Читать книгу Life of Evel: Evel Knievel - Stuart Barker - Страница 6

Situated in southwest Montana, approximately halfway between the Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, Butte is the largest city in the state, even though its population only numbered 33,892 citizens during the census of the year 2000. The figure speaks volumes about the decline in the town following the closure of the copper mining pits it was once famous for; one hundred years ago there would easily have been 100,000 entries on the census.

Butte was founded on a collection of small mining claims and eventually became a massively prosperous mining centre in the early part of the twentieth century. Described as ‘the richest hill on earth’ for more than 100 years due to the wealth of ore lying beneath its surface, the town was once the most important source of copper anywhere in the world, with 2,590 miles of tunnels connected by 41 miles of vertical shafts – some of which reached 6,000 feet down – allowing access to the valuable commodity. It is also home to the famous Berkeley Pit, once the biggest truck-operated open-pit copper mine in the United States.

Where there’s copper there are usually miners, and where there are miners there’s always a lively, noisy, hard-living community. Butte was no exception. If there was any exception, it was that the city was even livelier, noisier and harder-living than most of its peers, operating largely as it did by its own rules and code of conduct, much like the pioneer towns of the old Wild West.

To live in Butte was to work hard and play hard. At one time the city was reputed to have more bars per capita than any other city in the US – and for almost every bar there was a brothel. Such was the importance of brothels in Butte until very recent times that one of the more famous examples, the Dumas Brothel, has now been turned into a museum to celebrate the city’s sinful past. With miners working shifts round the clock, many bars in Butte were open twenty-four hours a day and there were always prostitutes on hand to accommodate the miners. At one time there were no fewer than 500 women working the red-light-district area of Butte.

As far back as 1863 the area surrounding Butte had been famed for its gold deposits, and when they ran out of this the prospectors found an abundance of silver in the same Tobacco Root Mountains. When the silver too was mined to exhaustion it could have spelled the end of mining in the area, and the city of Butte might never have developed as it did. But the discovery of vast resources of copper kept the prospectors coming, and this would prove to last much longer than the sources of silver and gold. Copper was the making of Evel Knievel’s hometown, just as his hometown was the making of Evel Knievel.

With large companies like the Anaconda Copper Mining Company (which Knievel would later work for) establishing big-time operations, mining work became plentiful and by 1917 the population of Butte had soared to upwards of 100,000 people. It would never again reach this peak but while it did the city was an absolute haven of all the major vices: gambling, drinking and prostitution were practised on a scale not seen since the days of Dodge City and Tombstone in the previous century, and the rough, tough copper miners were just as ready with their guns as the outlaws of the Wild West had been. Butte was one tough town.

But it was not only populated with hard-drinking, hardgambling and prostitute-friendly miners, it was also home to a new breed of millionaires who had made their money from the mines without actually having had to work in them. It was this nouveau-riche clientele who made possible the construction of the resplendent parlours, brothels, bars and hotels which set Butte aside, at least aesthetically, from the other rough-and-tumble mining towns. The presence of great wealth was evident even as drunks lay in the streets and men shot each other over card games. It was a town of contrasts and a town where a fast buck could always be made by anyone who was prepared to operate on the wrong side of the law.

The Wild West mentality hadn’t entirely subsided by 1938 when an unremarkable couple named Robert Edward Knievel and Ann Knievel (née Keaugh) had their first child on 17 October who they called Robert Craig Knievel. As the Knievels would soon discover, it was not the ideal time or environment to raise a child. The town was already a rough place and the great depression of the 1930s wasn’t making things any easier. Jobs were hard to come by, money was scarce and a world war was just around the corner; a war which would eventually damage the economy even further.

Robert senior was a handsome man of German ancestry, while his young wife could trace her own family roots back to Ireland. The uncommon surname of Knievel can be traced to Germany as far back as 1265 with a family coat of arms that places great emphasis on ‘military fortitude and magnanimity’. While the name is unusual, the hard pronunciation of the ‘K’ in Knievel is genuine and not an American corruption, nor is it a gimmick dreamed up by its famous bearer to enhance the rhythmic qualities of his stage name.

For reasons he has never openly discussed, presumably because the subject-matter remains a source of some anguish, Bobby Knievel’s parents separated in 1940 when he was just under 18 months old and not long after Ann Knievel had given birth to another child, Bobby’s younger brother Nick. It was not an uncommon scenario under the circumstances. Living conditions were extremely tough for any young family in America during the great depression and having two young children to clothe and feed stretched many families to breaking point. The Knievels were no exception. Knowing they would struggle to provide a stable and secure upbringing for their children, the decision was taken to hand the boys over to their paternal grandparents, Emma and Ignatious Knievel. While Robert Senior believed a brighter future might lie in California, Ann moved to Nevada, and the young Knievel brothers were left with their grandparents in a small house on Parrot Street in Butte, unaware at such a young age of exactly what was happening to them and why.

Ignatious J. Knievel owned a tyre shop in Butte and worked long hours trying to make it more profitable than it actually was. While it was no gold mine it did put food on the table and clothes on Bobby and Nick, a burden the ageing couple could well have done without but a duty they fulfilled to the best of their ability. With Ignatious devoting so much time to the shop it fell mostly to Emma to raise the boys and instil in them the rights and wrongs, the do’s and don’ts, that would prepare them for life in a difficult world.

Having been taken in by their grandparents at such an early age, Bobby and Nick quite comfortably and naturally called them ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ and, apart from the greater age gap, life in the small Knievel house probably felt much like that of any other working-class family in Butte. There wasn’t much to go around and survival was a daily struggle, as Evel explained many years later: ‘Everything that my grandparents got they worked morning, noon and night for. Nothing was ever given to them and nothing was given to me; I either worked for it or stole it.’

As soon as Bobby and Nick were old enough to play outside in the streets they found out what it really meant to be a resident of Butte. Pimps, prostitutes and drunks were everywhere, and one of the boys’ earliest childhood pastimes was throwing stones at prostitutes in order to bait their pimps into chasing them down the street. And it wasn’t as if Bobby had to go out of his way to locate the city’s prostitutes; a good many of them were working quite literally on his doorstep. ‘There were 500 prostitutes working in one square block on Mercury and Gallina Street and my grandfather’s tyre shop was right on Gallina Street. I was raised right in it. Blonde Edna’s whorehouse was right across the street from it [his grandparents’ house] and Dirty Mouth Mary’s was on the other side.’

When he came of age, Knievel stopped throwing rocks at prostitutes and began throwing money at them instead. ‘In ten years in these whorehouses,’ he admitted, ‘I must have spent at least five or six thousand dollars, at three dollars a time. Every whore in this town knew me. There just wasn’t anything else to do there but go into a bar or a whorehouse. When you got tired of going to the whorehouse, you went to the bar.’

But as a kid there were often more conventional games to be played than pimp-baiting, and Big Sky Country was a better place than most in which to play them. Like any young American boy, Bobby loved playing cowboys and Indians, and since Montana had been as much a part of the Wild West as anywhere else in the States it formed the perfect backdrop for escapist cowboy games. Television cowboy Roy Rogers was Bobby’s greatest childhood hero and he would spend hours pretending to be him, dressing up in a makeshift cowboy outfit complete with sheriff’s badge and his grandfather’s hat. By the time he reached his mid-teens, Bobby even had a real horse, Alamo, gifted to him by his step-grandfather, Roy Buis, to add a touch more realism to his escapades. It would have dumbfounded the young Knievel to imagine that he would not only meet but befriend his hero Roy Rogers in later life, but for the time being he was content just to imitate him.

Another of Bobby’s childhood idols was boxer Joe Louis, better known at the time as the ‘Brown Bomber’. Bobby was a huge boxing fan and always tuned the radio in to listen to Louis fight the likes of Billy Conn, Max Baer and ‘Jersey’ Joe Walcott. As a kid, Bobby owned a pair of boxing gloves but had no punchbag. Being as inventive as any other child without the resources to actually buy what he wanted, Bobby soon found a solution to this, albeit an unlikely one. ‘My dad was in the Second World War and he sent me his canteen from Japan, so I hung it up in my grandmother’s [house] upstairs and I used to use it for a punching bag.’ When Knievel’s father managed to get Joe Louis’s autograph for his son, Bobby was so thrilled he carried it in his wallet for 12 years.

Despite having being abandoned by his parents, a scenario that can often result in children becoming rebellious and delinquent, Bobby Knievel wasn’t an inherently bad child – he simply had a mass of energy and an inclination to mischief like most young boys. In other words, he was perfectly normal, but he did seem to have an inherent fondness for danger and so sought out thrills whenever and wherever he could. Apart from the adrenalin rush he enjoyed when being chased by pimps, Bobby also loved to build his own ramshackle soapboxes and race them down the hill at the end of Montana Street. Naturally there were crashes – the first of many in Knievel’s life – but they rarely amounted to more than a bloodied knee or scuffed elbow and injuries were always something to boast about in a town like Butte. Bobby was also extremely fond of football and would don his leather safety helmet and play with his brother Nick every night after school as their grandmother cooked dinner.

There was nothing about Bobby’s early childhood to suggest he would be anything other than a regular working Butte man when he grew up; nothing which marked him out as being particularly different to the other kids he played with on the block. It was not until he was eight years old that he witnessed the event which would ultimately inspire him to carve his own way in life and become famous the world over for doing so.

In 1946, Butte’s Clark Park played host to Joey Chitwood and his Auto Daredevil Show, and when Emma Knievel took her grandsons to watch the performance she could never have imagined the far-reaching consequences their day out would have; in fact, if she had known, it is most probable that the family would have stayed at home. Bobby was completely mesmerised by the performances of the daredevils and thrilled to see their Ford V-8s crash through fire walls, jump from ramp to ramp and perform choreographed rollovers. ‘I had never seen anything like it,’ he later recalled. ‘Using a take-off ramp, Chitwood had leapfrogged his car over an automobile while stuntman Cliff Major jumped a motorcycle through a hoop of fire. This set the course for the rest of my life.’

Although he didn’t decide there and then that he was going to become a professional stuntman, Knievel did set about imitating the stunts he had seen on his bicycle. ‘I went home and took the mudguards off my bicycle and put cards in the spokes so it would sound like a motorcycle and I built little ramps and jumped off of them. I’d put on little shows for the kids in the neighbourhood.’

Even those early shows combined the three key elements to Knievel’s later career: his love of performing in front of an audience, his willingness to be hurt while doing so, and his entrepreneurial skills for making a fast buck – Bobby charged his friends two cents apiece to watch. Using his grandfather’s garage doors as ramps, Bobby’s brother Nick would chalk a mark where Bobby landed before moving the doors further apart to allow him to try and better the distance. When this became too mundane, the brothers set flame to piles of scrub and Bobby would amaze his young audience by leaping over the flames. Leaping fire proved to be a real showstopper until both doors caught fire and left the budding stuntman with no ramps. Needless to say, Bobby’s grandfather was none too impressed upon discovering that his garage no longer had doors, but after reprimanding Bobby he merely chalked the experience down to ‘boys being boys’.

Witnessing the Chitwood show was certainly the defining moment of Bobby Knievel’s childhood. At the time it may have simply been a fantastic spectacle and an exciting escape from the realities of growing up in Butte, as well as being the inspiration for his own little stunt show, but at a deeper level the experience had a more profound and lasting effect on Knievel. He had learned that people would pay to watch men risking their lives – and would love them for doing so.

But while Knievel’s marketing and PR skills would become legendary, they certainly weren’t learned in Butte High School where he showed little aptitude for the discipline of scholastic pursuits. He was more interested in the opportunity school gave him for meeting girls. ‘I didn’t like school very much – I never did. The only time I liked it was when I had a girlfriend and I wanted to go to school to see her.’ Knievel later rued the fact that he had not persevered in school, admitting that ‘Education is so important. I didn’t have much schooling and regret it now.’

While he was still in formal education, Bobby relied on sports rather than academic pursuits to provide the inspiration for getting out of bed each morning. He enthusiastically played hockey and football and tried his hand at pole-vaulting and most other track and field events, usually with a considerable degree of success. In fact he became so competent at skiing that he went on to win the Class A division of the Northern Rocky Mountain Ski Association men’s ski-jumping championship in 1957 – his first real, high-profile jumps of any kind and another crucial piece in the jigsaw that was to make up his unique and bizarre career. Years later, Knievel would utilise ski-jump-style ramps for several of his motorcycle jumps when there was insufficient space to reach the required take-off speed.

Further refining the necessary skills for the career path he would eventually choose, Knievel also tried his hand at rodeo riding all over Montana. Again, the physical involvement and danger appealed to Bobby just as it did on the football pitch or hockey rink; he was a natural-born thrill-seeker and those thrills simply could not be found sitting behind a desk listening to a lecture on the American Civil War, much as he enjoyed tales of the Old West. Rodeo riding also happened to be another discipline that would stand Bobby in good stead when it came to muscling a bucking and weaving Harley-Davidson down a landing ramp.

But the sport that most of his childhood friends and sports coaches remember him as being particularly good at was ice hockey, even though he was never noted as being much of a team player as his high-school hockey coach Leo Maney recalls: ‘He was an individualist and he did not learn, at any time we were associated with him, this matter of team play; passing the puck to the other players. He’d get the puck at one end of the ring and away he’d go all by himself.’

That streak of individuality, that preference to rely on himself instead of others and that desire to attract the glory of the limelight for his own achievements were all crucial elements in the making of Evel Knievel. While his grandparents did all they could for him, Bobby was continuously aware that he had been abandoned early in life and that the only person that was going to be able to help him make something of himself was himself.

But, much as he would have liked to, Bobby couldn’t spend his entire time at high school playing sports and, when the pressure and boredom of class work finally became too much, he decided to leave school at 16, before graduating, much to the disappointment of his grandmother. Emma Knievel had tried everything she could to make sure Bobby had a solid education which would earn him a respectable job, but in the end his own will was too strong. If he didn’t want to do something, Bobby Knievel simply wouldn’t do it – for anyone or anything. But his lack of education meant there were few options of employment in Butte and it was almost inevitable that he would find himself working down the mines.

Mining for any substance is hard, gruelling and dangerous work but it was even tougher before today’s high standards of safety and occupational health came into being. Apart from the multitude of physical mining accidents, which were all too common, there was also silicosis – or miner’s consumption as it was known locally – to worry about. Caused by breathing in tiny particles of silica, quartz or slate, over time silicosis affects the lung tissue and can ultimately prove fatal. Regardless of the dangers (or more probably because he just didn’t have any other viable options) Bobby Knievel landed a job with the Anaconda Copper Mining Company after leaving school, and worked in the Stewart and Emma mine shafts a mile below the surface of the richest hill on earth as a contract miner, skip tender and diamond driller. ‘I did every job in the mine from the top to the bottom and I remember my first cheque – $57 for a week’s work.’

Apart from silicosis there were other potentially lethal hazards, including the constant threat of cave-ins, fires, floods and the escape of poisonous gases, not to mention the additional and usual hazards of working with heavy equipment in a poorly lit environment where temperatures often soared above 100 degrees. Conditions were so bad that more than 2,100 miners lost their lives in Butte’s deadly labyrinth of mine shafts over the years, 168 of which perished in a single fire in 1917. Knievel soon discovered it wasn’t for him. ‘I could hardly wait to get out. I had many friends killed in the mines [from] accidents; ore dumped on them in the shafts and killed falling to the bottom, and being crushed to death in the slopes. I just wanted to get out.’

Knievel did have one other option open to him apart from working down the mines and that was to work in his father’s Volkswagen dealership, which he had opened upon his return to Butte in 1956. But Bobby, perhaps needing to find his own way in the world or maybe because he still harboured a grudge against his father for abandoning him, declined the offer and stuck with his mining job, however desperate he was to get out of it.

Salvation from the pits eventually came in the form of a driving job for the same Anaconda company. Bobby could escape the perils of the mines by driving his less fortunate colleagues to and from work. It was a safer and more comfortable job but Bobby found it mundane work and often spiced it up by trying to scare his passengers witless, to the point where he claims they refused to ride with him any longer. The final straw in his career at Anaconda came when he reputedly told a colleague to drop a giant boulder into the back of a truck he was driving so that he could perform a ‘wheelie’. According to Knievel, the truck reared up so high that it brought down overhead power cables and led to his dismissal.

Glad to be out of the mining business, an experience he would ‘never forget’, Knievel was nonetheless still short of career options and decided that his physical prowess would be put to better use in the US Army. He joined the 47th Infantry in the late 1950s (most probably 1958, though Knievel himself offers varied dates) for one year’s full service to test the water. As a non-team-player and a young man who did not respond well to authority, the armed forces may have seemed a strange choice, but for Knievel it represented one of the few opportunities to escape the grimness and hopelessness of Butte. He had to give it a try.

Knievel was stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington, and although he initially claimed he hated his time in the Army his opinion appeared to have mellowed in later years when he was asked if it was a particularly grim period in his life. ‘Not really. I served two years in the infantry full-time then seven years in the Reserves when I was in my twenties, but it was okay. I even managed to do a bit of pole-vaulting, sky-diving and parachuting.’

Despite becoming proficient in the use of Browning automatic rifles, it would seem that Bobby’s premier contribution to Uncle Sam was in his role as a member of the Army’s pole-vaulting team where he could stand by his own merits – just the way he preferred it. Having already become a proficient ski-jumper, his pole-vaulting prowess (he claims to have been able to clear a bar at 14 feet) seemed to prove that jumping really was in Knievel’s blood, one way or another.

Whatever his true feelings about the Army, he didn’t enjoy the experience enough to sign up for any longer than the minimum term, and after a short period of service he opted out, even though he didn’t have any other immediate prospects.

Once again it was his love of sport that provided the prospect of a possible alternative career. Having attended a summer hockey school at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks in 1959, Bobby saw a glimmer of hope in carving out a career as a professional ice-hockey player.

Perhaps disliking the formal approach adopted by an official hockey school, Bobby claimed to have declined the offer of a full-time scholarship, opting instead to throw his lot in with the semi-professional Charlotte Clippers who were members of the Eastern Hockey League. Yet again he appeared to be restless and easily bored and he quit the team after completing just one exhibition season. By then Knievel felt he had no chance of making it into the professional National Hockey League and, after failing a try-out with the semi-professional Seattle Totems of the Western Hockey League, he headed back home to Butte, a little more worldly but still lacking any real direction in his life.

While he may not have been good enough to cut it on the national scene, Knievel was now armed with the experience he’d gained on his travels and he viewed himself as a big hockey fish in a pretty small pond. He saw a new opportunity of making a living from the sport, and decided to form his own team, the Butte Bombers, which he would not only own but also play for, manage and coach. If he couldn’t cut it solely as a player, maybe a jack-of-all-trades approach would reap rewards. The Bombers established themselves as a semi-professional team and Knievel claims they only lost one game in the two seasons they existed. That game was against the Czechoslovakian Olympic team, whom Bobby had shrewdly coerced into playing his Bombers as a warm-up game for the 1960 Winter Olympics that were being held at Squaw Valley in California.

This may have appeared to be a shrewd move at the time but it soon turned into a farce and threatened to ruin Bobby financially. He had hired the Civic Center in Butte and promoted the entire event himself, as well as still being one of the team players. He stood to make some decent money on the gate and a few bucks more from selling beer and snacks, but when forty Czech players, officials and hangers-on turned up in Butte, all expecting their expenses to be paid, Bobby knew he was in trouble. He had only anticipated an entourage of 20 and immediately realised he was going to lose money, and what was more, it was money he didn’t have to lose. After the game he told the Czechs he couldn’t pay their expenses without receipts (which Knievel later admitted to stealing) and an international incident was only avoided when the US Olympic Committee stepped in to pick up the bill.

The whole event must have left a sour taste in Knievel’s mouth as he finally turned his back on ice hockey and set about looking for other ways to make a quick buck. ‘There’s no money in hockey,’ he later lamented. ‘It was my dream to be a pro-hockey player but there’s just no money in it.’ He certainly needed to make some money somehow because Knievel had by now married his childhood sweetheart, Linda Joan Bork.

Knievel had known Bork from his days at Butte High, and even after he dropped out he still hung around outside the school looking for any opportunity to talk with Linda. Three years younger than Knievel, Bork was caught between her youthful love for the handsome but unpromising 20-year-old and the disapproval of her parents, who saw Bobby as little more than a hoodlum who couldn’t hold a steady job. And if Knievel’s often-repeated tale about kidnapping his future wife is true, then he certainly justified the Borks’ assessment of him. According to Knievel, he became so frustrated by the Borks’ ban on their daughter speaking to him that he kidnapped Linda from the local ice rink. He reportedly dragged her off the ice by her hair and headed for Idaho where he proposed to marry her. Knievel’s grandmother recalled the incident many years later, adding a ring of truth to the story. ‘He did kidnap her of course and they were hunting for them all night long. The police were hunting for them and we were hunting for them but he was not put in jail or anything.’

Driving conditions on the night of the ‘kidnap’ were terrible and the young couple were forced to pull over and sleep the night in Bobby’s grandparents’ car, hoping the blizzard would abate by morning. But, by the following day, word of Knievel’s escapade had got out and the couple were intercepted by a police road-block before they could reach Idaho. Knievel was charged not with kidnapping but with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, but since Linda did not want to press charges he was merely reprimanded by the authorities.

However, now feeling fully justified in his assessment of Knievel, Linda’s father subsequently succeeded in obtaining a restraining order against Bobby, forcing him to stay away from Linda for a period of two years. Knievel had little choice but to obey – at least in public – but he still never gave up hope of one day marrying Linda Bork. His patience paid dividends and that day finally came on 5 September 1959 when the pair tied the knot having eloped with the help of a $50 loan from Knievel’s grandmother and the use of the family car. Linda had only managed to elope because her father was away on a fishing trip at the time of the marriage and by the time he discovered the truth there was nothing he could do to change matters, no matter how furious he was.

A married man he may have been, but Bobby Knievel was still without gainful employment and the only money he was bringing in to the caravan he and his young wife were staying in was from a number of petty criminal activities. Knievel had long since realised that most of the people he saw in Butte with money had gained it on the wrong side of the law and he wanted a piece of the action, having seen the benefits of a life of crime. ‘All that you can desire in life or want to be is what you can see immediately around you,’ he explained, ‘and what I saw immediately around me was a pimp with a shiny pair of shoes and a ‘49 Mercury. In Butte, if you weren’t a pimp or a thief you were nothing. And I needed a few bucks to get out.’ It was all the incentive Bobby needed; if he couldn’t earn an honest buck, he’d earn some dishonest ones.

Knievel had long been used to the wrong side of the law, having been involved in several fights and charged with petty theft, but that was not exactly out of the ordinary for young men in post-war Butte. He was no stranger to dreaming up scams to make money either. One particular favourite was stealing hubcaps from cars to sell on as replacements or as scrap metal, a technique he perfected while still at school but one which escalated over time to almost industrial proportions. ‘One time the police caught me and another boy with about three hundred hubcaps. I sold them for about a buck apiece. Christ, I needed a few bucks to go out. I could steal a guy’s hubcaps when he was sitting in the car. You know, those ore trains go by, make a lot of noise. A guy’s sitting in his car, I didn’t care whether he had the radio on or not, I’d just steal the hubcaps right off his car. Every kid in town knew I could do it. But I moved on to bigger and better things.’

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.