“I was young. I learned a lesson—never go into business with someone you can’t trust. That was a good lesson to learn.”
Knievel tried to convince him to change his mind, took him to the bus station, talked all the way. The departure was emotional. Knievel cried. Perior fought back second thoughts about staying with the show, somehow felt sorry for Knievel in the end. He still left. The bus pulled out into a steady rain. The scene was something out of a movie.
“The show should have worked,” Perior said. “Bob had a great idea, had a lot of things going for him. Everything was there … except it was just a click off. Bob did things where he couldn’t help himself. It was all about Bob Knievel. He wanted to get ahead, and if someone was in his way, he’d just kick ’em down the side of the mountain. That was the way he was.”
The Stateline jump was his first jump over a string of cars. There were eleven of them, and he cleared them all to great applause. He claimed a world record, most cars jumped at one time, and since no one else was in this newly invented sport of jumping cars in a line he had to be right. It wasn’t exactly like breaking the record for the 100-yard dash.
In his next jump, on June 19 at the Missoula Auto Race Track out on Miller Creek Road, part of a daylong schedule of motorcycle races, Knievel tried to break his three-week-old world record. He lined up twelve cars this time, plus a cargo van at the end.
He had learned through trial and error that the most important component for making these jumps was reaching a proper speed at liftoff from the ramp. Too much speed and he could overshoot his target. Too little speed and, sure, he would undershoot. When he came onto the ramp this time he thought his speed was perfect.
He was mistaken. His speedometer said he was traveling fast enough, but not too fast. His speedometer was wrong. He figured out later that the wheel must have spun in some gravel on the way to the takeoff, delivering a faster number on the speedometer than he was traveling. Not a big discrepancy, but enough to make him fail.
He cleared the twelve cars, but the back wheel of his motorcycle clipped the cargo van at the end. The motorcycle and Knievel went flying. He wound up in St. Patrick’s Hospital in Missoula with a severely broken arm, lacerations, and broken ribs. A lesson that he learned here was not to look at the speedometer. He would jump in the future strictly on feel. He would let his senses tell him how fast he was going.
“I’m sorry that we didn’t give the folks a better show,” he told a reporter from the Daily Missoulan newspaper at the hospital. “I promise that we’ll come back and jump again in Missoula.”
He showed his wounds to any reporter who asked. One of them said his arm was “stitched together like a baseball.”
A story. He stayed at “Good Time Charlie” Shelton’s house in Kalispell, Montana, after he was released from the hospital. Charlie was originally from Butte, ten years older, a friend who had worked for a radio station. Knievel had another show scheduled in a couple of days at Doran’s Family Campground in Kalispell, a modest affair (an RV park!), performing for campers watching from a grandstand that seated no more than fifty people. The show would have to go on without him, because his arm was in a cast and his body ached in at least a dozen places. He would appear, but he certainly couldn’t jump.
The entire daredevil enterprise seemed in jeopardy. He was busted, broke. He told Good Time Charlie that he’d cleared $400 from the Missoula jump, then paid over $300 in hospital costs. He had put on four shows now and had been seriously injured in two of them. This was not an encouraging statistic. None of the statistics were encouraging. Most of the other daredevils already had left.
The whole deal seemed dead almost before it started.
“You know what you have to do?” Good Time Charlie said over cocktails in his living room. “You have to jump something big. Nobody gives a shit if you jump thirteen Volkswagens or whatever it was you jumped in Missoula. If you’re going to take the risk, you have to jump something that will get people’s attention, something big.”
Big?
“You have to jump Soldier Field in Chicago,” Good Time Charlie said. “You have to jump the Washington Monument. You have to jump the Grand Canyon …”
Knievel considered the idea. He didn’t consider long. He shouted to his wife in the kitchen.
“Linda,” he said, “I’m going to jump the Grand Canyon.”
The words sounded natural the first time he said them.
A focus was added to the operation. Just like that. He had a goal, a subject for easy conversation in all promotions. He was not some carnival act coming through your town, another clown trying to take a local dollar, he was a Man on a Mission, building up to the death-defying stunt of stunts that would captivate the world. He was going to jump the Grand Canyon.
There was no hesitation, not even the glimmer of a second thought. He and Good Time Charlie went that afternoon to Moose’s Saloon, a peanuts-on-the-floor place in Kalispell run by former University of Montana football player Moose Miller. Almost as soon as they sat at the bar, Knievel pointed at a picture on the wall with his good arm and said to anyone within hearing range, “That’s the Grand Canyon, and I’m going to jump over it on my motorcycle.” No matter that the picture showed nearby Flathead Lake, not the canyon, the message was what mattered.
(Knievel in later years would say that he had the idea to jump the canyon while drinking a number of Montana Marys and staring at a picture of the Grand Canyon at Moose’s Saloon in Kalispell. Reporters would call and ask if the picture of the Grand Canyon still was there. Moose Miller, a nice man who did not want anyone to be mad, would diplomatically say, “No, it’s not.”)
After the stop at Moose’s Saloon, Knievel went on local television that night to promote the appearance at the RV park. He talked more about the jump over the Grand Canyon than he did about the upcoming show. He already had invented all the details about how the jump was supposed to work.
“He said that Robert F. Kennedy was going to be there,” Good Time Charlie said. “He said Kennedy had promised to be part of the rescue team.”
The canyon was part of the show.
The jump at Doran’s Family Campground on August 7, 1966, went fine. Knievel tried to recruit Darrell Triber’s younger brother, Archie, a high school kid, to come down from Spokane as a replacement, but after Archie agreed, Archie’s mother disagreed. A young guy named Chuck Burt from Mossyrock, Washington, came down and cleared the ten cars. He also jumped ten cars four weeks later in Helena, Montana, as Knievel’s body continued to heal.
There was nothing wrong during that time, however, with Knievel’s mouth or his imagination. In between the two jumps by Burt, an Associated Press story came out of Butte about a local daredevil who said he was going to jump the Grand Canyon. The daredevil said he would be traveling to Arizona that very weekend to search for a proper spot for the attempt. Three weeks after Good Time Charlie made his off-the-wall suggestion, hell, plans were being unfolded in the newspaper about how it would be done. They sounded wonderful, well researched, and almost official, but they were total nonsense.
“I won’t say definitely that I will be able to jump it until I get a look at it, but I will say I’m going to try it,” Knievel told the AP. “I’m determined to drive off the edge at 140 miles per hour.”
He said he envisioned a paraglide landing, the speed of his motorcycle shooting him into the air, the parachute opening to carry him the rest of the way. He sounded as if he had been planning the jump for a long time, said the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, and “television networks” had asked about becoming involved. Included in the story were mentions of the accident in Barstow and the crash in Missoula. The implications were obvious: the unwritten headline was “Crazy Son of a Bitch Soon to Kill Himself.”
He finished out the year with a successful ten-car jump at Naranche Stadium, the high school football field in Butte, plus similarly successful ten-car jumps at drag strips in Tucson, Arizona, and Deming, New Mexico. He was pret
ty much a solo act for these shows, but his entire approach was different. He sold his product, the jump over the canyon, everywhere, rattled long-term interest in the future with his appearances in the short-term present. He was that Crazy Son of a Bitch.
He announced at his appearance in Butte that he hoped to jump the Grand Canyon in a year, in November of 1967. He now said he was exploring a spot on the northern rim that was three thousand feet high. His scenario for success had changed. He had added two imaginary jet engines to the sides of the imaginary motorcycle he would use. The first jet engine would shoot him off the takeoff ramp at 130 miles per hour. The second jet would cut in almost immediately to increase the speed to 300 miles per hour and lift him a thousand feet higher than the takeoff point. As he approached the opposite side of the canyon, he would parachute off the motorcycle and flutter safely to the ground. A second parachute, radio-controlled by his crew, would drop the motorcycle to the same stretch of real estate, where heroic man and heroic steed would be reunited.
This was perfect. Made a potential customer tear up a bit, just thinking about it all.
9 Gardena, CA
The best motorcycle racetrack in the country in 1967 was Ascot Park in Gardena, California, the place where Bob Knievel had tried and failed as a rider. Sitting at the confluence of three major roads (“Ascot Park—Where the San Diego, Harbor, and Riverside Freeways collide!” ads on half the radio stations in Los Angeles shouted all day, every day), the half-mile clay oval was the home to flat-track racing and motocross racing and sprint car racing and demolition derbies and figure-eight racing, and just about any event that involved the burning of hydrocarbons for spectator pleasure.
The proprietor, forty-four-year-old J. C. Agajanian, was a definite motor-sports character. He wore a cowboy hat all day every day, had a cigar tucked under his mustache at most times, and every May took up residence in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he sponsored the 98 car in the Indy 500. Troy Ruttman in 1952 and Parnelli Jones in 1963 had won the race in the 98 car.
The son of an Armenian immigrant who had made big money in the combination businesses of trash hauling and pig farming—the refuse of people was feed for the pigs, the pigs were feed for the people who created the refuse, a never-ending ecological cycle—Agajanian wanted to be a driver of race cars when he was eighteen years old. His father told him that an occupation that dangerous would be fine; however, he should kiss his mother and pack his bags because he no longer would be living at home, and he also probably should change his name since he no longer would be a part of the family. This advice had sent him into the business side of the sport.
Ascot, his home base, was a dusty, noisy wonder. The noise and smells filtered through the surrounding neighborhoods, a strict 11:00 p.m. curfew in effect. The cramped stands held 7,500 cramped bodies, always a cheap night of live entertainment. The prime motorcycle times were Friday nights and Sunday afternoons.
Knievel saw an opportunity here. No longer a part of the racing, he returned to Ascot with his new idea. He set up a business meeting with Agajanian, delivered a proposal.
“ABC television is going to be here to film your motocross race for Wide World of Sports,” he said. “I’d like to be a part of that. I’d like to jump fifteen cars in a line with my motorcycle, which would be a world record.”
“What do I need you for?” Agajanian asked. “I already have Wide World of Sports coming. I’ll get a good crowd. I don’t have to pay a jumper.”
“You’re right, you don’t have to pay me,” Knievel said. “Unless I bring in more people. Look at your attendance for last year. Just give me a dollar per person for everybody over the figure for last year. If the number is the same or lower, you don’t owe me anything.”
Agajanian was receptive to the idea. He was intrigued by Knievel’s personality and guts. He would do this deal. Sure. No risk really was involved. The date for the Ascot Park show was set for March 5, 1967. This was Knievel’s first appearance of the new year. He was gone from the apartment in Orange, the family often back in Butte as he lived in his car, in low-rent Hollywood motel rooms, in the spare rooms of friends and acquaintances.
“He’d stay at my house sometimes,” Skip Van Leeuwen, one of the Ascot racers Knievel had befriended, said. “Neither of us had any money. We’d go to restaurants on Sunset Strip where we’d work the dine-and-dash. We’d each try to finish faster than the other so we could get out the door first. That way the other guy would have the check, and he would take the risk bolting out the door.”
Van Leeuwen was fascinated with Knievel’s promotional skills. He came home one day and Knievel was writing a letter to the president of Sun Oil asking for $250,000 in a sponsorship deal. Van Leeuwen was astounded. He said Knievel didn’t need money like that. Hell, $2,500 was more like what he needed, not $250,000.
“Skip,” Knievel said. “I want the president of Sun Oil to read this. Do you think his secretary is going to show him a letter from some guy looking for $2,500? She’ll show him this one, though, for $250,000.”
The canyon jump definitely was now his prime promotional tool. The motorcycle daredevils of the past year pretty much were disassembled. He was a one-man canyon-jumping show. This was how he presented himself when he was interviewed by Jim Murray, the sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times, before the March 5 jump at Ascot.
“Evel proposes to jump over the Grand Canyon in a motorcycle,” Jim Murray wrote. “You heard me, over it, not across it, or through it …”
Murray, nationally syndicated, at the front end of a thirty-seven-year career at the Times that would land a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, had the perfect ear to hear what Knievel was selling. Death! Craziness! Sick fun! This was the best column that ever had been written about the man and his ideas, capturing their base-level appeal. Murray quoted Knievel’s promise to jump the canyon—“You can bet your life I’ll do it”—near the end of the column.
“ ‘Correction,’ I told him,” Murray then wrote. “You bet your life. I wouldn’t fly over the Grand Canyon in anything that doesn’t have stewardesses.”
The Murray column and other publicity brought a crowd to Ascot Park. Knievel made the jump—the fifteen-car world fecord—without problems. Agajanian, after the show was finished, tossed him an envelope full of money back in the office. Knievel counted the bills, saw there was $3,000, put the money back in the envelope, tossed the envelope back onto Agajanian’s desk. The promoter was on the phone to someone else and said, “I’ll have to call you back. I think I have a problem here.”
The problem, Knievel said, was that too much money was in the envelope. By his count, 2,300 more people had come to the races this year, so he was owed only $2,300. Agajanian had given him $700 too much. Agajanian said that his turnstile count was the same. The extra $700 was a bonus. He liked Knievel’s work, thought maybe this could be the start of a longer business relationship.
He wanted to see more of this car-jumping act.
A story. The first famous car-jumping daredevil in the United States was a Noblesville, Indiana, farm boy named Earl M. “Lucky” Teter. Automobile thrill shows had been part of the state fair circuit almost since the invention of the automobile itself, but the Depression caused a jump in the business as an estimated 250 different shows filled with desperate but brave men rolled back and forth across the country in search of the vanishing entertainment dollar. Lucky Teter came out of that group.
His big trick was to drive an automobile off a ramp at high speed to create a parabolic curve that he hoped would clear a designated car or cars, maybe a bus or some other object, then land on another ramp on the other side. He was a showman, one who “marched out like the American Legion,” one observer said. He wore dust goggles, jodhpurs, and a scarf around his neck and looked every night as if he were off to find that pesky Baron von Richtofen.
In the summer of 1942, he decided that the real daredevil business had switched to Europe and World War II, so he announced that he was going to sh
ut down his show. The last appearance of Lucky Teter and his Hell Drivers would be on Sunday night, July 5, 1942, at the Indianapolis State Fair.
“I’m ready to join the armed forces when my number comes up,” he said in lead-up publicity. “That day may come any time now, so I’ll be shooting the works next Sunday to give my friends enough thrills to hold them until war’s end.”
A crowd of twelve thousand people that included his mother, father, and sister arrived to watch his attempt to clear a semi-trailer transport truck in his Plymouth sedan. His wife gave him a customary pre-jump kiss before he entered the car. He then drove off that ramp and killed himself.
He landed short. The car never reached the proper speed to get the height, 20 feet, and clear the distance, 150 feet, that he needed. He crashed into the second ramp. The wooden boards on the ramp, in a fatal mistake, had been nailed lengthwise instead of sideways. They became spears sticking into the car. The car was crushed. Lucky Teter was crushed inside. He was dead before he reached the hospital, thirty-nine years old.
His widow, disconsolate about seeing her husband die on his last jump on the last night of his career, soon asked a friend, Joie Chitwood, an auto racer, to see if he could sell Teter’s equipment. Chitwood, who was 4F, still at home, looked for buyers, but auto racing pretty much had been shut down for the war and no one was buying much of anything, and after a bunch of thinking he decided to buy the equipment himself.
This was the birth of the Joie Chitwood Thrill Show, which began on July 4, 1943, one day short of the first anniversary of Lucky Teter’s death, and ran for the rest of the twentieth century. The thrill show was so successful after the war that as many as five separate editions traveled the country, crashing cars and scaring the local populations in small towns and large, becoming a basic part of corn dog and Ferris wheel summers.
Evel Page 12