The sporting houses, congregated around Mercury Street, the area called Venus Alley, were treated as local industry. Two blocks from Butte High School, on the edge of the business district, they were a part of the community, passed every day as if they were so many exotic hardware stores. They were more memorable to visitors from out of town than to locals, visitors like comedian Charlie Chaplin, who first stopped in the city in 1910 and came back more than once. “The red-light district of Butte, Montana, consisted of a long street and several side streets containing a hundred cribs, in which young girls were installed ranging in age from sixteen up—for one dollar,” Chaplin recalled in his 1964 book My Autobiography. “Butte boasted of having the prettiest women of any red-light district in the West, and it was true. If one saw a pretty girl smartly dressed, one could rest assured she was from the red-light quarter, doing her shopping. Off duty, they looked neither right nor left and were most acceptable.”
Butte was a man’s city, an all-night city, a city where money meant good times and a lack of money meant getting your hands dirty. Butte was a city where women painted their faces and sold their evening’s attention on an open market. Butte was a city where con men conned, where policemen and politicians often accepted sealed envelopes for services rendered or not rendered. Butte was a city of fistfights and braggadocio, tall tales and sporting propositions. Butte was a city where alcohol made the wheels go round.
This was the city where Robert Craig Knievel was born on October 17, 1938.
A story. A nineteen-year-old Irishman, Patrick Keough, from the copper-mining town of Avoca, County Wicklow, arrived in town in 1906 with the same idea as everyone else: to see what small part of the riches in the ground might stick to his hands. He had followed the up-to-date advice from home: “Don’t stop in America. Go straight to Butte, Montana.” Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Hagan, accompanied by her father, arrived at approximately the same time, clutching a lace shawl wrapped around her shoulders by her tearful mother at the docks in Belfast. She was part of the tradition that the eldest daughter leaves first with the father when the family decides to emigrate.
Patrick Keough went to work in the mines, taking his chances, and Elizabeth Hagan got a job cleaning houses, and eventually they met and one thing led to another, as often happens, and they were married in 1912. They built a family consisting of four girls, Mary, Elizabeth, Ann, and Katherine, and a late-arriving boy at the end, John Patrick, also called Charlie. Life was fine until the Depression hit in 1929 and copper prices fell through the floor and Patrick’s job disappeared with them.
Forced to find an alternative way to support their kids, Patrick and Elizabeth tapped into the prosperous, but illegal, field of bootlegging. Prohibition, now a decade old, had done little to slow the fast Butte pace. Bars like the M&M were simply renamed “cigar stores,” and nothing changed as they did their same solid business. Laws were laws, though, and the revenue agents did catch a few traffickers in forbidden fluids. Patrick eventually was one of them.
Facing both federal and state charges, he was kept in the local jail. Elizabeth, called Lizzy, felt bad for him. To improve his sagging spirits, she decided to provide him with a taste of the family product. She painted the insides of a baby bottle white, let the paint dry. She then poured in some spirits to improve her husband’s spirits.
On visiting day, she brought baby Charles and the baby bottle to the jail. While Patrick held Charles, she handed him the bottle. He started to feed the baby.
“No,” Elizabeth said. “You should test the bottle before you ever give it to the baby.”
“Aw, I hate milk,” Patrick said. “You know I hate milk.”
“Well, you should test this milk,” Elizabeth said, staring straight at him. “You should test it now. Do it right now.”
Patrick took a pull on the bottle. His eyes registered great surprise. He spit the whiskey onto the ground.
“Jesus Christ, Lizzy,” he said in Irish brogue, “are ya trying to get me sent to San Quentin?”
In 1937 Ann Keough, the third of Patrick and Lizzy’s four daughters, married Bob Knievel, the second of Butte businessman Ignatius Knievel’s two sons. Bob Knievel was twenty-one years old and she was seventeen, and the plan was to start a family and live in Butte.
This was the city where Robert Craig Knievel was born on October 17, 1938.
The Knievel name was well known in Butte. Originally from Halle Westfalen, Prussia, Knievels had settled in Antelope, Nebraska, as farmers in the 1880s, and spread out in succeeding years. One of the landing spots was Butte. Anton Knievel became one of the city’s leading businessmen, the owner of the Butte Potato and Produce Company, which had a five-story warehouse on the corner of Iron and Utah Streets. He was a charter member of the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, and the YMCA, and a stout parishioner of St. Patrick’s Church.
Ignatius, his younger brother, who followed him to Butte, was decidedly less successful. Drummed out of the family produce business for some shady dealings, he became a tire salesman, then a car salesman. He focused on foreign cars in later life, with Knievel Imports, and eventually became the first Volkswagen dealer in the United States on the far side of the Mississippi River. He was called “Iggy” in Butte. Iggy Knievel.
Iggy Knievel was married to Emma Brown, an Iowa girl, and they begat Robert, called Bob, in 1917 …
Robert Knievel, called Bob, grew up and married Ann Keough, and in 1938 they begat the second Robert, also called Bob, later to be called Evel …
And that was the short version of the family tree …
Tidy …
Except the newest branch was shaky.
Bob Knievel, Iggy’s son, was not ready to become a husband or a father in 1938 at age twenty-one. And he definitely was not ready to become a father a second time, which pretty much was a certainty when Ann became pregnant within a month after she had delivered the first baby. Responsibility and then more responsibility loomed as a lifelong straitjacket. Bob reacted.
Ann worked during the second pregnancy at the American Candy Shop in uptown Butte with her mother and sisters. The family-run establishment was huge, three stories that included a dance hall, a restaurant, and an ice cream and soda shop. The ice cream and soda shop was a gathering spot for young people, especially young women, jukebox music in the background, a place where gossip ran free.
A lot of the gossip concerned Bob Knievel and girls. Reports came back about this girl, that girl, a succession of girls, a succession of embarrassments for Ann. Bob was a hound. No doubt there were confrontations. No doubt there were tears. Ann waited out the end of the pregnancy, delivered Nic, a second healthy baby boy, then stepped away from the embarrassments. She filed for a divorce as soon as possible.
It was a familiar story, two people married too young, at least one partner not ready to settle down, but this time the words were backed by fast and irreversible action. Bob Knievel soon took off for California, settled in the Sacramento area, drove a bus and raced cars. Ann Keough/Knievel took off for Reno, Nevada, a place where Butte residents tended to relocate to escape the cold. She eventually lived on the edge of show business in Reno, sang a bit, sang sometimes with the Mills Brothers, appeared in some local plays, did impressions. Each partner married again in the new locations, new lives. Each started a new family. Bob had three daughters. Ann had two. Neither had another son.
The sons they did have together, oh yes, Bob and Nic, wound up with the dinner check for everyone else’s liberation. They were left in Butte to be raised by Ignatius and Emma, their paternal grandparents. This did not go well. Ignatius was forty-eight years old when he suddenly had two babies under the age of two in the house again. Emma was forty-six. They were overmatched from the beginning.
Ignatius was bipolar, people later decided, sometimes open to long conversation, but sometimes silent for months. He didn’t have the temperament for the job. Emma tried, everyone said she tried, and everyone said she was very nice, smart, a reader of b
ooks—but she was no match for two restless, nonstop boys, especially the older one. Bob Knievel, Bobby Knievel, needed action. The house, Ignatius and Emma’s house at 2511 Parrot Street, was too quiet, too controlled, too cuckoo-clock cautious and dull. Maybe if the young Bob lived in some wilderness somewhere, some Great Plains outpost of the immigrant Knievels in Nebraska, it would have been okay, boredom on the outside matched against boredom on the inside, but that was not where he lived. He lived in Butte, Montana.
He became a classic semi-orphan Butte kid, same as all of those semi-orphan kids whose fathers had perished from working in the mines. He was different, perhaps, because his father had gone to Sacramento, not some place described in the Bible, different because his mother also had disappeared, but he was the same because he did what all of these other fatherless kids did in Butte. He went to the streets for his education, for his concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, winning and losing. In this manliest town in America, he learned the manly life in a hurry, with heavy emphasis on the vices as opposed to the virtues, the physical over the cerebral, the importance of gambling, drinking, stealing, cursing, talking all talk, walking any walk, standing as tall as possible at all times and finding a compliant if not necessarily good woman for a good roll in the hay. He was a true child of Butte, Montana.
This was the city where Robert Craig Knievel was born on October 17, 1938. There was no wonder in his hometown about why he was the way he was, or why he became what he became.
4 Butte, MT (II)
The request was for Clyde Kelley’s belt. Clyde Kelley had to be convinced to give it up, a strange bit of business before the bell even rang to start another day at Butte High School, but if anyone could convince him, Bob Knievel would be the one to do the job. Bob Knievel had the charm, the style, to convince people to do things that didn’t fit into their normal plans. He was a fine adolescent con man.
“Just give me your belt,” Knievel said.
“What do you need it for?” Kelley asked.
“Just give it to me.”
There was a ticking inside this Knievel kid’s head, a faster syncopation, that kept him one step ahead of just about anyone else in the school. He wasn’t a star athlete—didn’t play football for Swede Dahlberg, or basketball for Bob Rae—and he certainly wasn’t a star student, but he was a presence. He was good-looking enough, cocky as could be, boastful, devious. Mischief ran through him, crackled out of his pores. Mischief had its allure.
“Okay,” Kelley said, undoing his belt. “But why do you need it?”
“You’ll find out,” Knievel said.
He was one of those kids who could have been book-smart if he wanted to be book-smart, but couldn’t care less about that. Life was a lot more interesting than any book, especially life in Butte. He probably would be diagnosed with ADD or ADHD, some kind of attention disorder, in another time, but now he was seen as a fidget of a kid, always looking for new action. Plots and schemes abounded.
“Give me a hand with this,” Knievel said one day to Kelley and a group of football players.
“Sure,” they said, not exactly certain why they did.
A girl from the West Side, the more affluent part of Butte, had been handed a Nash Metropolitan by her father. The Nash Metropolitan was a tiny American car, undersized in all respects, perfect for a rich girl’s commute to school. Knievel had his group of football players surround the Metropolitan, bend down, and lift at the count of three. They carried the little car (1,823 pounds) up the school steps and parked it in front of the front door and went away. Perfect.
That had happened a few weeks earlier. Now Knievel collected belts.
His plan soon was unfolded. He had a problem, it seemed, with the school librarian. She had turned him in for some infraction, made his life miserable in some way. He decided to make her life miserable. While she worked alone in the library, getting ready for the school day, he used the five or six belts he had collected to tie the doors to the library shut. He then pulled two wastebaskets, large and full, to the front of those doors. He lit the contents of the wastebaskets on fire.
The smoke from the fire quickly went under the doors and into the library. The librarian just as quickly responded to the problem and tried to get out of the room. The doors wouldn’t open. Panic ensued. Fire trucks were called.
“He smoked her out,” Clyde Kelley said. “Except she couldn’t get out.”
Score another one for Bob Knievel. The hell with the consequences. The hell with the school librarian. If there was punishment, hell, he could take it. Bring it on.
The time-lapse photography version of his run through the Butte streets from childhood to adulthood was filled with these types of moments. Some were more benign. Some were worse, much worse, featuring acts like thievery and fraud. Always, there was action.
Knievel was a loner, no real close friends, but seldom was alone. Everyone knew him or knew of him. He was someone who couldn’t be overlooked, couldn’t be missed. He brought his own spotlight with him wherever he went, focused it directly on himself.
“We’d sit in delinquency, which was detention at Butte High School, staying after school,” Jim Blankenship, a classmate, said. “He was the kid, the teacher would say, ‘One more peep out of anyone and you will all stay another half-hour,’ and he would say, ‘Peep.’ He’d drive everyone crazy. Delinquency was supposed to last for an hour, but when he was there, it would stretch to two hours, three. It would be six o’clock at night when you’d get out of there. Kids would want to kick his ass. I would want to kick his ass.”
The other kids would be sent to delinquency on rare afternoons after getting caught talking in class, arriving late, some minor infraction. Knievel was there every day. He would serve forty straight days of delinquency, miss a day, then serve twenty more. He couldn’t shut up. He couldn’t sit still. He needed to dominate any situation.
That was how he always had been. That was how he always would be. His word was the last word.
“We were seven years old,” his cousin Pat Williams said. “There was a bunch of us. We were playing down by the railroad tracks. We had a contest: who could balance himself and walk the furthest on one of the tracks. Nobody lasted very long. We all fell off, one after another. Bob went last. I can still see this … he bent over and pushed himself into the air and walked along the track on his hands! He walked further on his hands than anybody else did with their feet. He never really fell off. He could still be walking on his hands, if it hadn’t become boring.”
His brother Nic, younger and smaller, was the normal kid, a member of the clubs in school, someone who looked for good grades. Bob was the one collecting the belts. Nic pretty much followed the rules. Bob followed his passions. He was the one who walked on his hands.
He was always attacking something. He always was moving, moving, moving.
“You know how kids, when they start something new, they kind of go from onesies to twosies?” Nic said. “Bob never did that. He always skipped the beginning stuff. He didn’t go into anything in onesies and twosies. He jumped right in. He went straight to threesies and foursies.”
Raised by Iggy and Emma, the two boys were comfortable enough, never had economic worries. Bob was so well dressed all the time, never in jeans, always so clean, that Dan Killoy’s mother down the street would look at her son on those odd moments when he too was well dressed and clean and say, “Oh, my gosh, it’s you! I thought you were Bobby Knievel!” There was love and good cooking in the little house at 2511 Parrot Street, but not a lot of understanding. That was the problem. The generation gap with Iggy and Emma skipped an important generation in the middle.
The boys saw their parents separately on vacations, special visits, but that was it. There would be trips to Sacramento, then El Sobrante, California, to see their father, trips to Reno to see their mother. Both parents expressed hope that someday they could fold in their older boys with their younger girls to make one family, but that didn’t happen. After a
while, it became an impossibility.
“My mother always had the thought that she would get the boys back,” half-sister Loretta Young said. “Then one Christmas Nic came to visit, but Bob stayed in Butte. I remember my mother took Nic to see one of those department store Santas. The Santa told Nic he could have anything in the world, any toy, any bike, what did he want? Nic said all he wanted was to be with his brother, Bob, in Butte. Broke my mother’s heart. She knew right then that she would never have the boys.”
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