(2 of 9)
Hyman George Rickover was born in 1900 in the small, predominantly Jewish village of Makowa, Russian Poland, where his father, Abraham Rickover, was a tailor. By 1904 father Abraham had saved 100 rubles (then $50) and managed to reach New York. In another two years of hard work, he saved enough to send for his family. Ruchal (Rose) Rickover and her two children, Fanny, 8, and Hyman, 6, made their way across Germany, sleeping in bleak dormitories provided by German Jews. When they saw their first ships at Antwerp, the future admiral, Hyman, burst into tears. "The boats were so big," his sister recalls, "they frightened him."
Up from the East Side. The U.S. was good to the family of thankful refugees. A third child, Gitel (Augusta), was born in 1908. Two years later the Rickovers left Manhattan's seething East Side and moved to Chicago. Prosperous enough to avoid the slums, they settled in respectable Lawndale. They never went hungry again. Father Abraham always had work as a tailor. In 1919 he started a small garment factory, which he sold in 1946. Now he owns an apartment house on Chicago's North Side. Though 79 and comfortably fixed, he still plugs away as a tailor "to provide for his old age."
Hyman went to high school, but he always worked too, first as a delivery boy, later as a Western Union messenger. Though small, frail and sickly looking, he bicycled solemnly around the streets from 3 p.m. to 11, dutifully turning over his earnings to the family. Hyman was an earnest, bookish student, but his eight-hour job with Western Union did not help him get the best marks.
Young Hyman knew that his father would not pay for college. Thus tuition-free Annapolis seemed the best bet, and his friend Leonard Rosenblatt, son of a local politician, wangled appointments for both of them from Chicago's Congressman Adolph Sabath.
In Rickover's time (class of '22), life for a Jewish midshipman at Annapolis was marked by some unpleasantness. But Rickover's temperament also caused some of his troubles. Rebellious, secluded, intellectual, determined to make high marks, he did not fit the conformism of the Academy. He took little part in athletics; he preferred study to bull sessions; he did not "drag" (date).
Peacetime Navy. When Rickover graduated (in the top quarter of his class), he might have resigned from the Navy. World War I was over, and in the peacetime Navy, with no enemy in sight, the ships seemed good enough for their purpose, and the "book" contained instructions to deal with every situation. Rickover was not spectacularly successful in that Navy. He disdained cocktail parties and other social occasions, passed up shore leave for his books, made no effort to attract the attention of rising senior officers who might help his career.