Evel

by Leigh Montville

  He later admitted being involved in a lot of robberies, apologized for the inconvenience. He robbed pharmacies, sporting goods stores, grocery stores, any place that could be robbed. One robbery that he admitted was left as unfinished business was an attempt to break into the vault when the Prudential Bank switched headquarters, moved from one side of the street to the other. Knievel and his robbery associates tried to cut through the wall next door, then through the vault, but moved too slowly and had to quit before they reached the money because sunrise had arrived.

  Another robbery, which he never admitted, happened at the courthouse. The safe was filled with money, silver dollars. Someone came in through the roof, broke open the safe, and stole the silver dollars. The prime suspect was the local door-knocker, former hockey executive.

  “It was the weekend of Lincoln’s Birthday,” Jack Kusler said. “A bunch of us were going down to Las Vegas for go-kart races. On Friday I talked to Knievel. He said he really wanted to go, but he was flat broke. He told us to have fun. The rest of us put our karts on a trailer and went. On Saturday night in Las Vegas, there’s Knievel. He has all kinds of money. He’s got $4,000 spread out on the dice table. He said he got lucky.

  “I heard he was stopped by the police on the way back. He had thousands of dollars in silver dollars. He said the same thing, he got lucky. What could they do? Bets are paid off in Vegas in silver dollars. The cops knew he did it, but they couldn’t prove anything.”

  Knievel did admit later that he was headed in the worst directions. Most of his accomplices ultimately would have bad fates ranging from death to drug addiction to long stretches in prison. The Butte policemen would be sent away after a celebrated trial. For the moment, though, everybody was young and bulletproof. The people on the dark side in Butte could do anything. They might have had suspicions that bad things could happen, but the bad things hadn’t happened yet.

  Every day was exciting.

  “I’d see him in a bar,” Clyde Kelley, the grown-up kid who had surrendered his belt to Knievel in the plot against the Butte High librarian, said. “I’d watch him. He’d be looking at the jukebox or the cigarette machine, trying to figure out if it was full of money or not. If he thought it was full, well, he was going to try to figure a way to get that money. That was just the way he was.

  “A hustler.”

  6 Insurance

  He settled down in the summer of 1962, found his first actual suit-and-tie job, selling insurance for the Combined Insurance Company of Chicago, Illinois. The legend later became that he had broken his collarbone riding in a motorcycle race and was forced to take a job in the dull everyday world to pay the rent, but he mentioned at the time that he had a feeling that his illegal activities were catching up with him. He was scared.

  “He told me he thought the police were waiting for him to make a mistake,” Matt Tonning, another salesman at Combined, said. “They knew that he had robbed the courthouse. Everybody knew he had robbed the courthouse. They just couldn’t prove it.”

  If that was the case—or even if a broken collarbone from a racing crash was the reason—he substituted the excitement of insurance sales for his previous excitement. The excitement of insurance sales was a surprise. He was hired by Alex Smith, the district manager for the western Montana territory, and sent to Combined’s headquarters in Chicago for a two-week sales course that appealed to him in ways that high school or the United States Army never could.

  The head of the company was W. Clement Stone, an energetic multimillionaire who had turned business success into a sort of capitalistic religion. With a tidy aristocratic mustache and a partiality to bow ties, he was a living representation of the pint-sized millionaire pictured on the box for the board game Monopoly. He had lived a true up-from-nowhere story, a high school dropout, former newspaper boy, his path to success laid out by the Horatio Alger books he read in the Chicago tenements. He was sixty-two years old now, more convinced than ever that if he could succeed, anyone and everyone could follow.

  To work for Combined was to be immersed in an ocean of Stone’s aphorisms:

  Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star.

  All personal achievement starts in the mind of the individual. Your personal achievement starts in your mind. The first step is to know exactly what your problem, goal, or desire is.

  Big doors swing on little hinges.

  Like success, failure is many things to many people. With Positive Mental Attitude, failure is a learning experience, a rung on the ladder, a plateau at which to get your thoughts in order and prepare to try again.

  Sales are contingent on the attitude of the salesman—not the attitude of the prospect.

  Thinking will not overcome fear, but action will.

  Try, try, try, and keep on trying is the rule that must be followed to become an expert in anything.

  Regardless of who you are or what you have been, you can still become what you may want to be.

  The first duty for all recruits at the training sessions was to read a book that contained all of these thoughts and more, Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude, written by Stone and Napoleon Hill. (When Stone eventually died in 2002 at the age of one hundred, the New York Times headline on his obituary read “Clement Stone Dies at 100; Built Empire on Optimism.”) The second duty was to take the information in the book and use it to sell a hell of a lot of insurance.

  Which was what Bob Knievel did. He followed this program in ways he never had followed any program in his life.

  “A lot of guys shut themselves off from all of that rah-rah stuff, thought it was corny,” Matt Tonning said. “Not Bob. He followed what you were supposed to do. I did too. I believed it. That stuff worked. It could make you a lot of money.”

  The policies were for accident coverage, three dollars for six months’ coverage that would pay the customer a modest benefit if he was disabled. The salesman would earn sixty cents on each three dollars, so he had to move policies in bulk to make money. The company provided all of the essentials for sales, right down to a Five-Part Rebuttal System to customer objections. What the mind can conceive, the mind can achieve! There were contests, rewards, constant memos, a sequence of honors for salesmen that went from Pearl to Ruby, Sapphire, and then Grand Diamond. The big contest every year was held to celebrate Mr. Stone’s birthday on May 4. On every salesman’s birthday, Mr. Stone would send him a book, perhaps Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, perhaps The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, perhaps some other manual for success.

  “You took these principles into your personal life,” Jay Tamburina, another salesman at Combined, said. “Of course you did. The importance of eye contact. The Socratic method, teaching by questions. You realized how you can control people’s minds just sticking to the goddamned script.”

  Playing with people’s heads. Bob Knievel loved it all. This was what he had been doing for all of his life.

  The sales week would begin on Sunday night, a trip to some town somewhere on the Montana map, registration at some bad motel, a bright start on Monday morning. Salesmen would travel through the state on a six-month cycle, renewing past clients, but also armed with a list of referrals. They would work their lists, also make some dreaded cold calls, which W. Clement Stone called “gold calls.”

  Initiative was part of the operation.

  “Bob would rent a booth in a bar for a week,” Matt Tonning said. “He’d go to a place like Eureka, Montana, find a place that he liked, and ask the bartender how much it would be to rent a booth. That would be his office. It was all cattle country, and those ranchers would come into town and line up, and Bob would write ’em up. They all would have money, those ranchers. Shit on their boots maybe, but they had money. There would be lines out the door.”

  The self-confidence and aggressiveness and fast talk that had made some people walk away from Knievel in Butte were assets in this job as he made deals, shook hands, moved along to the next customer. He was Harold
Hill, the Music Man, discovering trouble right here in River City. The trouble could be averted by a fine insurance policy, three dollars for six months.

  Part of his initiative was making deals even if cash was not involved. He would barter insurance for goods or services as well as for money. A rancher offered him a horse in exchange for a big policy in Eureka. Knievel jumped at the chance. The rancher took the horse out of a trailer and left it outside the bar. Knievel tried to sell the horse to ranchers who followed.

  “That horse is Sweeneyed,” a rancher said after inspection.

  “What’s that?” Knievel asked.

  “It means his shoulder is gone,” the rancher replied. “He’s worthless.”

  Not every deal was a triumph.

  A better result came at the roundhouse in Lewistown, Montana, where trains were serviced and turned around, sent back on different tracks. Knievel convinced the foreman to let him talk to the workers and sell policies during lunch breaks. All was proceeding nicely until the big boss arrived and saw this commercial activity and ordered it to stop. Knievel argued that this was lunch break. The big boss argued that this was a place for railroad business, not insurance business. Knievel said he would take this to the president of the company and would be back. He did indeed write a letter to the president, who, it turned out, was a good friend of W. Clement Stone’s and quickly dispatched a telegram to his man in Lewistown.

  Policies were sold.

  “He was an absolute bullshitter,” Jay Tamburina said. “He had bigger cojones than anyone I ever met. There were things about him that were great. There were some that were not great. We had a lot of fun.”

  Any approach could be tried. Faced with a disinterested business owner one afternoon, Knievel threw his insurance book at the man, hitting him in the chest. The book weighed about five pounds.

  “I’m offering you the best God damned insurance in the world,” Knievel shouted. “You better pay attention, by God.”

  Sold.

  The salesmen sometimes would invade a Montana town in pairs. Tamburina would work with Knievel. They looked a little bit alike, short hair, same coloring, same eyes. They would follow their leads, compare notes. Drinking would be involved at the end of the day, Montana Marys in a long line. They would argue about who was better-looking.

  The fifteen or so salesmen in the western Montana district all were around the same age, late twenties, early thirties, most of them married. They were road warriors, partners sometimes, competitors more times, always restless, working on the same daily dose of W. Clement Stone adrenaline. They would gather on Friday nights at Alex Smith’s house in Helena on their way home to cheer their successes, bemoan their plights, report their sales results.

  Smith, older, forty-five, was the charismatic model of what the salesmen wanted to be. He wore custom-tailored suits and sports jackets, all of them with a signature red lining. He wore alligator boots. He drove a white Lincoln Continental, expensive, long as a city block. He had a bar and a pool table in the basement of his home. He was a gracious host, a good talker, a big drinker. Work long enough for the company, hell, this is what you could be. Alex Smith.

  “I thought the sun rose and set on Alex Smith,” Jay Tamburina said. “I wanted to be exactly like him. Everybody did.”

  The salesmen sometimes would gather for parties, sometimes with wives, sometimes without wives. At one affair, Knievel stunned everyone with his agility. A sort of logrolling competition was held in the host’s backyard, using part of a kids’ play set. One after another, salesmen fell off the log hanging from two chains. Knievel stepped up, and not only could he walk on the log, he started spinning it with his feet. No one came close to what he did.

  At another affair, a Christmas party, wives involved, drink involved, Knievel stood up late in the proceedings to propose a toast “to the woman I love.” Everyone anticipated and looked at Linda … and he said some other woman’s name. Linda started crying. Another woman, backed by her husband, stood up and began to chew him out for making Linda feel bad. Knievel reacted.

  “You just shut up,” he said to the woman. “Because I fucked you too.”

  The room became very quiet. People soon started to gather their coats and leave. This was not exactly a power of positive thinking moment, although W. Clement Stone had an aphorism that seemed to apply:

  “You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to do something, or that you were forced to, but actually, whatever you do, you do by choice. Only you have the power to choose for yourself.”

  True enough.

  A story. The two salesmen finished the sales day at the Capri Bar in Helena, Montana. They sat next to each other, Tamburina and Knievel, joined by the county attorney, a Helena lawyer whom they both knew. There was a crowd in the place, most seats filled around the large circular bar, one of those arrangements where the bartenders work in the middle of the circle, serving customers on all sides.

  Knievel seemed preoccupied.

  “What are you doing?” Tamburina asked.

  His fellow worker in the Combined Insurance empire seemed to be figuring out some kind of calibration at the edge of the bar. The distance between the edge and his glass seemed important. The measurement now was perhaps a foot.

  “No,” Knievel said, moving the glass a half-inch, maybe an inch.

  “No,” he said again, moving the glass another half-inch, maybe another inch.

  This continued for a while. The glass was moved, half-inch by half-inch, inch by inch until it was two feet from the edge of the bar. Maybe more. Maybe two feet, six inches. Both Tamburina and the county attorney, who also had become interested, repeated the question. What was Knievel doing? He finally answered as he moved the glass a final half-inch, maybe an inch.

  “I think that’s it,” he declared.

  “That’s what?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure, if I stood at the edge of the bar, if my dick could still reach the glass. How far away would the glass have to be to be as far as I could reach? I think this is it.”

  He was serious. The county attorney and Tamburina stared at the distance. The idea seemed preposterous. Seabiscuit, the racehorse, didn’t have a member that could stretch that far. Bob Knievel? Either he was a biological freak or he was self-delusional. All evidence pointed toward self-delusional. The men had been drinking for a while.

  “Nobody’s dick is that long,” the county attorney said. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Do you want to bet?”

  “Sure.”

  “Five hundred bucks.”

  The county attorney knew a sucker when he saw one. This was easy tax-free money. He shook Bob Knievel’s hand. Knievel quickly got out of his chair, stood. He moved close to the bar and put his hand on his zipper.

  “What are you doing?” the attorney asked.

  “I’m going to show you,” Knievel said. “There’s only one way to do that.”

  The fact should be mentioned that the circular bar at the Capri was not a flat circular bar. One side was higher than the other, so the patrons on the higher side could look down on the patrons on the lower side and see every single thing that they might be doing. Knievel, Tamburina, and the county attorney were on the lower side. If Knievel unfurled his member, his dick, and tried to reach the glass, the people on the high side would see the entire show. The fact also should be mentioned that other lawyers, maybe a judge or two, maybe a couple of newspapermen, and certainly a fair share of gossipy voters sat on the higher side. A reputation could be destroyed in a moment.

  “You can’t do that,” the county attorney said.

  “Sure I can,” Knievel said, starting to unzip.

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Then I win the five hundred dollars. If I can’t show you, then you have to take my word. Give me the money.”

  The county attorney, after a substantial amount of grousing, eventually paid. Knievel received $500 for not expos
ing himself in the Capri Bar.

  Tamburina wondered forever if his fellow salesman had plotted out the whole scene in his head, if he knew the attorney would bite and then would have to back off. Was Knievel such a student of human nature that he could predict all that? Could he play a game that far ahead? Apparently so. Tamburina couldn’t figure out any other explanation to the story.

  “The guy,” Tamburina said, “was sharp as a tack.”

  His biggest moment in the insurance business came when he visited the state mental hospital in Warm Springs, Montana. He tore through the hospital during a competition called “I Dare You Week,” sold 110 three-dollar policies in a day, 271 three-dollar policies in the week. These were both record numbers in his district. He sold policies to doctors, nurses, clerical staff, everyone except the residents, though later in life he would not mind leaving the impression that, yes, well, maybe he sold to a couple of residents too. Hey, it was I Dare You Week.

  His efforts made him a Grand Diamond winner, highest honor in the company, and were extolled in a mailing distributed to all Combined salesmen in the region. Under the headline “Bob Knievel Sets Record” and a shirt-and-tie head shot that could have been any corporate young man on the move, he handed out advice on how to do exactly what he did.

  “You asked me to tell you how I broke the records last week in daily and weekly sales … Well, to tell you the truth, it wasn’t very hard … after I conceived in my own mind that I could do it,” he said. “I enjoyed it and had a lot of fun … All it takes is accepting the challenge to do it … I’ll admit I worked long hours during that one day and all through the week, but I had a lot of fun.

  “I’ve got a wallet full of money, and that helps me to realize what a great System and a great product that we have to sell … it’s easy.”