Backyard Work and Play: When Eddie was a Boy

Backyard Work and Play: When Eddie was a Boy. Rickenbacker Woods Incorporated. , On this land the Rickenbacker family grew cabbage and potatoes. They raised chickens, goats, and an occasional pig. Eddie remembered, "there was vacant land all around us, and nobody cared if we tethered our goats to graze. As our herd grew, we had more, than enough milk even for our large and hungry family. I delivered milk daily to several customers in the neighborhood.", With seven children, life in the Rickenbacker house was not all about work. Eddie and his brothers played and tumbled with each other and their neighbors, sometimes getting into trouble. Eddie had a competitive nature and liked to take on his brothers. As an adult he remembers, "I practiced hard at shooting marbles and became so proficient that I could beat Bill [my older brother]. We played for keeps and I would wind up with all the marbles. Bill would get mad and start swinging, but I had the faster feet, and the marbles." In an archaeological dig conducted at the site in 2006, many of the Rickenbacker boys' marbles were unearthed., [Sidebar:] , Here in the backyard, there was a small workshop where William Rickenbacker and his boys built and experimented with machines. Eddie describes the last time he ever spoke to his father, "One evening, on his way to work, my father stopped in the little workshop back of our house to see what I was doing. It so happened I was building a perpetual motion machine, which I knew would bring me fame and fortune … 'What good does it do,' he asked. 'A machine has to have a purpose.' … Then Papa asked me to remember two things. He told me never to get mixed up with a machine I didn't know how to control and that there was no value in a machine that didn't serve a useful purpose … 'Eddie,' papa said, 'you're a lucky boy to be born when you were. There are a lot of new things in the making, and you ought to be ready to have a hand in them." William Rickenbacker went off to work and never returned. That night he died in a construction accident.