my hangar in California. You want it?”
I should have immediately got on the plane to Los Angeles to claim it, but like others who touched the cursed portrait, my cousin is dead. The real estate collectors took away his household waste. He had no heirs, no siblings, no one I could annoy about this image of Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, autographed for my grandfather. Let’s go. Maybe burnt like Rosebud in an incinerator. Or, and I can only hope, it’s on a hangar wall in Flabob, Calif., The owner still proud of buying two dollars at a real estate auction and unaware of who the friend was. from Rickenbacker, Joe. If so, I’m willing to pay up to $ 10 to put it back in the family.
