Life of Evel: Evel Knievel (2 page)

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.’