Life of Evel: Evel Knievel

by Stuart Barker

  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 i
n 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.