Saltman admitted later he lied.
Nothing.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
The Butte High School band had a good view of the liftoff, the opening of the parachute, the turn downward, and then the disappearance beyond the canyon rim. Kids began to cry, especially girls. Evel Knievel was dead. Director Berg now had this problem to handle. He would have to talk with the band members about mortality and risks and … he suddenly had a more immediate problem.
The band was situated between the fence and the canyon. That had been a worry all day. He had spent the last eight hours watching the kids, making sure that none of them went too close to the edge. Now he looked back toward the crowd and saw an unsettling sight. The gathering of louts, emboldened by the disappearance of the rocket, or maybe simply wanting to get a closer look, had torn down the fences and was headed this way toward the edge of the canyon. The Butte High School band was in the way.
Berg furiously ordered the band into a closed formation like a wedge. He tried to make sure everyone was accounted for, near as he could tell, and ordered the band to march forward toward the buses in the parking lot. The wedge went against the unruly Visigoths heading for the canyon. The two sides crashed into each other, headed in their different directions. The Visigoths, unorganized, gave way.
“When we got through the crowd,” Ken Berg said, “I just kept the kids marching right to the buses. I just wanted to get everybody out of there.”
Don Branker had hurried from the family viewing area, where he watched the liftoff next to Linda and the kids, to get to the ABC control truck. He wanted to see different pictures. Maybe fifteen monitors showed shots around the site. While other eyes scanned for the shot that none of the monitors had, the X-2 Skycycle and Knievel, Branker was more interested in the action around the edge of the canyon. Yes, the fans had broken through one fence, two fences, and were headed to the edge. This was the worst possible situation, one of those tragedies you always read about at religious celebrations in India or somewhere, hundreds of people killed in a crowd panic. He envisioned a great loss of life. Right here.
Then an amazing thing happened.
Branker saw it again and again. The Hells Angels, the motorcycle guys, whoever they were, held their ground. The last-ditch security guards, themselves the people the promoters had feared the most in their planning, stood on the far side of the broken fences and through menace or charm or force, whatever was needed, calmed whoever came at them. These beefy, bearded outlaws with their tattoos and ponytails, their leather and denim, were the quiet heroes of the entire production. There and there and there, Branker saw them stop the charge or catch some people at the end of the charge and throw them back into the crowd, safe from being pushed over the side.
“They were terrific, these guys,” he said. “No $1,000 for beer plus free food ever had been spent better.”
Bob Arum looked down at the crowd from the control tower, where he had watched the liftoff, saw the chaos, and suddenly was forced to smile. Here came his two sons. They had been sketchy about the idea of going to Knievel’s trailer, listening to his absolution for their father—“A lot of people are going to hate your father, but it’s not his fault”—and they definitely didn’t want to watch the jump with his family. That was the last place they wanted to be if he died.
Arum had forced them to go, simply to ease Knievel’s scattered disposition. Now, when it appeared the worst might have happened, his sons were making their escape back to the TV tower. Good for them.
The lack of information was a strange addition to the event. With cameras everywhere, all of them focused on this one man in a small area, how could he go missing? Yet he did. Like a quarter that had rolled under the couch, had to be there, he somehow couldn’t be seen, couldn’t be found.
And then he was.
“I think Evel’s getting into the helicopter!” Lovell, the astronaut, shouted on the broadcast.
Sure enough. There he was.
He was alive.
The camera angle never did allow a picture of the rocket, which had bounced off an outcropping on the near side of the canyon, ricocheted, fallen fifty feet more, finally come to rest in some brush a few feet from the Snake River. The rescue happened out of sight. Knievel continued in his attempt to unlatch the damn harness after the crash. He was in a panic. He had cut his nose trying to pull off the visor on his flight helmet without unlocking it. His legs ached from a first jolt at liftoff when they were slammed into the hatch. His body ached from the landing. Another jolt.
The first people to reach him were Bob Garrison, a seven-foot-tall skin diver, and John Hood, a forty-eight-year-old guy from Trenton, New Jersey, who worked for Knievel. Hood had been lowered from the rescue helicopter on a rope.
“Are you hurt?” Garrison asked.
“No,” Knievel said.
“Can you move your arms?”
He moved his arms.
“How about your back?”
He tested his back.
“I’m ready,” Knievel said.
Garrison and Hood cut the daredevil from his harness. Yes, he might have died if he’d landed in the water, unable to unbuckle the harness, but the buckled harness probably had saved his life in this situation. If he had been able to free himself, he might have been thrown out of the cockpit when the rocket hit the first rock or when it landed. Even if he hadn’t been thrown out of the cockpit, if he hadn’t been locked in, secure, he would have slid forward on impact and been mangled with the front of the rocket. Either way would have brought serious injury. The mistake with the suit actually saved him. He stayed in place.
Hood pulled him from the rocket, placed him in a boat, then they transferred him to the rescue helicopter. Knievel waved to the closed-circuit camera from the boat to show he was all right. He took Hood’s place in the helicopter. The pilot said he would come back for Hood. He then took Knievel to the launch site.
The amount of time involved, all of this happening, was startling. Sixteen minutes after the man of the moment had blasted off in the rocket, scared to his core, then possibly dead, he now was back. He jumped off the chopper and into the chaos at the site. From a distance, yes, he almost looked like Lindbergh at Le Bourget Airfield in Paris. A sixteen-minute Charles Lindbergh perhaps. The fences were down, and as the helicopter immediately went back into the air, the crowd came around him in drunken congratulations. He was surrounded, a white dot in a small sea of ants.
Sixteen minutes.
No time had passed. A lifetime had passed.
Sixteen minutes.
David Frost greeted him, and Jules Bergman of ABC was right there too, and they asked questions as he moved back up the hill toward the same spot up where he had left Frost. People jostled and bounced all around them, but a couple of the shotgun-carrying guards cleared a path.
Knievel seemed more than a little disoriented, and very tired. He basically had no idea what had happened with the rocket. He hadn’t even realized that the parachute released early. Did he release the chute himself? He did not know. When his view from the cockpit had become a view of the canyon and not the blue sky, that was when he had worried. He had thought he was going to die in the water, yes. He was very lucky, yes.
“Both Ron Chase [who designed the parachute system] and Bob Truax told me that if I saw the canyon wall to get the hell out,” he said. “That’s what I was trying to do.”
After the quick interviews, he went through the crowd to his reunion with Linda and the kids in the trailer. After the trailer, he came out, threw a cane to the crowd, not the real one, a fake, which started yet another fight among the rabble. The cane was eventually broken into smaller pieces for the many members of the congregation, somewhat like relics of the true cross. He moved onto the helicopter with Linda and the three kids, off with Watcha again to the Blue Lakes Inn.
Done.
“I’m so glad it’s over,” eighty-one-year-old Emma Knievel told the Associated Press. “And i
f there’s a party tonight, I’ll be there with bells on.”
The outcome was deemed very strange. If the battle had been between life and death, success and failure, this somehow felt like a tie. Maybe even worse. He hadn’t killed himself, which was a good thing of course, but he also hadn’t done what he’d set out to do, which was clear the canyon. There was no resolution.
“When you stop to think about it, this was the best thing that could have happened,” Jimmy the Greek said. “It shows he could have gotten killed. It wasn’t a rip-off.”
Maybe. Something still felt fishy, even if nothing was. America does not react well to failure in any form. The same press tent cynics who sucked in their breaths when the rocket went down now exhaled doubts. Could it all have been a plot, a scam? Did Knievel release that lever for the drogue chute just to save his ass? Could this have been scripted, all the way to the rescue? Was he ever in any real danger? The veterans of closed-circuit boxing shows remembered that championship fights usually ended with an intriguing story line to promote the next closed-circuit fight. An odor often accompanied the finish to championship fights. Was that the case here? A rematch? Smelled like it.
Clouding the situation were immediate quotes from both rocket engineer Truax and operations director Branker that they thought Knievel had released the lever by mistake (Truax) or on purpose (Branker). Both men retracted their observations, but the words added to the general feeling of dissatisfaction.
The truth, soon discovered by Truax when he looked at video replays, was that the top of the canister containing the drogue chute had been blown off by the force of the liftoff. The problem was as simple as that. The engineers never had run a single test, not even a static test, with the canister and chute attached. It was a curious decision, since parachute problems had plagued both of the test launches, but the madcap rush to the finish was blamed. Nobody had checked out the parachute arrangement. A blunder.
“It was our fault” was Truax’s assessment. “He did everything he was supposed to do. He showed courage and performed like a good test pilot. I’m sure he did not release the chute prematurely. But he thought he did at first. He came in and said, ‘What did I do wrong?’ It was a mechanical failure.”
At dinner at the Blue Lakes Inn a few days earlier, Knievel had presented a $100,000 check to Truax that he vowed to sign if the jump went successfully and he was alive. In a quieter moment after the jump, Truax ripped up the check in Knievel’s presence, said he wouldn’t take it. This was much to the consternation of assistants Facundo Campoy and Bill Sprow, who had been scheduled to receive substantial parts of that payment. They thought Truax was trying to ingratiate himself to pursue some further project. They wanted their money.
Nobody was really happy anywhere about the result. Nobody except Knievel.
“People were praying, and God made the wind blow, and I landed on the bank,” he said. “I would have been dead if I landed in the water.”
A story. John Hood was still on the bottom of the canyon next to the Skycycle. After he had helped pull Knievel from the cockpit, he had surrendered his seat in the rescue helicopter. The pilot said he would return. He did not mention when that would happen. Hood waited and waited, and the helicopter did not come back. He waited some more, and the helicopter still did not come back. Darkness arrived. This brought the realization that the helicopter was not going to come back.
He was on the bottom of the canyon for the night.
Strangely, he was not alone. There was a guy from Connecticut and a couple of other guys in the area who did not introduce themselves. They had climbed down to avoid the $25 ticket price, yet see the rocket take off. The show had come to them, better seats than they ever imagined. Everybody seemed to have been drinking.
Hood moved off to the side, made a fire. He took the parachute from the rocket, the parachute that in the end had doomed the flight, and made a bed and blanket out of it. He thought mostly about what he would say to the pilot, the son of a bitch who had left him there, but he also thought about his time with Knievel.
Funny how things worked out. He lived in Trenton, New Jersey, was a motorcycle racer for Harley when he was younger, steady appearances at Langhorne Speedway, Harrisburg, Williamsburg, plus two times down at Daytona, good stuff, then he ran the service department in a Honda dealership. He was intrigued with the events that took place at Caesars Palace back in ’67 and ’68. He liked the idea of the canyon jump. After Knievel was mangled when he jumped the fountains, Hood sent him a letter volunteering to replace him on the Skycycle, whatever that was, and jump the canyon. Knievel sent a letter back, thanked him for his interest, but said the canyon jump was his own challenge and he was going to do it himself.
Four years later, at a small track in West Windsor, New Jersey, Hood met Knievel. The daredevil had switched to the newer version of the Harley XR750 and was doing some practice jumps at the track with the new motorcycle. The two men talked, and Knievel said he needed someone to drive his big rig, with its thirty-two-foot chassis and thirty-foot coach, so long it was illegal in most states, up to Buffalo for a show. This was July of 1971. Hood did the job, and then Knievel said he needed someone to drive the rig to Wilkes-Barre, and Hood, who was divorced, back living with his mother, did that job too. He had been with Knievel ever since.
It was a business arrangement, no doubt about that. He already had quit twice, been convinced to come back. He was like Ray Gunn, who had the job before him. He knew there would be some blowup moment that would end it all.
“Knievel’s just an unreasonable character,” he decided. “That’s the way it is.”
When dawn came, Hood decided to get the hell out of the canyon. He had brought his climbing rope and belt with him on the rescue, not knowing what kinds of trouble he would find with Knievel. This was the trouble. He left the other souls at the bottom of the canyon and worked his way, careful step by careful step, up the 540-foot climb to the top. He tried not to look back.
When he hit the top, made it, he beheld an amazing sight. The chemical toilets all had been burned. The concession stands all had been burned. A 1974 Cadillac Eldorado, the odometer stopped forever at 1,037 miles, had been burned, torched. Fires still smoldered. Litter was everywhere. The scene was a vision of the end of the world.
“It was like there’d been a great battle in a great war,” John Hood said.
He started looking for that pilot who had forgotten him. He was thinking about punching the guy in the nose.
The aftermath of the jump was the final nightmare. One more night of anarchy. The fever that broke out in the crowd when Knievel went into the canyon, then grew when the fences went down and everyone rushed to the rim to get a better view, continued to roar until it simply roared itself out.
The bizarre result, mixed with an anger about the ticket prices, mixed with the day or days of drink and drugs and unchecked abandon, left various spectators in various states. Some trudged home. Some waited for the crowd to disperse. Some continued to go wild.
“I’ll always remember that a lot of the people, when it was announced that Evel was safe, were not happy,” Judy Staudinger from the Butte High School band said. “We couldn’t believe that. They wanted him to die. They were shouting that the whole thing was a rip-off, a fraud. How could you have been rooting for someone to die?”
Everything that could be burned was burned. Everything that could be trashed was trashed. Broken pipes from the water fountains sent water everywhere. The chemical toilets burned in a row.
The ABC production crew was not saved from trouble. When Knievel went into the canyon, people broke through the fence and tried to climb the staging that was used as the control tower. The climbing soon switched to violence, destruction. The people took over the tower after the show was done.
“There were a lot of spaced-out idiots with knives,” ABC unit manager Bill Farrell told the New York Times. “They cut wires, smashed equipment, ripped off headsets. Our guys had to abandon the site.
”
“They took out everything that would burn,” one concessionaire said. He estimated he had lost $10,000 in equipment.
The only security, once again, was provided by the few paid guards the promoters had hired. The Hells Angels guards departed once Knievel was back from the canyon, job done. No reinforcements arrived. The paid security guards were no match for the remaining “spaced-out idiots.”
“We could have held them off if we had any help from downtown,” security guard Courtney Krest said. “We thought we had enough help on hand, but all we could do was pull back and guard the launch area.”
A man named Don Hanley wound up as the last employee on the promotion’s payroll at the site. A Butte guy, a builder of race cars, he once had built some cars for Knievel’s father. When the canyon jump preparations moved into the building stage, he had come to Twin Falls to construct the 108-foot track and the wooden tower around it. He had put in the fences and the water fountains, done a bunch of things around the site.
He watched the jump from the other side of the canyon with Knievel’s father. They had a good view of the entire descent. (“I never thought he was going to die,” Knievel’s father told reporters. “I did think he was going into the water.”) When they saw that Knievel was all right, Hanley looked back up at the rim of the canyon. All he saw was people.
“Where the hell did they come from?” he said.
Back at the site, his job was to take as much of the equipment as he could salvage back to Twin Falls to a warehouse. He made one trip, when there still were a lot of people at the site. He made a second trip when there were not many people. He came back, maybe three in the morning, for a third load and was stopped at the entrance to the site by a sheriff’s deputy.
“You can’t go in there,” the deputy said.
“I have to go in there,” Hanley said. “I have to bring out some more stuff.”
“They’re burning everything in there. There’s a riot.”
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