Life of Evel: Evel Knievel

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Life of Evel: Evel Knievel Page 3

by Stuart Barker


  Perhaps disliking the formal approach adopted by an official hockey school, Bobby claimed to have declined the offer of a full-time scholarship, opting instead to throw his lot in with the semi-professional Charlotte Clippers who were members of the Eastern Hockey League. Yet again he appeared to be restless and easily bored and he quit the team after completing just one exhibition season. By then Knievel felt he had no chance of making it into the professional National Hockey League and, after failing a try-out with the semi-professional Seattle Totems of the Western Hockey League, he headed back home to Butte, a little more worldly but still lacking any real direction in his life.

  While he may not have been good enough to cut it on the national scene, Knievel was now armed with the experience he’d gained on his travels and he viewed himself as a big hockey fish in a pretty small pond. He saw a new opportunity of making a living from the sport, and decided to form his own team, the Butte Bombers, which he would not only own but also play for, manage and coach. If he couldn’t cut it solely as a player, maybe a jack-of-all-trades approach would reap rewards. The Bombers established themselves as a semi-professional team and Knievel claims they only lost one game in the two seasons they existed. That game was against the Czechoslovakian Olympic team, whom Bobby had shrewdly coerced into playing his Bombers as a warm-up game for the 1960 Winter Olympics that were being held at Squaw Valley in California.

  This may have appeared to be a shrewd move at the time but it soon turned into a farce and threatened to ruin Bobby financially. He had hired the Civic Center in Butte and promoted the entire event himself, as well as still being one of the team players. He stood to make some decent money on the gate and a few bucks more from selling beer and snacks, but when forty Czech players, officials and hangers-on turned up in Butte, all expecting their expenses to be paid, Bobby knew he was in trouble. He had only anticipated an entourage of 20 and immediately realised he was going to lose money, and what was more, it was money he didn’t have to lose. After the game he told the Czechs he couldn’t pay their expenses without receipts (which Knievel later admitted to stealing) and an international incident was only avoided when the US Olympic Committee stepped in to pick up the bill.

  The whole event must have left a sour taste in Knievel’s mouth as he finally turned his back on ice hockey and set about looking for other ways to make a quick buck. ‘There’s no money in hockey,’ he later lamented. ‘It was my dream to be a pro-hockey player but there’s just no money in it.’ He certainly needed to make some money somehow because Knievel had by now married his childhood sweetheart, Linda Joan Bork.

  Knievel had known Bork from his days at Butte High, and even after he dropped out he still hung around outside the school looking for any opportunity to talk with Linda. Three years younger than Knievel, Bork was caught between her youthful love for the handsome but unpromising 20-year-old and the disapproval of her parents, who saw Bobby as little more than a hoodlum who couldn’t hold a steady job. And if Knievel’s often-repeated tale about kidnapping his future wife is true, then he certainly justified the Borks’ assessment of him. According to Knievel, he became so frustrated by the Borks’ ban on their daughter speaking to him that he kidnapped Linda from the local ice rink. He reportedly dragged her off the ice by her hair and headed for Idaho where he proposed to marry her. Knievel’s grandmother recalled the incident many years later, adding a ring of truth to the story. ‘He did kidnap her of course and they were hunting for them all night long. The police were hunting for them and we were hunting for them but he was not put in jail or anything.’

  Driving conditions on the night of the ‘kidnap’ were terrible and the young couple were forced to pull over and sleep the night in Bobby’s grandparents’ car, hoping the blizzard would abate by morning. But, by the following day, word of Knievel’s escapade had got out and the couple were intercepted by a police road-block before they could reach Idaho. Knievel was charged not with kidnapping but with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, but since Linda did not want to press charges he was merely reprimanded by the authorities.

  However, now feeling fully justified in his assessment of Knievel, Linda’s father subsequently succeeded in obtaining a restraining order against Bobby, forcing him to stay away from Linda for a period of two years. Knievel had little choice but to obey – at least in public – but he still never gave up hope of one day marrying Linda Bork. His patience paid dividends and that day finally came on 5 September 1959 when the pair tied the knot having eloped with the help of a $50 loan from Knievel’s grandmother and the use of the family car. Linda had only managed to elope because her father was away on a fishing trip at the time of the marriage and by the time he discovered the truth there was nothing he could do to change matters, no matter how furious he was.

  A married man he may have been, but Bobby Knievel was still without gainful employment and the only money he was bringing in to the caravan he and his young wife were staying in was from a number of petty criminal activities. Knievel had long since realised that most of the people he saw in Butte with money had gained it on the wrong side of the law and he wanted a piece of the action, having seen the benefits of a life of crime. ‘All that you can desire in life or want to be is what you can see immediately around you,’ he explained, ‘and what I saw immediately around me was a pimp with a shiny pair of shoes and a ‘49 Mercury. In Butte, if you weren’t a pimp or a thief you were nothing. And I needed a few bucks to get out.’ It was all the incentive Bobby needed; if he couldn’t earn an honest buck, he’d earn some dishonest ones.

  Knievel had long been used to the wrong side of the law, having been involved in several fights and charged with petty theft, but that was not exactly out of the ordinary for young men in post-war Butte. He was no stranger to dreaming up scams to make money either. One particular favourite was stealing hubcaps from cars to sell on as replacements or as scrap metal, a technique he perfected while still at school but one which escalated over time to almost industrial proportions. ‘One time the police caught me and another boy with about three hundred hubcaps. I sold them for about a buck apiece. Christ, I needed a few bucks to go out. I could steal a guy’s hubcaps when he was sitting in the car. You know, those ore trains go by, make a lot of noise. A guy’s sitting in his car, I didn’t care whether he had the radio on or not, I’d just steal the hubcaps right off his car. Every kid in town knew I could do it. But I moved on to bigger and better things.’

  Those bigger and better things included running a ‘protection agency’, which was, by Knievel’s own cryptic admission, really an extortion racket. While his well-meaning police-officer friend Mo Mulchahy politely referred to Bobby’s ‘job’ as being that of a merchant policeman, there were others in Butte who recognised it as something rather more corrupt. Knievel visited various businesses around Butte and asked if they would like him to keep an eye on their properties when they were closed. If they paid up, Bobby would check locks, make sure there were no open windows or doors and generally scare off any prowlers. Job done. If, however, any particular business refused his offer, they were very likely to find their premises had been broken into shortly afterwards.

  The differing accounts of Knievel’s ‘job’ among those who knew him show just how undefined his role was. Officer Mulchahy believed it to be legitimate, saying, ‘He went around on the south side of town and he’d rattle doors and shake windows; he was one of us. He went to different merchants down on the south side and asked them for a job. Course, a lot of people who knew Knievel, they said “we’d rather not do that”. They didn’t have break-ins, they had breaks; they had breaks in their windows or breaks in their doors but he’d be back the next day and tell the businessmen “If I was watching your place, this wouldn’t have happened”, and they’d hire him.’

  Knievel’s own take on the situation was rather more telling, even if it did stop short of an absolute confession. ‘When I was a merchant policeman I had a deal – you don’t want to give
a little kid that’s trying to make a dollar a five-dollar bill every 30 days to watch your place then you might get robbed. That’s what it amounted to. You pay me ten dollars a month, five dollars a month, to watch your place of business, you don’t get robbed. They found out that my protection was well worth the five or ten dollars a month after not subscribing to it for a while.’

  Knievel’s friend Bob Pavolich, who ran the Met Tavern in Butte at the time – one of Knievel’s favourite watering holes – showed no such ambivalence when asked for his interpretation of Bobby’s scam. ‘When he was a doorknocker here he used to come around my place at two o’clock in the morning – he was a merchant cop is what they called him. Well I would have to say that he probably knocked over mine and about a dozen others on the route. He always had money and he didn’t make that kind of money knocking doors. Really, he told me he’d knocked over my place.’

  Knievel eventually owned up – and apologised for – committing a string of burglaries around Butte, and he confessed that he tried for a whole weekend to break into the Prudential Federal Savings building but couldn’t manage it. Addressing a meeting of Butte townspeople in the late 1990s, he blamed his misdemeanours on his youth and insisted he had eventually made amends for those acts over the years and was now a model Butte citizen.

  But the money Bobby was spending in Butte bars was coming from increasingly more dangerous criminal activities. He had by now become so desperate for more money that he’d started robbing grocery stores, pharmacies and even banks all over the western United States. Knievel teamed up with a gang of six other men in order to be able to carry out more and more ambitious crimes. He claimed most of them were drug users, hence their penchant for turning over pharmacies to steal drugs as well as whatever was in the cash registers.

  The techniques employed by his crew usually followed a similar pattern: they would stake out whichever building they planned to rob to gain the usual information about workers’ shifts, opening and closing times, and where the entry points and exits were, then Bobby would drill a hole through the roof to allow the gang to drop down into the premises, by which point the adrenalin would really start to flow. Knievel, for one, found he liked the rush. ‘That feeling I got inside a bank was the same feeling I got later when I started to jump [a motorcycle]. I could crack a safe with one hand tied behind my back faster than you could eat a hamburger with two.’

  But Knievel soon realised that the prize of adrenalin alone wasn’t enough to justify the risks he was taking. ‘When we dropped through a hole in the roof there was so much pressure we’d sweat our shoes off. And it wasn’t really worth it. We’d have to split the money between four or five people (depending on how many were in on any particular job) and averaged only a few grand apiece.’

  If the FBI really were on the gang’s trail, as Knievel claims, then the risks could not have been worth the slight rewards. After all, Bobby may have had a few dollars to throw around on beer but he and his young wife weren’t exactly living in the lap of luxury as a result of his endeavours – and things would only be worse for Linda if Bobby was thrown in the county jail.

  One long-standing mystery from this period relates to whether or not Knievel used dynamite stolen from his former employers, the Anaconda Mining Company, to blow up and rob the local courthouse in Butte. While Evel has sometimes boasted of carrying off the job, he has at other times backtracked and claimed, ‘The courthouse was not blown up, the courthouse was burglarised. As to whether I did it or not, that’s nobody’s business but mine and that’s the way it’ll always remain.’

  Either way, it was only when one of his accomplices was shot while trying to flee from a crime scene that Knievel was shocked into abandoning his evil ways. It brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown, which in turn made him feel so low that he actually contemplated suicide. His accomplice, Jimmy Eng, had been shot dead in the street by police while on a job in Reno, Nevada, and while Knievel escaped with his life, he broke down on the way home and vowed to change his ways and turn his back on crime. ‘I was crossing a bridge when I stopped and took out all my burglar tools – ropes, crowbars, nitroglycerine, drill bits, all of it – and dumped it into the Sacramento River in California. I just vowed right then that I would never steal another dime or rob another place and I never did.’

  Knievel may have decided to go straight but he would continue to have run-ins with the law throughout his life, even after he had given up trying to make a living from crime. His skills as a bank robber appeared questionable anyhow and are perhaps best summarised by his childhood friend Paddy Boyle who once said of Evel, ‘Actually he wasn’t a bank robber cos he never got nothing. I think that’s why he started jumping motorcycles – cos he couldn’t make it as a burglar.’

  Further pressure for Knievel to find a legitimate job came with the birth of his and Linda’s first child, a son, Kelly Michael Knievel, on 21 August 1960. Now with a wife and child to feed, Bobby needed not only to find a source of regular income, he also needed to ensure he wouldn’t be facing a lengthy jail sentence and leaving his family helpless.

  In 1961, Knievel formed the Sur-Kill hunting service, another scheme which was not quite above board. Bobby would assure his clients that he knew the countryside of Montana so well that he could lead them to whatever game they chose to shoot, thereby guaranteeing them a good day’s hunting. The problem was, much of that game was to be found only in protected national parks and was therefore off limits to hunters. Bobby being Bobby, however, wasn’t about to let a small matter like that stand in the way of business.

  It was during this period of being involved in hunting that one of the stranger episodes of Knievel’s life occurred. Hearing that the US Department of the Interior had decided to cull half of Yellowstone Park’s 10,000-strong elk population to maintain nature’s balance, Bobby decided to intervene in what would prove to be his first ever publicity stunt. He (illegally) shot an elk in the park then cut off its antlers and slung them across his shoulders and set out to hitchhike all the way to Washington DC in protest at the cull. After all, how could a hunting guide like Knievel expect to make any money if there were no more elk to shoot? Bobby, backed by the Montana Fish and Game Commission, wanted to initiate a relocation programme so the elk could be re-homed all over the state for hunters to legitimately shoot. Bobby could then run his business legally.

  Knievel claimed he gave the antlers to President Kennedy himself and told him, ‘If you don’t do something about this immediately your son John-John will look at the head of an elk on a nickel like my kids do the head of a buffalo.’

  Whether or not he actually gained an audience with the president (he was pictured in local newspapers with the antlers but JFK was conspicuously absent) it is nonetheless doubtful that a 22-year-old hitchhiker from Butte would have single-handedly persuaded the government to complete a U-turn on its culling policy. Even so, Knievel had played his part in stirring up publicity for the campaign and the idea was abandoned and a programme instigated whereby the elk were transported to sites across Montana as fair game for hunters. For the elk it was a stay of execution; for Knievel the trip represented a double victory. The first bonus was that Bobby now had some elk he could legally lead his clients to as part of the Sur-Kill experience, but the other plus point was to be far more important in the long-run. Bobby’s picture had appeared in the Washington Post along with details of his plight, proving to Knievel for the first time that publicity wasn’t that hard to come by if you just used a little imagination.

  Hitchhiking may have been his only means of getting to Washington but it had added a novelty factor to the trip, as did the elk antlers. Knievel had discovered he was a natural at promoting himself and his ideas, and the lesson would not be lost on him.

  Somewhat surprisingly, Bobby tired of the hunting game before he could take advantage of the new elk policy and decided to try his hand at a ‘proper’ nine-to-five job as a car insurance salesman with the Combined In
surance Company of America. He was hired by a certain Alex Smith, whom Knievel later acknowledged as being the man who finally helped steer him away from a life of crime and who ‘probably saved my life’ in doing so.

  Knievel has never been short of boasts when talking about his skills as a salesman, but given the phenomenal manner in which he managed to promote and sell himself to the world some years later, they perhaps aren’t completely idle. He claimed he broke all company records for selling 110 policies in one day to staff at the Warm Springs mental hospital in Montana and quipped that he ‘might have even sold some policies to the patients’. There have been comments from more than one party over the years that Knievel in fact sold all those policies to mental patients. Whatever the case, he also claims to have gone on to sell an incredible total of 271 policies in that same week. But, if the stories are to be believed, then Bobby became a victim of his own success. Feeling he should have been rewarded with very swift promotion after his success in the field, Knievel determined he was going to ask the president of the company, Mr W. Clement Stone, for just that; he demanded, rather arrogantly in a face-to-face meeting, to be promoted to the position of vice president. Not surprisingly, Stone declined and Knievel immediately resigned. ‘He refused me and I quit. He said he was sorry to see me go and wished me the best of luck. I thought I’d regret it but in every adversity there is a seed of benefit. Mr Stone taught me a lot about the value of a positive mental attitude and he taught me to do the right thing by others simply because it’s right.’

  Significantly, as well as being president of Combined Insurance, Stone was also a self-made millionaire and author, and his book, The Success System that Never Fails, became one of Bobby’s favourites. Preaching the benefits of a positive mental attitude, Stone’s book would be a constant source of support and guidance in the making of the star that was Evel Knievel. Also present at the meeting between Knievel and Stone was Napoleon Hill, another author who promoted the benefits of positive thinking. Hill had written a book called Think and Grow Rich, and while Knievel had been trying to do just that over the last few years with varying degrees of failure, he would have the art mastered within the next ten years and would be rewarded with riches beyond his wildest dreams. All he had to do was think of a field in which he could grow rich.

 

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