Life of Evel: Evel Knievel (4 page)

Those bigger and better things included running a ‘protection agency’, which was, by Knievel’s own cryptic admission, really an extortion racket. While his well-meaning police-officer friend Mo Mulchahy politely referred to Bobby’s ‘job’ as being that of a merchant policeman, there were others in Butte who recognised it as something rather more corrupt. Knievel visited various businesses around Butte and asked if they would like him to keep an eye on their properties when they were closed. If they paid up, Bobby would check locks, make sure there were no open windows or doors and generally scare off any prowlers. Job done. If, however, any particular business refused his offer, they were very likely to find their premises had been broken into shortly afterwards.

The differing accounts of Knievel’s ‘job’ among those who knew him show just how undefined his role was. Officer Mulchahy believed it to be legitimate, saying, ‘He went around on the south side of town and he’d rattle doors and shake windows; he was one of us. He went to different merchants down on the south side and asked them for a job. Course, a lot of people who knew Knievel, they said “we’d rather not do that”. They didn’t have break-ins, they had breaks; they had breaks in their windows or breaks in their doors but he’d be back the next day and tell the businessmen “If I was watching your place, this wouldn’t have happened”, and they’d hire him.’

Knievel’s own take on the situation was rather more telling, even if it did stop short of an absolute confession. ‘When I was a merchant policeman I had a deal – you don’t want to give a little kid that’s trying to make a dollar a five-dollar bill every 30 days to watch your place then you might get robbed. That’s what it amounted to. You pay me ten dollars a month, five dollars a month, to watch your place of business, you don’t get robbed. They found out that my protection was well worth the five or ten dollars a month after not subscribing to it for a while.’

Knievel’s friend Bob Pavolich, who ran the Met Tavern in Butte at the time – one of Knievel’s favourite watering holes – showed no such ambivalence when asked for his interpretation of Bobby’s scam. ‘When he was a doorknocker here he used to come around my place at two o’clock in the morning – he was a merchant cop is what they called him. Well I would have to say that he probably knocked over mine and about a dozen others on the route. He always had money and he didn’t make that kind of money knocking doors. Really, he told me he’d knocked over my place.’

Knievel eventually owned up – and apologised for – committing a string of burglaries around Butte, and he confessed that he tried for a whole weekend to break into the Prudential Federal Savings building but couldn’t manage it. Addressing a meeting of Butte townspeople in the late 1990s, he blamed his misdemeanours on his youth and insisted he had eventually made amends for those acts over the years and was now a model Butte citizen.

But the money Bobby was spending in Butte bars was coming from increasingly more dangerous criminal activities. He had by now become so desperate for more money that he’d started robbing grocery stores, pharmacies and even banks all over the western United States. Knievel teamed up with a gang of six other men in order to be able to carry out more and more ambitious crimes. He claimed most of them were drug users, hence their penchant for turning over pharmacies to steal drugs as well as whatever was in the cash registers.

The techniques employed by his crew usually followed a similar pattern: they would stake out whichever building they planned to rob to gain the usual information about workers’ shifts, opening and closing times, and where the entry points and exits were, then Bobby would drill a hole through the roof to allow the gang to drop down into the premises, by which point the adrenalin would really start to flow. Knievel, for one, found he liked the rush. ‘That feeling I got inside a bank was the same feeling I got later when I started to jump [a motorcycle]. I could crack a safe with one hand tied behind my back faster than you could eat a hamburger with two.’

But Knievel soon realised that the prize of adrenalin alone wasn’t enough to justify the risks he was taking. ‘When we dropped through a hole in the roof there was so much pressure we’d sweat our shoes off. And it wasn’t really worth it. We’d have to split the money between four or five people (depending on how many were in on any particular job) and averaged only a few grand apiece.’

If the FBI really were on the gang’s trail, as Knievel claims, then the risks could not have been worth the slight rewards. After all, Bobby may have had a few dollars to throw around on beer but he and his young wife weren’t exactly living in the lap of luxury as a result of his endeavours – and things would only be worse for Linda if Bobby was thrown in the county jail.

One long-standing mystery from this period relates to whether or not Knievel used dynamite stolen from his former employers, the Anaconda Mining Company, to blow up and rob the local courthouse in Butte. While Evel has sometimes boasted of carrying off the job, he has at other times backtracked and claimed, ‘The courthouse was not blown up, the courthouse was burglarised. As to whether I did it or not, that’s nobody’s business but mine and that’s the way it’ll always remain.’

Either way, it was only when one of his accomplices was shot while trying to flee from a crime scene that Knievel was shocked into abandoning his evil ways. It brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown, which in turn made him feel so low that he actually contemplated suicide. His accomplice, Jimmy Eng, had been shot dead in the street by police while on a job in Reno, Nevada, and while Knievel escaped with his life, he broke down on the way home and vowed to change his ways and turn his back on crime. ‘I was crossing a bridge when I stopped and took out all my burglar tools – ropes, crowbars, nitroglycerine, drill bits, all of it – and dumped it into the Sacramento River in California. I just vowed right then that I would never steal another dime or rob another place and I never did.’

Knievel may have decided to go straight but he would continue to have run-ins with the law throughout his life, even after he had given up trying to make a living from crime. His skills as a bank robber appeared questionable anyhow and are perhaps best summarised by his childhood friend Paddy Boyle who once said of Evel, ‘Actually he wasn’t a bank robber cos he never got nothing. I think that’s why he started jumping motorcycles – cos he couldn’t make it as a burglar.’

Further pressure for Knievel to find a legitimate job came with the birth of his and Linda’s first child, a son, Kelly Michael Knievel, on 21 August 1960. Now with a wife and child to feed, Bobby needed not only to find a source of regular income, he also needed to ensure he wouldn’t be facing a lengthy jail sentence and leaving his family helpless.

In 1961, Knievel formed the Sur-Kill hunting service, another scheme which was not quite above board. Bobby would assure his clients that he knew the countryside of Montana so well that he could lead them to whatever game they chose to shoot, thereby guaranteeing them a good day’s hunting. The problem was, much of that game was to be found only in protected national parks and was therefore off limits to hunters. Bobby being Bobby, however, wasn’t about to let a small matter like that stand in the way of business.

It was during this period of being involved in hunting that one of the stranger episodes of Knievel’s life occurred. Hearing that the US Department of the Interior had decided to cull half of Yellowstone Park’s 10,000-strong elk population to maintain nature’s balance, Bobby decided to intervene in what would prove to be his first ever publicity stunt. He (illegally) shot an elk in the park then cut off its antlers and slung them across his shoulders and set out to hitchhike all the way to Washington DC in protest at the cull. After all, how could a hunting guide like Knievel expect to make any money if there were no more elk to shoot? Bobby, backed by the Montana Fish and Game Commission, wanted to initiate a relocation programme so the elk could be re-homed all over the state for hunters to legitimately shoot. Bobby could then run his business legally.

Knievel claimed he gave the antlers to President Kennedy himself and told him, ‘If you don’t do something about this immediately your son John-John will look at the head of an elk on a nickel like my kids do the head of a buffalo.’

Whether or not he actually gained an audience with the president (he was pictured in local newspapers with the antlers but JFK was conspicuously absent) it is nonetheless doubtful that a 22-year-old hitchhiker from Butte would have single-handedly persuaded the government to complete a U-turn on its culling policy. Even so, Knievel had played his part in stirring up publicity for the campaign and the idea was abandoned and a programme instigated whereby the elk were transported to sites across Montana as fair game for hunters. For the elk it was a stay of execution; for Knievel the trip represented a double victory. The first bonus was that Bobby now had some elk he could legally lead his clients to as part of the Sur-Kill experience, but the other plus point was to be far more important in the long-run. Bobby’s picture had appeared in the
Washington Post
along with details of his plight, proving to Knievel for the first time that publicity wasn’t that hard to come by if you just used a little imagination.

Hitchhiking may have been his only means of getting to Washington but it had added a novelty factor to the trip, as did the elk antlers. Knievel had discovered he was a natural at promoting himself and his ideas, and the lesson would not be lost on him.

Somewhat surprisingly, Bobby tired of the hunting game before he could take advantage of the new elk policy and decided to try his hand at a ‘proper’ nine-to-five job as a car insurance salesman with the Combined Insurance Company of America. He was hired by a certain Alex Smith, whom Knievel later acknowledged as being the man who finally helped steer him away from a life of crime and who ‘probably saved my life’ in doing so.

Knievel has never been short of boasts when talking about his skills as a salesman, but given the phenomenal manner in which he managed to promote and sell himself to the world some years later, they perhaps aren’t completely idle. He claimed he broke all company records for selling 110 policies in one day to staff at the Warm Springs mental hospital in Montana and quipped that he ‘might have even sold some policies to the patients’. There have been comments from more than one party over the years that Knievel in fact sold
all
those policies to mental patients. Whatever the case, he also claims to have gone on to sell an incredible total of 271 policies in that same week. But, if the stories are to be believed, then Bobby became a victim of his own success. Feeling he should have been rewarded with very swift promotion after his success in the field, Knievel determined he was going to ask the president of the company, Mr W. Clement Stone, for just that; he demanded, rather arrogantly in a face-to-face meeting, to be promoted to the position of vice president. Not surprisingly, Stone declined and Knievel immediately resigned. ‘He refused me and I quit. He said he was sorry to see me go and wished me the best of luck. I thought I’d regret it but in every adversity there is a seed of benefit. Mr Stone taught me a lot about the value of a positive mental attitude and he taught me to do the right thing by others simply because it’s right.’

Significantly, as well as being president of Combined Insurance, Stone was also a self-made millionaire and author, and his book,
The Success System that Never Fails,
became one of Bobby’s favourites. Preaching the benefits of a positive mental attitude, Stone’s book would be a constant source of support and guidance in the making of the star that was Evel Knievel. Also present at the meeting between Knievel and Stone was Napoleon Hill, another author who promoted the benefits of positive thinking. Hill had written a book called
Think and Grow Rich,
and while Knievel had been trying to do just that over the last few years with varying degrees of failure, he would have the art mastered within the next ten years and would be rewarded with riches beyond his wildest dreams. All he had to do was think of a field in which he could grow rich.

Having flunked out of school, tried his hand at so many occupations and moved from one sport to the next, it seemed that Bobby Knievel would never be able to maintain enough interest or enthusiasm in any particular field to make a decent living. He was too restless, too ambitious to make something of himself and too opposed to knuckling down and accepting a regular nine-to-five job. The only real constant in his life, the only thing he hadn’t tired of since his schooldays, was riding motorcycles. Bobby simply loved to fool around on bikes.

Motorcycles had first entered Knievel’s life when he was 15 years old, although he had fantasised that his bicycle was motorised long before that. He was given his first motorcycle by his father while visiting him in El Sobrante, California, where Robert senior had eventually settled with his second wife Jeanie Buis and had three daughters: Christy, Renee and Robin. After working as a bus driver for a time, Knievel’s father had managed to save and borrow enough money to open a Volkswagen dealership in Berkeley (he would later return to Butte and open another dealership there), and while young Bobby was visiting his father presented him with a little British-built 125cc two-stroke BSA Bantam – a massively popular machine at the time and one which was responsible for launching countless racing careers as well as the less-travelled route Knievel would eventually follow on two wheels.

It might have seemed an extravagant gift, given the relative poverty Bobby was accustomed to living in, but it may have been his father’s way of assuaging his own guilt at deserting his son at such a young age. And, as the bike was part of a trade-in on a car sale, it probably didn’t cost him too much.

As well as running a garage, Robert Knievel also raced cars on occasion in local events. He was never serious enough about the sport to attempt to make a career out of it but he was a competent driver and was responsible for generating Bobby’s interest in cars and bikes.

Perhaps surprisingly, Bobby never displayed any real anger or bitterness at having been abandoned by his father (and mother) as a child. On the contrary, he usually spoke well of his dad. ‘Jeez, I thought my dad was a helluva guy,’ he would later say. ‘I used to go down there [San Francisco] when he raced midgets and sports cars. Helluva good driver.’ Whatever his true feelings were about being given up as a child, Bobby certainly had his dad to thank for kick-starting his two-wheeled career.

The pattern for Bobby’s wild-riding style was set right from the first time he ever rode his little bike. Without any formal tuition, Knievel threw a leg over the Bantam, pulled in the clutch lever, engaged first gear, popped out the clutch, roared off down the street and smashed straight into a mailbox. ‘I couldn’t control it. I really got in trouble on that motorcycle that day. I almost got killed.’

Undeterred, Bobby brought the Bantam back to Butte and set about learning the skills of his future trade as well as annoying and amusing the good citizens of the town in equal measure. ‘I used to ride through bars here and ride down the sidewalk, and my dad said, “What is the matter with you? You’re going to get killed.” ’

Tales of his cop-baiting (in which he would spark off chases from Butte’s finest) have become legendary and are, at least in part, due to the depiction of such events in the 1971 George Hamilton movie
Evel Knievel.
Officer Mo Mulchahy lends some credence to the legend, however, with his testimony that ‘It got to be kinda fun. Most times you chased him you’d go have a coffee. If he didn’t wanna be caught, you didn’t catch him. But it was never nothing serious.’

While Mulchahy’s version of events is certainly within the realms of possibility, other versions show how the legend of Evel Knievel has been added to over the years to the point of absurdity. In his book
Evel Knievel: An American Hero,
author Ace Collins relates one particular incident involving Knievel and the local police. Without crediting anyone as a source or witness, Collins tells of Knievel being trapped in a dead-end alley by police, who had barricaded the entrance with their patrol vehicle. Undeterred, Knievel rides straight towards the police car, but bears to the right at the last minute, hits a convenient earthen ramp and sails straight over the police car! At best it’s a highly unlikely scenario, and had there been any element of truth in the tale it’s certain that Knievel would have told and retold it over the years. The fact that he hasn’t done so would seem to prove that it is just another myth.

However much truth there is in the cop-baiting tales, there is no doubt that Bobby Knievel loved his motorcycle and spent countless hours riding round Butte on it, his thrill-seeking character making him a natural when it came to trying wheelies and rear-wheel slides and gunning the little Bantam flat out for all it was worth. ‘I learned to do wheelies on my little BSA and when I later had bigger bikes I could do a wheelie either sitting on the motorcycle or standing on it better than anyone else in the world. And I mean that – better than anybody in the world. I was the first guy to do one standing on the seat. I could wheelie until the oil ran out of the pan and the engine seized up.’

Knievel’s two-wheeled antics became something of an institution in Butte, and locals were particularly fond of turning out to watch Bobby race up impossibly steep mine hills on his bike. ‘I was goin’ up and down mine hills here in Butte. Everybody thought I was a nut. Fifty or sixty cars used to come out every night to this mine-hill dump. I used to climb it; I’d fall off ten times and make it once. They’d all sit there and blow their horns.’

Bobby also started to discover that people would actually pay to see his motorcycle pranks, and he found he could make a buck here and there by amusing his drinking buddies. On one occasion outside Bobby’s favourite watering hole, the Met Tavern, a friend bet Knievel $10 he couldn’t ride over a Volkswagen car which was parked outside. With friend and Met owner Bob Pavolich riding pillion, Knievel hoisted the front wheel of his Bantam onto the boot of the car, rode up over the rear window, smashing it in as he went, then revved the bike up and over the roof and finally back down over the bonnet and onto the street. He scared the life out of Pavolich, amused the hell out of the gathered drinkers and won his $10. The owner of the Volkswagen was presumably less than pleased.

Knievel may have been good at performing stunts on his BSA, but back in the 1960s there was no obvious means of pursuing motorcycle stunt-riding as a career. Therefore it was to becoming a motorcycle racer, rather than a stunt rider, that Knievel aspired, and in America in the early 1960s there really was only one kind of motorcycle sport and that was dirt-bike racing. Had Knievel been born 20 years later there is every chance he would have taken to road racing on purpose-built Tarmac circuits but back then this was almost exclusively a European pursuit. The Americans preferred to race ‘flat-trackers’ round dirt or shingle-based ovals ranging from a quarter-mile to a mile in length. It’s a fearsome spectacle, with riders racing their bikes flat out down the straights at around 140mph before slewing their machines sideways to scrub off speed into the corners. The nearest European equivalent is speedway, but speedway bikes are far less powerful than the big 750cc American flat-trackers, personified by Harley-Davidson’s legendary and enduring XR-750 V-twin machine – the same bike Evel would later use in his jumping career.

Having gained his national racing licence from the AMA (American Motorcycle Association), Bobby headed out to California to try his hand at dirt-track racing. Borrowing all he could from his ever-supportive grandparents, Knievel was still extremely poor and his accommodation at race meetings, as often as not, was the back seat of his car, usually with Linda and Kelly along for the ride. On many nights the young family would camp out under the stars and wash themselves in rivers or creeks, all so Knievel could pursue his dream of becoming a professional motorcycle racer.

Knievel did meet with some success in the racing world, but the prize money was poor and barely enough to keep him going to the next meeting. He also found his six-foot frame put him at a disadvantage next to the smaller riders. ‘When the AMA put us on 250s, the little guys who didn’t weigh anything would go past you like a rubber band,’ he complained. It was during one of these races in May 1962 that Knievel achieved something of a landmark in his life: he broke his first bone. It was his collarbone and it was to be the first of many bones he would shatter; enough, in fact, to earn him a place in the
Guinness Book of Records
as the man who had broken more bones than any other. The 1972 entry for this, however, is laughably inaccurate. It states that in that year alone, Knievel fractured 431 bones. As Steve Mandich correctly points out in
Evel Incarnate: The Life and Legend of Evel Knievel,
that would average out at 1.2 bones being broken every single day of the year, a feat which even Knievel would find hard to admit to with a straight face.

But back in May 1962, apart from being a month memorable for breaking his first bone, Knievel had good reason to celebrate as his second son, Robert Edward Knievel, was born on the seventh day of the month. He would become known to the world as Robbie Knievel, the world-class motorcycle jumper, but his relationship with his father would be stormy in the extreme. But right now, Robbie was just another mouth to feed and his father was still not earning any money worth talking about. Bobby knew he would have to try harder to support his family.

His interest in racing and bikes in general had become such that by late 1962 Knievel made his first attempt to earn a proper living from motorcycles. Having been disillusioned with the carinsurance business, Bobby borrowed as much money as he could from his grandmother and his friend Joe Dosen, put it together with his own meagre savings and opened a motorcycle dealership in Butte called ‘Imported Motors’. He stocked a range of bikes including Hondas, Triumphs, BMWs, Indians, Ducatis and Matchless machines. With his innate gift for promotions and sales techniques Knievel should have been a natural as a bike dealer, but money was scarce in Butte and there simply weren’t enough people in the position to buy a motorcycle. The shop did a poor trade and in 1963 Bobby was forced to close the business, whereupon he fled to Spokane, Washington with his young family, which grew again to include a daughter, Tracey Lynn, born on 22 October of that year. In Spokane, Knievel tried, yet again, for a new start in life.

The experience of having raced and of owning a bike store, albeit an unsuccessful one, stood Knievel in good stead when he arrived in Spokane. He’d made lots of contacts and friends within the bike industry and one of those, a man named Darrell Triber, readily offered Bobby a job in one of his Honda dealerships. This time Knievel flourished in the trade and was soon made a partner of the Spokane branch. Later, when Triber decided to add another franchise in Moses Lake, also in Washington State, he trusted Knievel enough to allow him to run the business. When Triber eventually wanted out of the motorcycle business entirely he sold the Moses Lake branch to Knievel, who was obviously determined to have another stab at being a successful businessman.

Bobby knew from his previous experience that the challenge of running a successful bike dealership was in learning how to attract potential customers to his particular store rather than anyone else’s, and, once he’d got them there, how to persuade them to part with their money to buy a motorcycle. At first, Knievel thought small: he offered a $100 discount off the price of any Honda to anyone who could beat him at arm wrestling. (According to Knievel, no one ever did qualify for the discount.)

But such wacky fairground gimmicks were never going to be enough to attract serious business, and as sales continued to be sluggish Knievel started thinking bigger. Having become more and more adept at the art of riding a motorcycle and, more importantly, at performing stunts and tricks on a bike through his racing, Knievel got round to thinking back to his childhood and the Joey Chitwood Auto Daredevil Show. It might now have been nineteen years ago, but childhood memories, especially such exciting ones, are forged strongly within the psyche and Knievel had never forgotten the experience. But only now, in 1965, did he see a way to turn what was just a happy memory into a potential money-spinner, or at the very least, a way to attract more customers through his shop doors. Robert Craig Knievel, at the age of 26, decided he was going to jump a motorcycle off a ramp over some obstacles in front of a live audience. A star, and a whole new medium of entertainment, was about to be born.

Not content with an ‘ordinary’ ramp-to-ramp jump (which was anything
but
ordinary at the time), Knievel decided upon adding more danger and more novelty to the event. His elk protest from 1961 had taught him the value of original thinking when it came to drumming up publicity and this time around he excelled himself. In future years the world would know Knievel as the man who soared over cars, trucks and buses on a motorcycle, but his first ever jump was one of the most unusual of his entire career: Bobby had made up his mind to leap over two mountain lions and a crate containing 100 live rattlesnakes.

Once more displaying a keen eye for promotional opportunities, Knievel chose a 350cc Honda from his dealership to make the jump on. Honda, now the world’s largest manufacturer of motorcycles, was a relative newcomer in 1965, and many people still mocked the little bikes from the land of the rising sun, associating them with cheaper, unreliable produce manufactured in the Far East. American riders in particular referred to Hondas as ‘rice burners’ and preferred their machines to be of wholesome American or British stock. But if Knievel could prove that a little Honda was good enough to jump 40 feet over a cage of rattlers then just maybe he could convince them to buy one from his store.

The obvious choice for the jump site was at the Moses Lake Raceway, not far from Knievel’s bike shop, and it was arranged that he would perform his madcap stunt during the halftime break in race proceedings. Knievel says he never formally practised the 40-foot leap but it seems safe to assume he had attempted some sort of jumps prior to his public debut, even if they were on a much smaller scale. On the other hand, given that he never made a habit of practising for any of his later bigger jumps (‘No use practising – if you kill yourself in practice you’ll never make the jump for real’), it is possible that he was prepared to just twist the throttle and see what happened. He was, after all, well versed in the merits of positive thinking and was more than happy to take a risk if he thought there was money to be made.