“We were coming back from the races somewhere, and he had me stop at this woman’s house,” Frey said. “It was a farm that she and her husband ran. They had kids. This was five o’clock in the morning. He wanted me to let him off. He said she’d give him a ride to work.
“I said, ‘Well, what if her husband’s there?’ He said, ‘The husband’s gone. She told me he was gone.’ I said, ‘But what if he returned?’ Bob pulled out his penis right there in the front yard. He said, ‘If the husband’s home, I’ll tell him I’m the milkman and he hasn’t paid his bills and I’ll piss on his shoes.’ Then he went up and rang the doorbell.”
The one fistfight Frey fought with Knievel was about Knievel sweet-talking Rita. Frey didn’t like it. Rita hated it. Knievel always would say that he wanted to make a trade, Linda for Rita, funny if someone else might say it, but creepy when he said it because he meant it. Frey and his wife not only had the five kids, but they also had a big Chesapeake Bay retriever that they mostly kept in the basement. On the days Knievel sent Frey on the road, Rita let the dog out of the basement for protection.
Frey finally told Knievel to cut it out one day at the shop. Knievel took issue with Frey’s words and asked what he was going to do about it. While he said that, he grabbed a chain to use as a weapon, which he swung.
Frey, the wrestling coach, dodged the chain, got inside, and threw Knievel to the floor. He proceeded to put him into a submission hold. That ended the fight and curtailed the romantic proposals. Then again, Knievel was Knievel.
“You had to know two things about him,” Frey said. “You had to know that he would steal from anybody and that he would chase all women. It didn’t matter how good a friend you were. If he saw something you had that he liked, he’d try to take it. If you understood this from the beginning—and it was a lot to understand—you could get along with him. You just had to watch him.”
So while the Chesapeake Bay retriever prowled the lawn at Frey’s house and while Rita worried about any strange car that might appear in the driveway, he negotiated with the old-timer in Coulee who owned the mountain lions and the rattlesnakes. The old-timer agreed to bring two mountain lions and an unspecified number of rattlesnakes to the event. Frey agreed that Knievel would pay the old-timer $50.
The death-defying stunt had its main ingredients.
Knievel practiced for the stunt in an alleyway next to the store. The ramp, built out of plywood and two-by-fours, was modest in size. The jump was modest in size. There was little worry that he could cover the distance required. His performance would come after a day of racing at the quarter-mile track on Billy Richardson’s father’s farm. Knievel distributed flyers, bought radio advertising.
A crowd of maybe three hundred people, laced with friends and relatives of the racers, gathered at the track on Billy Richardson’s father’s farm for the big event. It was a hot day, the dust stirred up in a hurry, covering everybody and everything. The man from Coulee City appeared as scheduled with the two mountain lions and maybe a dozen rattlesnakes, maybe fourteen or fifteen, maybe twenty, hard to count.
The mountain lions were small, no more than seventy pounds apiece, and not threatening at all. They seemed exhausted by the heat. The owner didn’t want them put in any danger, so they were chained to the sides of the jump ramp. The two of them immediately crawled under the ramp for the shade. The snakes were put in a large cardboard box that previously had contained a refrigerator. The snakes, unlike the mountain lions, were energized by all of this activity. They rattled and moved inside that cardboard box, made that sssssss sound, angry at the heat, angry at being confined.
Knievel roared around on a Honda 350, built the suspense for the big jump. The mountain lions were prodded to come into the sun and at least watch. The snakes continued to sputter. Knievel started into the run-up for this jump that he had done at least a hundred times, no problem, in the alley next to the store. If he could make that jump, he certainly could make this one. There was far more room to operate here.
Ah, but there also was that dirt track. The same problem that had confronted Gary Frey and his tangle with the flaming boards now confronted Knievel. The races had loosened up the track. He could not get any speed, could not get any speed, could not … could not clear the simple forty-foot jump over the cardboard box filled with angry rattlesnakes.
His back wheel hit the box …
The box flipped over and opened …
Knievel landed, shaky, sprained his ankle …
The rattlesnakes started slithering and rattling toward the crowd …
“Get my snakes,” the man from Coulee City said. “Get ’em …”
“Fuck you,” Knievel said.
“Fuck you,” Gary Frey said.
Who wants to pick up an angry rattlesnake? The crowd moved away in a hurry. The snakes split up in a jailbreak attempt to find freedom. Billy Richardson’s father worried about his livestock, about his cattle, his chickens. What if the rattlesnakes got near them? Knievel assured him it would be all right. The man from Coulee City worried about his $50. At least he should get his $50. Knievel assured him that the check would be in the mail. (Which, of course, it wasn’t.)
This was the beginning. This was the first professional daredevil show in Knievel’s daredevil career. It was a small disaster, if you were looking at it on a performance basis. Nothing really happened the way it was supposed to happen. If you looked at it on an entertainment basis, though, it was a hoot. What would those three hundred people be talking about when they went back to work on Monday? Wouldn’t they mention the rattlesnakes?
When Knievel went back to work on Monday, he began to experiment with other, larger jumps. He started to jump whatever objects he could find in back of the store. He started with boats. There were a couple of boats, taken in trade, and he would start his run-up across Third Avenue, next to the plumber’s store, shoot across the street, up the driveway, through the alleyway, and over the boats. After jumping boats, he started to jump a car. Two cars. He would add to his totals as the days went past. Not a lot of room in that alleyway to build up speed, but enough to jump a couple of boats, a couple of cars.
This was the beginning.
A story. Frey arrived one morning to open the shop and found Knievel already was there. This happened every now and then, the boss first to work, usually connected to some leftover nocturnal wanderings for romance, but this was different. Knievel had a safe in the middle of the floor. He pounded at it, drilled at it, swore at it, tried to get it open.
“Triber’s coming this week,” he offered in explanation.
Frey knew immediately what he meant.
The Knievel accounting system at the dealership had some inherent flaws. He basically went to the cash drawer whenever he needed money. Almost every day around noon, for instance, he would say to whoever was in the shop, “Come on, boys, we’re going to lunch,” and dig into the till to pay for the entire check.
To cover these and other excursions, he sometimes took parts from the showroom motorcycles to replace outworn parts on customers’ motorcycles. This worked out pretty well in the short term. The customer was happy with a new part. Knievel was happy with the money he was able to make from the part, refilling the cash drawer. Those new bikes, missing parts, couldn’t be sold, of course, but the short-term problems were handled. The only loser in the exchange, perhaps, was Darrell Triber in Spokane, but he seldom came to Moses Lake.
Except he was coming this week. Coming to take a look at the books.
To secure an influx of cash to clean up the accounting mess, Knievel had returned to his safe-breaking career. In the middle of the night, he had entered the Aero Mechanic building through the skylight. He had been able to pull the safe back through the skylight with a winch on an old wrecker the shop used to pick up disabled motorcycles. He had brought the safe back to the shop to open it.
Except it wouldn’t open. A couple of hours’ work had accomplished nothing.
With t
he workday starting, with the threat of visitors or customers arriving at any moment, Knievel walked across the street and bought a couple of sticks of dynamite from a plumber. The plumber kept dynamite in his shop because the area was filled with caliche, a hardened sediment that sometimes obstructed his work. Knievel bought the two sticks, loaded the safe back on the wrecker, and went to the sand dunes on the edge of town. Frey stayed to mind the store.
A couple of hours later, Knievel returned. He didn’t have the safe. He didn’t have the money. Unable to drill even a hole in the side of the safe to insert a stick of dynamite, he had become frustrated again. He simply slid the sticks of dynamite under the safe, lit the fuse, ran, and hid. The dynamite blew the safe two hundred feet in the air, he figured, something to see.
Except the safe had landed in one of the many sinkholes in the area. The safe was gone, down a sinkhole. There was nothing he could do to get it out.
“Once again he danced out of everything, though,” Frey said. “He figured out something to say to Triber. And he made a deal with the police. He called and said he had confidential information from the person or persons who robbed the safe. He would tell the location of the safe if the police would promise not to press their investigation of the robbery. They promised, and he told and he was all right.”
Except, of course, he still needed the money to replace the money in the cash drawer. That was an ongoing problem.
Frey left after his second summer with Knievel to get a master’s degree in California. Knievel tried to work a deal to buy the dealership, offered half of the deal to Ray Gunn, another young rider at the track and on late-night runs through the streets of Moses Lake. Gunn turned the offer down. His fearlessness didn’t extend to his checkbook.
“It didn’t sound like a bad deal,” Gunn said. “Not a lot of money was involved. But I knew how it all would work. I’d do all the work. He’d spend all the money. I knew Knievel well enough to stay out of it.”
Money was an ever-present problem. One Moses Lake resident remembered when Knievel was “so poor he didn’t have a cracker in the cupboard for his kids.” The creative accounting grew worse. The Internal Revenue Service began to look at the dealings at the dealership. The first nicest person you met on a Honda in Moses Lake increased time in his after-hours career as a burglar, a one-man local crime spree. He was the first suspect, only suspect, in assorted robberies, but the police never could catch him. He was an everyday exhibition of self-destruction.
“He was always doing these little criminal extracurricular activities,” Ray Gunn said. “He robbed a lot of places. Burglarized. Whatever you want to call it.”
Darrell Triber finally ended the arrangement at the dealership. The numbers never added correctly when matched with the numbers at other locations. He still liked Knievel, thought he was a wonderful salesman and an engaging character, but the numbers were the numbers. Something was fishy. He didn’t pursue the problem, but wanted it to end.
Knievel took the family back to Butte and Parrot Street. He tried to sell again with Combined Insurance, but the motivation was gone. When another rider from Washington, Don Pomeroy, offered a chance to sell Yamaha motorcycles in Sunnyside, Washington, which was about one hundred miles south of Moses Lake, Knievel accepted in a hurry.
This put the family on the road again. The important quality in the dynamic always was what Bob wanted. Wife came second. Kids came third. Home was another trailer, this time in Sunnyside. Linda took a job picking asparagus at Pomeroy’s seven-acre farm. She worked with teenagers, dressed every day as if she were heading to a church social instead of hard labor. Babysitters took care of the kids. Knievel was at the dealership on Thirteenth Street and Highway 12.
He also was back on his self-made tightrope.
“One of my first memories is the police coming to the shop and escorting him out in handcuffs,” Ron Pomeroy, one of Don Pomeroy’s sons, remembered years later. “I’d never seen anything like that. It made quite an impression on me. I still don’t know what he did. I know he missed a few days’ work.”
“He’d cashed a bad check,” Ron Hazzard, a friend, said. “I bailed him out. He was in jail a couple of times.”
The craziness at the end in Moses Lake was even crazier here. The Sunnyside police department, like the Moses Lake police department, formed the idea that he had committed a bunch of robberies but couldn’t prove he had. He had also dusted off the Butte idea of the protective private police agency. Once again, it sold best after businesses had been victimized. A rock through the window was still the best reason to buy protection from rocks being thrown through the window.
The police looked for reasons to arrest him. They thought they eventually would catch him. They never did.
“He wasn’t much of a drinker,” Hazzard, who owned a bar, said in a bartender’s appraisal of his friend. “He wasn’t much of a pool player either, though he’d play. He’d play shuffleboard too. He wasn’t afraid to fight. I’ll say that. He had more than one fight. And you didn’t have to push him real hard.”
His motorcycle skills improved working for Pomeroy, who was a terrific rider. (Pomeroy’s son Jim would become the first American to win an FIM international race, the 250cc Spanish Motocross Grand Prix in 1973.) At one race, Knievel saw Pomeroy wheel-walk—doing a wheelie and standing up on the seat. He wanted to add that to his repertoire. He practiced and practiced, came back to the next race to show what he had learned.
The day was warm. He was wearing only a T-shirt, not his racing leathers. The track was asphalt. He crashed and peeled the skin off much of his body. He went to the hospital, came back in bandages to race.
“I’ll never forget all that blood oozing through,” Pomeroy said. “He was a crazy bastard.”
The time in Sunnyside ended much the same way the time in Moses Lake ended, the police on the lookout for transgressions, money a problem, assorted relationships with women becoming another problem, especially with their boyfriends and husbands. Knievel formulated a new plan. Professional motorcycle racing had begun to take hold in southern California. He would go down there and see what he could do. The land of opportunity. Los Angeles. Hollywood. Maybe he could be a stunt man in the movies. Maybe anything could happen.
He made a stop in Spokane before he left, checked in with Darrell Triber, who had brought him into the motorcycle business. They talked about good times. In an amazing coincidence, Triber’s dealership was robbed later that same night. The take was roughly $350. The robbery was the only robbery at Triber’s before or after that night.
“Bob did it,” Archie Triber, Darrell’s brother, said years later. “We all knew he did it. There were things … things that only someone who’d been around the store would know … that made us sure. Darrell never said anything to him. Darrell never went after him. Darrell still liked him. If he needed the money that bad to go to California, okay, he had the money.”
In Sunnyside, Knievel stopped at Ray Gunn’s house on the way south. He had his motorcycle in a trailer hitched to his car. He told Gunn he was heading to Los Angeles to be a motorcycle racer. Gunn was not exactly a bundle of good wishes and confidence.
“They’ll eat you alive down there,” he said.
8 Orange, CA
The idea was taken for a walk in the early evenings at a bar called Marty’s in Orange, California. This was a neighborhood place, located in a strip mall on North Tustin Avenue, a dark and air-conditioned refuge for drivers from the nearby Costa Mesa Freeway, known by its highway number, the 55. The door opened and closed as regulars and irregulars stopped at the end of their workdays for a little fortitude before they joined or rejoined the full-bore evening commute on the 55.
Bob Knievel talked through the commotion. He was going nowhere. He lived around the corner.
The words tumbled out of his mouth, descriptions of some kind of motorized circus that would take place, thrills and chills, family entertainment with a bite. He would put it all together, sign all the ac
ts, book all the dates at racetracks and state fairs, anyplace available. This would be a daredevil show, understand, that topped all daredevil shows, the first daredevil show that featured motorcycles. He would be the head daredevil.
There was money to be made in this business. He had seen how excited people could become when watching a man risk his life by driving a motorcycle off a ramp and into the fresh air, consequences be damned. What you saw in front of you, sir, ma’am, was the man who had taken that risk. Lived to talk about it. Promoted right, and he could do that job too; this could be an attraction that would have people knocking down doors and climbing through windows to catch a look. This could be Elvis Presley and the New York Yankees and, oh, maybe the pope and Francis Albert Sinatra coming to your town.
That one wacky afternoon in Moses Lake, his singular experiment in the professional daredevil business, as opposed to his lifetime as an amateur daredevil, became as exciting in Knievel’s recitation of the story as any matchups in the Coliseum in Rome ever could have been. He was a Christian, and those were mountain lions in Moses Lake, weren’t they? Did the Romans have rattlesnakes? People were terrified when those rattlesnakes got loose, ran for their lives. The scene, when he described it, slightly resembled the streets of downtown Tokyo as Godzilla approached. The people in attendance still were talking about that day in Moses Lake. They would be talking about it forever.
A daredevil show.
This was the future.
This was his future.
He had come to that decision quickly in his new life in California. The realization that he wasn’t going to be a great motorcycle racer had arrived as fast and hard as Ray Gunn had predicted it would. Los Angeles was a step ahead of the rest of the country in the sport. Most of the riders back in Washington and Montana, good as they were, would have trouble keeping up with the professional stunt men, the surf-bum stoners, the forever golden adult-children of L.A. Knievel hadn’t won a thing, hadn’t even climbed out of the novice division to race once against the headliners. He was a good rider, unafraid, but the novice division was restricted to 250cc bikes and he was simply too big physically to compete with the smaller, more nimble racers who moved to the front.
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