Excerpt from Enduring Courage by John F. Ross, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

These increasingly difficult encounters with his father ended in a minute one July day in 1904. That summer noon, William and five or six other laborers were resting under a tree after a hot morning laying a cement sidewalk at Linwood and Mound streets. An African American drifter named W. A. Gaines, who had been putting in sod at a nearby yard, walked over to ask, “None of you fellows want to share your dinners with a fellow, do you?” Something about this innocuous request deeply angered William, who responded that “if I had any dinner to share with any person I would share it with my children.” Profanity then flowed. What lit Rickenbacher into a blue rage that day remains unclear, perhaps that he felt keenly the ever more vise-tight grip of poverty and his inability to succeed in this land of plenty. Gaines hustled away, but Rickenbacher went after him. Gaines, who later claimed that Rickenbacher had brandished a knife, swung a steel spirit level, a tool used to even the sidewalk, breaking William’s left forearm below the elbow. William kept coming. A second blow struck the back of William’s head, knocking him out. A sheriff later found the frightened Gaines, blackjacked him, and then charged him with assault to kill.

William slipped into a coma at nearby St. Francis Hospital but tenaciously clung to life. The community threw benefit picnics for the distraught Lizzie and her children, one a “lawn fete and dance” at the Driving Park, to which the Columbus Light Company provided free transportation. Only after five weeks, and after a brief awakening in which he recognized his wife and children, did William slip away. Lizzie went into debt to buy her sons dark suits for his funeral. As the family started out for church, she gathered the children together. “I want you all to promise me that, no matter what happens, you will always help one another,” Eddie remembered her saying. “Don’t you worry,” he replied. “I’ll take care of everything—don’t worry.” Yet he absorbed the important lesson that not even he could survive without the help of all his family pulling together. The failure of any of them could bring failure on all.

Three weeks after Eddie’s fourteenth birthday that October, a jury took more than an hour to convict Gaines of manslaughter. He drew ten years in jail, slight punishment indeed at a time when a black man often faced death itself for killing a white man, regardless of guilt or intention. The judge’s leniency articulated what most in the courtroom already knew: The hotheaded, often profane, elder Rickenbacher had brought this upon himself. The shame that front-page newspaper gossip brought on the family was intense, especially for a boy just reaching adolescence, who harbored extremely mixed feelings about his father’s readiness to deliver punishment. He would never forget what could happen to those who lost their tempers.

Eddie could never bring himself to tell the truth publicly about how his father died, claiming in his bestselling autobiography that his father had been no plain laborer but rather a manager on an important bridge-building project. He related how a swinging timber had struck his father fatally in the head one evening as he was operating a pile driver. His mother’s credo of doing what it took to survive had taken deep, firm hold; he buried humiliation and guilt by brushing the facts away. He would survive with dignity, even if that meant falsifying the record. He would also correspondingly downplay the grinding poverty, shame, cold, and fear of his early days, inventing a hard but somehow ennobling childhood.

Unable to sleep the evening of the funeral, Eddie walked downstairs and found his mother head in hands at the kitchen table. Standing beside her, the undersized thirteen-year-old solemnly promised never to make her cry again. Lizzie reached out and patted his head. A profound change had come over the boy. He drew up the chair to take his father’s place at the head of the table; from then on, he would assume the man’s role in her house, despite the presence of older siblings.

Excerpted from Enduring Courage by John F Ross. Copyright © 2014 by John F Ross. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.