“My brother paid the racers, so he knew exactly how much every racer had won,” J. C. Agajanian Jr., whose father promoted the races at Ascot Park in Gardena, said. “Knievel never got more than the minimum. If he got that.”
Broke, he called Alex Smith for a recommendation and returned yet one more time to knock on doors for Combined Insurance. Linda worked in the fields in Westminster, stoop labor, picking strawberries, green beans, whatever was in season. Finances were so tight that Knievel convinced his neighbor to allow him to run an extension cord from one tiny apartment to another tiny apartment to siphon off electricity. He couldn’t pay the bills.
Ah, but he still could sell. His new boss at Combined, Rodney Friedman, called him “the best salesman I ever came across.”
The game was still tough, even tougher in California than in Montana. Friedman would meet his salesmen for breakfast in a designated restaurant in a different designated area every day. The men would fan out from there, hit every business in the neighborhood, cold calls, reconvene for lunch to boast or lick wounds, then return to the streets for the afternoon. It was a daily routine that left feet tired, minds numb. The sale of one introductory six-month policy now returned $1.20 to the salesman. He had to sell 100 policies to make $120.
“Bob understood what you had to do,” Friedman said. “He was a believer in the W. Clement Stone approach. I ran sales meetings on Monday nights, and I’d put up these different quotations from Mr. Stone on the walls around the room. A lot of guys just laughed at them, thought they were hokey. Not Bob. He got it. The company would run these sales contests, and he would drive himself. He’d be out there till midnight, working on his numbers.
“He was trying to get his show set up. That’s why he was doing everything.”
The idea of the daredevil show, stewing in Knievel’s head since Moses Lake, was his new grand passion. He threw himself into it the same way he did with his other passions. The need, of course, was for working capital. That was why he talked about his plan everywhere he went, why he talked about it with the other salesmen, why he talked in Marty’s with the regulars and irregulars, with anyone who would listen. He was fishing for wallets.
Rod Friedman’s wife, Joyce, volunteered to type letters for him. She wasn’t excited about Knievel, didn’t like him, the way he let Linda work so hard while he pursued a half-ass dream, but she was a good typist and made her contribution to the cause. The letters, punchy and positive, were sent to petroleum companies, tire companies, motorcycle companies, any operation that might want to sponsor a bold man doing bold and dangerous motorcycle feats.
The lessons of W. Clement Stone and Napoleon Hill were woven through everything Knievel did. The true believer sold himself as much as he sold his product. The difference was that this time the product and the person were pretty much the same thing. He sold himself to sell himself.
“Your mind is your invisible talisman,” Stone and Hill advised in Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude.
The letters PMA (Positive Mental Attitude) are emblazoned on one side, and NMA (Negative Mental Attitude) on the other. These are powerful forces. PMA is the right mental attitude for each specific occasion. It has the power to attract the good and the beautiful. NMA repels them. It is a negative mental attitude that robs you of all that makes life worth living.
Knievel had PMA coming out of his ears. The NMA was stuffed clear out of sight as he talked about the glories of motorcycle jumping, the size of the potential crowds, the giant financial return that surely would arrive from any investment.
“To become enthusiastic, act enthusiastically!” the book advised. “To speak enthusiastically and overcome timidity and fear: (a) talk loudly; (b) talk rapidly; (c) emphasize important words; (d) hesitate when there is a period, comma, or other punctuation in the written word; (e) keep a smile in your voice so that it isn’t gruff; and (f) use modulation.”
Without timidity or fear, he talked loudly and rapidly in the bar, a smile and modulation in his voice, emphasizing the important words and hesitating in the right punctuated places. Alas, the other patrons listened or half-listened, eventually paid their tabs, and left, back on the 55, but one other character in the every-night cast did not leave. He was paid to listen to tales of lost love, disappearing dreams, asshole bosses, cold fronts approaching from the west, and sports teams that couldn’t fucking hit. A proposal to stage a daredevil show was downright exciting stuff compared to all of that, no matter how many times he heard it.
The bartender turned out to be Bob Knievel’s customer.
“I was just out of the Army, back from thirteen months in Korea,” Tim Perior said years later. “There was nothing imminent in my life. I was looking for something to do.”
Bartending was a pit stop on the way to this indeterminate future. He had lied to get the job at Marty’s, said he’d been a bartender back in Michigan, where he grew up, but the truth was that he’d never worked in a bar in his life. He didn’t know how to make a scotch-and-water. On the night of his debut, a Friday night at that, owner watching from the end of the bar, he’d written the ingredients for various drinks on the palms of his hands and kept a “Guide to Cocktails” at his side. Somehow he had survived. He was still there when Knievel appeared.
Perior’s fuzzy career plan was to become a commercial artist. He had taken art in high school back in Detroit, liked it, had painted supermarket signs in an after-school job. He had a steady hand and a good eye. He already was enrolled in courses at the Los Angeles Art Center. In the Army he had purchased a Nikon 35mm camera at the PX and then won a photography contest on his first roll of film. Perhaps a photography shop would be a business.
Knievel, the more he talked, offered a chance for experience in both of those potential fields. Perior could paint the signs for the shows. He could paint the trucks. He could take the photographs, handle all publicity. He could be the manager, a 50 percent partner in the fat, grand adventure. Wouldn’t that be the best part? The adventure? All he had to do was come up with some money to get the project started.
“When I got out of high school, I just took off for Europe,” Perior said, describing his free-form approach to life at the time. “I had a friend, each of us had enough money for a one-way ticket to Europe plus $25 to get started when we got there. We just went. My mother was really mad … we stayed for two years. Then I came back for a couple of months and took off for California.”
He met Knievel one afternoon before work, and Knievel showed him how well he could ride a motorcycle, doing wheelies up and down the streets of Orange. Perior decided Knievel hadn’t been lying. He could ride that bike, definitely was fearless. The idea grew muscle, noise, belched fumes. The conversations at the bar became more about details than possibilities. Perior was on the team.
He wasn’t a rich man, fresh from the Army, certainly no big numbers in the bank, but he did have something that Knievel did not have: perfect credit. He also had a brother-in-law, his sister’s husband, who also had perfect credit and was looking to make an investment. That was enough.
Perior and Knievel went shopping. Using the two lines of perfect credit, plus a few bucks down, they bought:
two Matchless motorcycles
a large trailer
two Ford pickup trucks
enough lumber and steel to build two ramps
incidentals
The Ford dealer in Anaheim, where they bought the trucks, made unlimited after-hours access to the open back parking lot part of the deal. This was where Knievel and Perior and anyone else who was available built the ramps. This was where they put together Bob Knievel’s rolling circus.
The first trial jumps, small, were done by Knievel in the parking lot. Ramp to ramp, the separation was maybe a few feet, the height no more than two feet at the start. Okay, the separation grew larger, the height grew higher, as the practices continued. The plan was to jump high enough and far enough to clear the two pickups, parked lengthwise, tail to tail.
/> Knievel also worked out a parasail routine, a tow rope attached to the back of a car, a parachute strapped to his back. The speed of the car, combined with the lift from the parachute, pulled him ten feet, twenty feet, a hundred feet, more, off the ground, as if he were some out-of-control water skier. He would run behind the car to get started, then whoosh, go up in the air.
Also, the first four-by-eight sheets of particleboard were doused with gasoline, then set on fire in the parking lot. Knievel crashed through them at seventy miles per hour on his Matchless bike, like Gary Frey did in Spokane. A small cast was assembled in the parking lot: a couple of guys from Butte, “Jumping Jack” Stroh from Sunnyside and Butch Wilhelm, a four-foot-four midget Knievel had befriended.
Wilhelm, riding a pocket bike, a motorcycle in miniature, practiced the same stunts Knievel did, but on a miniature scale. He jumped across toy trucks on the pocket bike. He crashed into a wall of foam rubber bricks instead of blasting through the burning particleboards. He crashed, period. He crashed a lot, crashed every time he attempted a jump. The smallest imperfections, a rock in the parking lot, a dip in the ground, could make his miniature bike fly out of control. He became discouraged, wanted to quit.
“Bob gave him this big pep talk,” Perior said. “He told him that crashing was nothing, part of the game. He said, ‘Look at me, I crash all the time.’ (And he did.)”
Knievel booked three shows around southern California for the first two months of 1966. The first was in Indio on January 23, 1966, a Sunday, at the Indio Date Festival fairgrounds. Knievel promoted the show, put flyers on poles, went to Indio schools to talk about helmet safety. The crowd that appeared was small, notable mostly for the fact that it included actor Lee Marvin. Marvin and Steve McQueen were the two noted cycle enthusiasts among the local Hollywood movie stars. McQueen competed in races under the alias Harvey Mushman. Marvin was a hard-core motorcycle rider, straight from the Marlin Brando image.
The show he saw on this first day went as perfectly as possible. Perior was the announcer. The tricks went as planned. Knievel cleared the two trucks, end to end. It all worked. The pay, to be split among the people involved, was $500. Professional show business life for Evel Knievel and the Motorcycle Daredevils officially had begun.
The name had been formulated on the advice of Bob Blair, the owner of ZDS Motors in Glendale, part of the Berliner Motor Corporation, which distributed Norton, Matchless, and Ducati motorcycles in the United States. Blair had become a sponsor of the daredevils and suggested that “Bob Knievel and the Motorcycle Daredevils” sounded a bit dull. The unused nickname from long ago, “Evil Knievel,” was a suggestion to improve the sound of the name, to make it more memorable. Knievel switched an “e” for an “i” to stay away from a dark, hulking image. Evel Knievel it was. Perfect.
“I painted the name on the pickups, on the black tarp for the trailer, on the doors of the cab, on everything,” Perior said. “ ‘Evel Knievel and the Motorcycle Daredevils.’ There was a feeling that this was going to be something special.”
A show in Hemet, California, was rained out, so the next appearance for the troupe was at the San Bernardino County Fairgrounds in Barstow. In the warm-ups before the show, Perior and Jumping Jack Stroh started racing each other around the dirt track. They hit one particular turn on the edge of control, started sliding, and went out of control. Crashed. Perior was uninjured, but Jumping Jack was a mess. He had scraped a bunch of skin off the right side of his body. His racing leathers had been ripped, and blood was leaking from various locations.
Jumping Jack’s major job in the show was an act where he stood in the middle of the track and Knievel drove straight at him at sixty, maybe seventy miles an hour. Knievel would dip low, flatten himself against the body of the motorcycle. Jumping Jack would jump, spread-eagled, at the appropriate moment, and clear Knievel and the bike. The act was a definite crowd-pleaser.
Unfortunately, Jumping Jack’s injuries now precluded him from jumping. He was in pain simply walking. The act would have to be taken out of the show unless, fuck it, sure, the roles were reversed. Knievel decided he would be the jumper. Stroh was healthy enough to ride the bike.
Knievel waited at the prescribed spot. Stroh came from the prescribed direction at the prescribed speed. Knievel jumped, but not high enough, not fast enough. The motorcycle hit him, straight on, at sixty or seventy miles per hour. He always described the point of impact as “the handlebars hit me right in the balls.” His legs caved the wrong way. He flipped high into the air. He fell to the dirt.
That was the end of the performance for Evel Knievel and the Motorcycle Daredevils. The star was taken to the hospital, where he was treated for cracked ribs and heavy bruises and sprains to his lower body.
“He was really hurt bad,” Tim Perior, who followed him to the hospital, said. “In fact, I don’t think he ever was healthy again. This was the start. I think he always was hurt after this.”
A film surfaced later that supposedly showed Knievel being knocked into the air by Jumping Jack and the motorcycle. Jumping Jack claimed that the film in actuality was from another show and that he, Jumping Jack, was the one being clipped. The figure, whoever it was, wore a crash helmet and did get hit hard. If using the film of Jumping Jack allowed Knievel to show the perils of his profession, then it was one of his lesser sins. He did get hit by the motorcycle in Barstow. He did get hurt.
The nimble kid who walked on his hands at a moment’s notice, the fast-moving center-ice man, the athlete, was no more. A lifetime of convalescence and pain had begun. He was twenty-seven years old. The next show didn’t take place for almost four months. He never would attempt the jump over a moving motorcycle again.
The return of Evel Knievel and the Motorcycle Daredevils, the first booking outside southern California, was scheduled for Post Falls, Idaho, on June 1, 1966, at the State Line Speedway. The state line mentioned in the name was between Idaho and Washington, the track close to Spokane. Knievel was headed back to familiar territory.
The cast of characters traveled north. One important change had occurred. Tim Perior, the partner, had begun to have doubts about the entire enterprise. He wondered where he fit. The more he saw the way Knievel operated, the more he became convinced that his own role did not extend much past his financial assistance. Knievel made all decisions, ordered him around the same way he ordered everyone else around. Knievel was in charge of everything. This was not the partnership Perior had in mind.
“Everything was about him,” Perior said. “He was convinced he was going to be famous. We’d go into a bar and he would have himself paged. He would go outside and call the bar from a phone booth, just to have his name spoken over the loudspeaker.”
A small incident, six months earlier, just before Christmas, still stuck in Perior’s mind. He had heard Knievel’s lament that he didn’t have any ornaments for the tree. Perior owned a box of ornaments that had hung from his family’s Christmas trees in Michigan. Touched by Knievel’s problem, he brought the box to practice and gave it to Knievel. Somehow the box wound up tied to Knievel’s roof rack. Somehow Perior was in the car. Somehow the box hadn’t been tied tight enough and went flying off the car and onto the road.
Perior mentioned the fact. Knievel said the heck with it. Perior mentioned the fact again. They could stop and get the ornaments. Knievel said the heck with it. Perior was struck by how oblivious Knievel was to everybody else’s feelings except his own. Didn’t the guy know that the ornaments meant something to Perior, that this was an important gift? Apparently not. Didn’t he want to bring the ornaments home for his kids? Apparently not.
In Spokane, before the Stateline Speedway show on June 1, 1966, even took place, two things happened that reinforced Perior’s unease. The first was that he discovered Knievel had spent twice, maybe three times as much money for publicity and advertising as they had agreed to spend. Knievel never had consulted Perior, he simply spent the money. In fact, he had lied to Perior about it.
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br /> The second thing happened in a strip club. Perior, Knievel, and a couple of the daredevils went to the club. They drank a bit, had some fun. One of the dancers, pleasant, decided she liked Perior. She paid extra attention to him, said those things that women say when they might be attracted to someone. Flirted. That was what she did.
Knievel, who had flirted with her most of the night without any positive response, became madder by the moment. The idea that she would select someone else, Perior, instead of him seemed to be an affront. As Perior talked with her, flirted back, Knievel kicked him under the table. This was not one of those conspiratorial kicks, psssst, to gain attention. This was a hard kick that hurt. Perior was astounded. He stifled his first inclination to punch Knievel in the face and sat at the table and steamed. Knievel steamed on the other side.
“I couldn’t figure it out,” Perior said. “I was single. He was a married guy. I was just talking to the girl, and he was upset that she wasn’t interested in him.”
This was the end of the partnership. Perior was mad about the money that had been spent without his knowledge, mad about his place in the operation, mad about the kick in the strip club. The next morning he told Knievel that he was done. He already had bought a ticket on a Greyhound bus back to Los Angeles.
He figured he was $36,000 in debt and couldn’t see any way the number wouldn’t grow larger. Maybe he would stay if he had a partner he could trust, but he didn’t think he had that. Knievel could keep all the stuff, good luck, but now the payments belonged to him.
“I took my chance,” Perior explained years later. “It wasn’t as crazy as it sounds now. This was Hollywood, where people mortgage their houses to make a movie. It took me a long time to pay off that money, $36,000, but I can’t complain.
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