In 1954 their father returned to Butte. Bob was sixteen and Nic was fifteen and their father went into the family car business with Iggy, Knievel Imports. If the move was to give guidance, structure, to the boys, it was too late. The boys were gone. Things happened fast in Butte. The driving age was twelve or thirteen, whenever your feet could reach the pedals, no need even for a license. The drinking age was the same as the driving age, except your arms had to reach over the bar in this case. Gambling was everywhere. Sex? The age of consent for a young boy was whenever he could collect enough money for the experience. The houses of prostitution on Mercury Street awaited.
“Two bucks to get laid, three bucks for half-and-half, five bucks for around the world,” Sandy Keith, Butte High grad, said. “I was twelve years old when I lost my virginity.”
The boomtown glow had begun to dim in Butte after World War I when vast amounts of copper were discovered in Chuquicamata, Chile, a new Richest Hill on Earth for the Anaconda Company to tackle, but even at half-speed the pace was faster than the rest of the country. The bars were still open twenty-four hours per day. The mines still put a lot of money in local pockets. The Korean War had brought an added demand for copper, a measured rebirth. The operating theory was that when the country had trouble—and the price of copper rose—Butte did well.
“It was just the best place to grow up back then,” Jim Lynch, who grew up at the same time as Knievel, said. “There was a freedom to do anything. Your house might not have been the greatest, but when you went outside … I lived right on the Continental Divide. There was a million-acre playground right behind my house.”
Lynch did a lot of skiing with Knievel at the old Beef Trail Ski Area when they were both in junior high school. His mother would drive the two of them to the area, and they would ski and explore. One day when the temperature was 45 degrees below zero they were the only skiers on the property. They were the only skiers on the ski jump on another day. It was one of those real ski jumps, just like the Olympics, a man-made hill that shot you off the platform at the end to an uncertain fate at the end of a long, long drop.
“It was the first time we’d ever gone up to the top,” Jim Lynch said. “The jump wasn’t even open. We were examining it when we could hear the ski patrol coming. We knew they’d check the jump. They didn’t want kids to kill themselves. Bob said we had to hurry.”
Hurry? Hurry for what?
Knievel was gone, down the ramp, swoosh, off the end, gone. Lynch, flustered, figured he better follow. He shoved off, went down the ramp, swoosh, went off the end, spotted Knievel from midair in a clump at the bottom, and soon joined him in another clump. Alone, Lynch never would have gone down that jump. With Knievel, here he was.
The kid made you do crazy things.
Somewhere after his junior year, presumably with the Butte High School record for successive delinquency sessions established, with the librarian convinced of her mistaken ways, Knievel retired or was forced to retire from his forced march toward a diploma. He was off to the mines, a familiar path for early retirees from the Butte school system.
The joke was that, with technological improvements, the mines had become Montana’s answer to collecting unemployment checks, filled with men who did little except sit next to a machine, hide underground, and take a paycheck. Knievel fit well into this idea.
“He worked there,” one former miner said. “He punched in and punched out, but you never really saw him.”
Knievel told a story in later years, could have been true, could have been half-true, could have been fiction, that he did a wheelie on the job with a payloader, hit a power cable, and put out half the lights in Butte. The most important thing that happened for him in the mines was that he learned, for sure, that he didn’t want to work in the mines. They were an extension of high school, someone else telling you what to do, except they were dirtier than high school.
He also joined the U.S. Army Reserve, the 592nd Ordnance Company, after he left Butte High to head off the possibility of being drafted. He did his six months of active duty at Fort Lewis, Washington, hated it, then came back for the five and a half years of weekend and summer camp reserve commitments, which he also hated. There was no surprise in the fact that he was not a very good soldier.
“He was the shits,” Sandy Keith, who was his commanding officer in the Reserves, but also the owner of the Acoma Lounge, said. “I always gave him one order—stay the fuck away from me. I liked him in the bar. I didn’t like him in the Army. We went on summer camp once to Fort Lewis, he fell out of the jeep on the first day, said he hurt his ankle, couldn’t do anything for the rest of camp. I told him that was fine … just stay the fuck away from me.”
His passion now was his motorcycle. He had ridden his first cycle on a visit to his dad in El Sobrante when he was fifteen, almost killed himself, and soon after that bought a used Triumph TR5000 with trophy gears from Rob Slack in Great Falls. There were weekend races in Great Falls, which he joined, but the way he rode, fast and fearless, there pretty much were races every night, even if he was simply racing against himself. He tore around the streets of Butte, went off-road, up around the mines, came back down, engine screaming. He liked to do things fast.
“He picked me up once,” Jim Blankenship said. “He had a motorcycle that could go 150 miles an hour. We went 150 miles an hour. I was never so scared in my life. I was really mad.”
He would roar by the high school during the day, popping a wheelie, showing off. He would make the circuit of the bars at night. He would go to the Freeway Tavern to see Muzzy Faroni, to the Met Tavern to see Bob Pavlovich, to see Joe Dosen at Joe’s Mirror Bar, to the Yellowstone, to a half-dozen places. He was mobile, young, fearless, into the action. If the action was on the other side of some law, well, action was action.
“He had a deal with some girl who owned a Volkswagen,” Pavlovich said. “He would have her park it outside the bar. He would find somebody and bet that he could drive his motorcycle up and over the car. The guy thought Knievel would worry about damaging a stranger’s car. Except Knievel already had a deal. He’d drive his motorcycle over the Volkswagen and collect the money.”
Need a fast deal? He had fast deals.
“He sold a guy in the bar four tires,” Muzzy Faroni said. “The guy went out to my parking lot at the end of the night. His car was on blocks. Knievel had sold him his own tires.”
The stories accumulated in a fat pile. Moving, moving, moving. He always was doing something. He took some friends to Reno—here’s one—to see his mother for Thanksgiving. He said he and his friends would supply the entrée for dinner. They went hunting. No more than an hour later they were back with a pillowcase filled with dead ducks.
“You did very well,” Bob’s mother said. “You must be great hunters.”
“It was easy,” Bob replied. “There were all these ducks in that nice park down the street.”
He made deals that sometimes were too good to be true …
“His father brought in the first go-karts to the showroom in Butte,” Jack Kusler said. “Bob drove one of them to my house. I think they cost $250. He said it was his and he would sell it to me for $100. I bought it. I had the first go-kart in Butte. Then his father came around the next day and took it back. Bob Knievel sold me a go-kart he didn’t own. His father was not happy.”
He took things that did not belong to him …
“A guy told me he went duck hunting in Whitehall with Knievel,” Mike Byrnes, a Butte contemporary, said. “They ran out of ammunition. They went to the nearest sporting goods store to buy some more. They were still wearing all of their gear because they were going back to hunt some more. The guy buys the shells, and Knievel starts motioning to him to get going, they have to leave. Knievel is hurrying, but walking with a big limp. When they get to the car, he pulls out a 30.06 Springfield rifle he had stuffed into his waders.”
Moving. Moving. Moving. Knievel and another guy learned about a ring of hubcap thieves, footb
all players at the high school. Hubcaps, especially specialty hubcaps, spinners, were a prized item during the custom-car fifties. Knievel and the other guy learned where the thieves kept the stolen hubcaps, then raided the spot, stole the hubcaps for themselves. Thieves stealing from thieves.
“There must have been five hundred hubcaps,” the other guy said. “We sold them off by bits to some character on the East Side for a buck, maybe two bucks a hubcap. The thing with Knievel, though, was that he was lippy. He liked to tell people, ‘Hey, we stole all these hubcaps.’ He liked the attention. I was worried that the police would find out, more worried that the football players would find out.”
The picture that caught Knievel’s style best at this time of his life—free and flying, lippy, single, not worried about anything—probably came from a spot behind the A&W Root Beer stand at the bottom of Woodville Hill in Meaderville, one of the Butte neighborhoods. The A&W parking lot was the place to be seen on a summer night. Kids and young adults would hang around, buy some food, see some friends, hang around, see some more friends, buy some more food, waste the night. And watch Bob Knievel ride his motorcycle.
The old smelting plant was up the hill, and piled on the ground nearby were the tailings, which were the remnants from the smelting process, the leftover rocks. The biggest pile went four hundred, maybe five hundred feet high, a mountain of tailings, ugly and foreboding, a Mount Everest of refuse, so steep and loose that no one could possibly walk up the side. This was where Bob Knievel rode his motorcycle. Or tried to ride his motorcycle.
He would begin at the bottom, perched over his little 250 Tiger Cub or whatever he was riding, get moving as fast as he could before he hit the mountain, then try to fight gravity and common sense and reach the top. He usually was the only one who tried this, a one-man show. The diners in the A&W parking lot had a perfect view as he charged so hard at first, then started to slow, then slipped somewhere in the middle or the last third of the climb and slid and went back to the beginning, short of his goal again.
He was entertainment. Up he went, down he came. Up he went, closer, down he came. Up, down, up down, closer, closer, still closer. Up … up … there. Every now and then he would finish the entire climb. Made it. Did it. He would finish high above the city with a big bounce, breathing hard, still upright, still astride the bike, looking at the spread-out lights on top of the many gallows from the mines.
The diners in the parking lot at the A&W would blow their horns in appreciation. Magic. Management—Jim Lynch’s grandmother owned the place—gave him a standing offer of free food any time he performed.
A story. The felon’s given name was William C. Knofel, but he sometimes was known as Clarence William Knofel and also sometimes was known as Clarence Junior Richards. He made a lot of work for the Butte justice system throughout the fifties. His record included time in the city jail, the county jail, and the Montana State Prison on charges ranging from murder to carrying a concealed weapon to grand larceny. He also spent some time at the state mental hospital in Warm Springs.
The biggest headlines came from the murder charge in 1954. He was accused of killing eighty-year-old Quong On, also known as Old Charlie, ransacking his house on East Mercury Street in search of money, then dumping the body near the Butte Gun Club. Knofel also was famous for his jail escapes. He escaped the county jail by sawing through the bars with a hacksaw blade, escaped the city jail by sawing through a hinge on the door, escaped once simply by running away from his guards after a court appearance.
He was recaptured each time, and the murder charge was dismissed when a key witness disappeared, but that did little to change the local perception that he was a pretty bad actor. The Butte police, kept busy with his many alleged infractions, gave him a nickname. They called him “Awful Knofel.” He did his best to live up to the name.
A deal was struck in July of 1960 that finally ended his one-man crime spree. Promising to relocate to California, he pled guilty to a grand larceny charge and was given a five-year suspended sentence. The stipulation was that he leave immediately for California, a move that was in everyone’s best interests.
“I hope you can get from here to the bus station without breaking any laws,” Judge John B. McClernan advised from the bench.
The anonymous court reporter for the Montana Standard pointed out in his story that the bus station was about two blocks from the courthouse. He added that there was a crosscut shortcut that reduced the distance to one block.
Awful Knofel apparently made the trip without incident. He was gone.
His place in Butte history was not assured until years later. One of the many stories about how Bob Knievel became Evel Knievel involved a night in a Butte jail cell and an officer named Mulcahy declaring, “Look at this, we’ve got an Awful Knofel and now we’ve got an Evil Knievel.” Mulcahy claimed it was true, and Knievel sometimes claimed it was true, sometimes gave the words to someone else, sometimes said his Little League manager first called him “Evil.”
Whoever used it first, the name did not stick in Butte. Everybody called him “Bob.”
Hockey was his next occupation. Hockey? His high school football career, people said, had lasted no more than a couple of freshman practices because he tried to step on other kids with his cleats, tried to break arms, leave marks, and was sent home. He was a skier, of course, and rode his motorcycle, and he was an ad hoc pole vaulter, even owned his own bamboo pole, practiced, but never went out for the school track team. Hockey?
It didn’t seem to fit his personality, a team sport, a collective approach to anything, but he always had played hockey. Every empty lot in the neighborhood around Parrot Street—and there were a lot of empty lots—became a skating rink in the winter. Skating was part of growing up in Butte. Hockey was the next step.
The organized version of the game was played at the rink at Clark Park, the prime recreational area in Butte. Knievel became a rink rat as a kid, showed up by himself, skates and stick, watched from the periphery as the older kids played. One of the regulars was Tubie Johnson, whose father coached the local youth teams.
“Knievel was small, this little punk kid who kept hanging around the rink,” Johnson said. “My father noticed him. I think he took pity on him, because he let him start practicing, showed him the things you had to do to be a hockey player.”
Johnson went into the Army for two years, and when he came back in the winter of 1956 he found a different Knievel. The little punk kid had grown into a six-foot, 175-pound hockey player. Knievel’s father, back in the picture, had sent him to a couple of hockey schools, one in Canada, and he had improved. He now was a physical center-ice man, good size, shot every time he had the chance, probably could have passed a little bit more, but scored enough to be effective. He talked a far better game than he ever played, but he could play. Not afraid to fight.
“He was decent,” Tom McManus, another Butte hockey player, said. “On a scale of one to ten, he was a seven. But I’d trust him about as far as I could throw him. He was a real show-off, had to be the life of the party all the time.”
“He was a good athlete, but he always was in a lot of trouble,” Tubie Johnson said. “He was the biggest bullshitter in the world. I couldn’t believe a thing he’d say. He could sell an Eskimo a refrigerator.”
In September of 1958, nineteen years old, Knievel suddenly became the most important figure in Butte hockey. He started his own semiprofessional team, the Butte Bombers. He was the owner, the coach, the starting center. Nineteen years old. It was a remarkable string of titles.
The start-up money, not much, came from his father and Ignatius and the car dealership. Local sporting goods dealer Phil Judd provided a bunch of uniforms and equipment on credit. Butte had a five-year-old civic center with dates to fill, so the move made some economic sense. Knievel offered players $50 per game, recruited some Canadian talent out of the Montana School of Mines in Missoula, put together an ambitious schedule that included other semipro teams from t
he United States and Canada, a few minor league juggernauts, and some big-name colleges like Minnesota and Michigan.
There was no chance that anyone would wind up in the National Hockey League—the NHL contained only six teams and virtually 100 percent of the players came from Canada—but this was good local theater.
Knievel put himself on the ice for power plays, penalty killing, and all big moments as center for the first line. He set himself up to be the star. Little self-placed stories soon appeared in the Montana Standard about how different minor league teams coveted his services, but the final paragraph always noted that he had decided to stay with the Bombers.
The other players soon learned that the $50 a game was a mirage. Knievel was tough to pin down for money, but hockey was hockey. This was the only team around if a player wanted to play.
“We never got paid too often, but I remember a couple of good meals,” Tubie Johnson said. “God bless Phil Judd. He kept the thing afloat, giving credit for sticks, uniforms, equipment. I don’t think he ever got paid either.”
The Bombers survived a first year, came back for a second in 1959–60. Knievel scheduled games with U.S. teams from Great Falls, Salt Lake, Spokane, and Denver, plus Canadian teams like Medicine Hat, Calgary, Lethbridge, Trail, and Rossland. He also secured an exhibition with the Czechoslovakian Olympic team at the Butte Civic Center on February 7, 1960. The Olympics would begin eleven days later in Squaw Valley, California, and the Czechs, two-time world champions, would stop on the way.
The game was a coup. A coup? It was the coup of coups. The two-time world champions? In Butte? Against the Bombers? Knievel had tried first to attract the Russians, the defending Olympic champions, but was turned down when he couldn’t guarantee certain financial considerations. The Czechs were a suitable substitute, another hockey power from the dark side of the Iron Curtain, grim and foreboding and very good. The finances were shaky here also—Knievel said in the newspaper two weeks before the contest that it would be called off if attendance at a pair of games with Salt Lake didn’t bring in enough revenue—but all parties pushed forward.
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