He had been married on September 5, 1959, in Dillon, Montana, at the residence of the Beaverhead County justice of the peace. Two pictures in the Montana Standard on the day of the game against the Czechs ran under the headline “Greater Love Hath No Woman … Than to Stand in Direct Line with the Hockey Puck That Can Travel as Fast as 100 Miles per Hour.” Both pictures showed the former Linda Bork, dressed in a Bombers goalie uniform, ready to take shots from her husband of six months. The caption said she was his target when no one else was around.
The caption was not wrong.
She was the daughter of John Bork, who owned the company that owned and serviced most of the billboards in Butte. She was from the West Side, another girl from the affluent side of town. She was a cheerleader, pretty, smart. She had long dark hair, beautiful eyes. College certainly was in her future. Or could have been before now. There were some people who wondered what she was doing with Bob Knievel of Parrot Street, fast talker, fast mover, but not a lot of people.
“I can honestly say that in Butte there was not much class consciousness,” Alec Hansen, former reporter for the Montana Standard, classmate of Linda Bork, said. “People just took you as you came along in Butte. I know that isn’t true in most other places, but it was there.”
The one person who didn’t like the way Knievel came along was John Bork. He was like most of the fathers in the city. He knew trouble when he saw it. A guy who entertains people by driving up a slag heap behind the A&W Root Beer stand on a motorcycle was not a great catch.
“I had a date with Bob Knievel once,” Patty Sturis, another student at Butte High, said. “Or at least I thought I did. He pulled up in front of my house, and my father saw him and said, ‘No.’ My father was six-foot-ten. He was known as the tallest man in Butte. He went out on the porch and told Bob to go home. Bob went. That was the end of my date.”
The truth was that Knievel didn’t have a lot of dates. He would become a celebrated womanizer, boast about his staggering total of one-night stands, but he was awkward around girls before he met Linda Bork, holes showing through his self-confidence. Before he met Linda, he trailed another girl everywhere she went, tried to convince her of his virtues. She would have none of it. Her friends would gather around her in a circle at school dances so he couldn’t find her.
“All she wanted,” one of the friends said, “was for him to go away.”
That was not a problem when he settled on Linda Bork. They became a couple. He was four years older, doing his best to run wild, and she was known as quiet and sensible, but he made her laugh and certainly had big plans and … who knows why people fall for other people? She fell for Bob Knievel. No matter what her father said.
“She sat next to me in English class,” George Markovich, a classmate, said. “I kind of liked her. And I thought she kind of liked me. Then one day I saw Bob, he was driving a 1948 Oldsmobile, and she was sitting next to him, and that was that. She was his girlfriend.”
The story that Knievel always told was how he eventually had to kidnap her to marry her. This was one of the assorted basic legends that he attached to himself. The story had different permutations, sometimes sounded suspiciously like the scene John Milius later created for the movie, sometimes not. There even might have been two kidnappings. Knievel sometimes said that happened.
One kidnap story was that he dragged her off the ice rink by her hair, maybe from an ice rink in her backyard, maybe at Clark Park, and they drove away in the Olds, headed toward Idaho and marriage. The trip was ended by a snowstorm, and they found shelter in a highway maintenance shed in Whitehall. Her father called the state police, and when they found the shivering couple, she was still wearing her ice skates. All was well. All charges were dropped.
The second kidnap story was that she went to college in the fall after the first kidnap story. Her father had gotten a restraining order against Knievel to keep him away from her. The restraining order was no more threatening to this restrained party, of course, than most laws were at the time. He showed up at the college, swooped her up, and away they went to see that Beaverhead County justice of the peace in Dillon, Montana. She was seventeen years old. He was a month short of his twenty-first birthday. This was more like a traditional story of the time than kidnapping. Kids decided to marry young. Parents objected. Kids eloped.
“I hope you didn’t do anything silly like get married,” John Bork supposedly said to his daughter when she called him on the phone.
“Daddy, I am married,” she supposedly replied.
No woman knows, especially at seventeen, what kind of trouble she might have bought by saying “I do” to a freewheeling young man (“He’ll settle down” is the eternal hope), but Linda had signed on for a bunch. She had married a high school dropout, a con man, a thief, a motorcycle rider, a hockey player, a daydreamer, a fast talker, and a full-blown egomaniac, all in one package. Bob was all about Bob. That was the basic truth about Bob.
His idea of marriage was that the woman should serve the man. The man should be in charge, and the woman should do what he said she should do. That would never change. Maybe these were ideas he had collected from his grandparents. Or from some long-ago generation. He should be able to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. The woman, his wife, should do what he told her to do.
“Bob, I don’t think, ever understood women,” George Markovich said. “I know he developed a reputation, all those women, but those were one-night stands, whatever. A relationship with a woman, I don’t think he ever understood them.”
The couple came back to live in a double-wide next door to Iggy and Emma’s house on Parrot Street. Linda had signed on for a hard road.
A story. One of the jobs he concocted after the end of the hockey project was the Sur-Kill Guide Service. He was the president, chief financial officer, and leading tracker of animals that hunters might want to hunt. He was the entire company, a one-man corporation.
The job did not last long—he apparently had a tendency to take his customers onto posted land to fulfill that sur-kill promise—but was notable for one celebrated event. He went to the White House, trying to track down President John F. Kennedy.
The trip began when the U.S. Park Service announced that the elk population had grown to ten thousand head inside Yellowstone Park, an unsustainable figure, and it was going to send sharpshooters into the park to slaughter half of the herd, five thousand elk. Knievel had become active within various sportsmen’s groups that opposed the kill. The sportsmen’s groups wanted either permits for hunters issued for the parkland or the capture and transportation of the excess elk to other areas, many of them in Montana. Either move would benefit an operation like the Sur-Kill Guide Service.
Knievel went to a public meeting on the subject at the Elks Lodge in Livingston, Montana, where he reported that ninety elk had been killed by park rangers on Monday, sixty more on Tuesday. Something had to be done. He organized a petition to save the elk, collected three thousand names, and said that he would hitchhike to Washington to personally deliver them to Washington.
And he did.
He killed a six-point buck elk himself, maybe on parkland, maybe not, and removed the antlers. He then hitchhiked to Washington to present the antlers and the petition to JFK.
Or so he said.
The cynics in Butte suggested that maybe Knievel had a friend, maybe someone like Jack Ferriter, drive the route, Knievel stepping into different press conferences in different towns with his hitchhiking story and his appeal to save the elk. Ferriter denied this happened, but stories persisted. Knievel said he had twenty-seven rides between Butte and Washington, which would have been a lot of times putting those antlers, which were fifty-four inches wide, in and out of cars. Someone might have helped.
Anyway, he left Butte on December 1, 1961, and reached Washington on December 9, 1961. On December 10, his picture with Montana congressman Mickey Boryan, antlers in the foreground, U.S. Capitol dome in the background, was shipped across the country by the wire service Unifax. Knievel wore a jacket and tie, had a buzz cut, and looked incredibly young and incredibly earnest, a charter member of JFK’s New Frontier.
On December 11, 1961, he had a fifteen-minute visit with Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. “He was very interested in the situation,” Knievel told United Press International. “He said that we’ve got a lot of room to kick about what they’re doing in Yellowstone.”
On December 12, 1961, he visited the White House and presented the antlers to JFK assistant Mike Manatos.
“I’m sure he will call the situation to the president’s attention,” Knievel told United Press International.
On the same day, his picture and a story were on the fourth page of the B section of the Washington Post. He told the reporter that people had been nice to him on the trip. When they found they couldn’t fit the antlers into the car, they put them in the trunk or tied them on the top. No mention was made of a hitchhiking return.
The slaughter supposedly was curtailed after this grand trip. The immediate effects on Knievel’s business were minimal because the business soon died. The long-term effects were more important.
He had discovered an important truth about self-promotion: if you talk to reporters, they will write down your words and put them into the newspaper. Nothing will be checked. The more interesting the story, the faster the words will appear.
And a good prop does not hurt.
His main, listed occupation during this time was merchant policeman. The job was mentioned in the article in the Washington Post. His unlisted occupation, besides policeman and hunting guide, was burglar. The listed and the unlisted occupations complemented each other, strange as that sounded.
A merchant policeman was not a Butte policeman but a private contractor, what was called a “door-knocker.” He offered his clients protection from robbery and vandalism. Every night he would check their businesses, make sure the locks were locked, the windows unbroken. He would have his eye open for suspicious characters, for strange doings. Signing a contract with him—Knievel was the only private policeman in Butte—was insurance against bad news.
The major cause of that bad news, of course, was him.
Decide not to sign that contract and maybe there would be a robbery, maybe a broken plate-glass window, maybe a small fire. See? Bad news could arrive as fast as that. Decide to sign the contract and the robberies, the broken windows, the small fires, would cease. See? Bad news could disappear as fast as that. Life would resume at its normal pace.
The door-knocker business was nothing more than an extortion scheme, the old protection business, a staple of illicit income around the world, and it worked. Knievel put together a client list that even included many of his friends in the bar business. He was able to rob with a purpose, have one business help the other. The robbery would show the problem. The service would stop the problem.
“He robbed me,” Bob Pavlovich at the Met Tavern said, still incredulous years later. “He robbed me more than once.”
“I made sure he did his job,” Muzzy Faroni at the Freeway Tavern said. “I stayed up all night after I hired him. I made sure he checked the locks, and I made sure he didn’t come in. I was sitting there with a shotgun in the dark. Just in case.”
“I’d do some of the robberies for him,” one friend said. “He would stand guard in the parking lot. I’d go inside. It worked out fine.”
Knievel did make his rounds, did make the job look official. He would leave a piece of paper under the door for the store owner as proof that he had visited, and sometimes he’d have his name in the Montana Standard for some chase of some suspicious character. He and the Butte police would be in pursuit. Shots would be fired. Knievel invariably would be the one who fired.
He carried a gun on a regular basis and was not afraid to show it. One of his stops on social nights was the Yellowstone, one of the tougher bars in Butte. He was in there one night, talking, yapping, fooling around with some other young guys. Normal stuff. One of the older regulars took offense. He said that the young guys were too noisy. He asked the bartender to throw them out. Maybe he placed a hand on Knievel while he spoke. Knievel took offense. He tapped the regular on the shoulder.
“Open your mouth,” he said.
“What?”
“Open your mouth.”
The regular opened his mouth. Knievel, in one fluid motion, pulled a pistol from his boot and shoved it into the man’s open mouth.
“What do you say now?” he asked. “Is it still too noisy?”
This was where he lived now. The dark side. The dark side, the easy money, was attractive. He and Linda had a son, Kelly, born on August 21, 1960, who was followed by Robbie, born on May 7, 1962, and would be followed by a daughter, Tracey, born on October 22, 1963. The double-wide on Parrot Street became full and noisy in a hurry. Knievel rented other, larger places around Butte to live. There was a string of these places, low rents, linoleum on the floor, basic living. The one constant was that he wasn’t in these places a lot. He was always gone, out of the house, moving.
“I lived down on Idaho Street, the low-rent side of town, in this little apartment,” Jim Blankenship said. “They lived near me. I remember I’d see Linda, all the time, outside with three little kids. They’d all be in their snowsuits, buttoned up. She’d be running around after them. They’d be giving her a workout. I never saw Bob. He was off. Gone. Doing whatever he was doing.”
The expenses of family life, Linda and the three kids, added to the expense of the fast, every-night social life, created a demand for more and more money. The dark side was an answer to the demand.
“We were looking for a place to rob one night,” a man said. “We stopped to buy gas. The attendant was in the garage, didn’t see me when I went in to pay. I tried to open the register, take the money, but the register was locked. I unplugged it, lifted it up, and carried it to the car. We drove away, broke the thing open someplace else.
“The next day Bob saw a story in the paper. He started laughing. He said, ‘Hey, you got that guy fired.’ The owner heard about the robbery and fired the guy for not being at the register.”
The robberies took place everywhere, many of them more serious than a cash register taken from a gas station. Butte was in the midst of a crime wave—a perpetual crime wave, some residents said—that even included members of the Butte police force. Knievel was operating at the same time. He described the excitement of entering a building with bad intentions, boasted about his prowess at opening safes. He brought a safe into the Freeway Tavern one night, showed how he could open it, just to win a bet.
He later admitted being involved in a lot of robberies, apologized for the inconvenience. He robbed pharmacies, sporting goods stores, grocery stores, any place that could be robbed. One robbery that he admitted was left as unfinished business was an attempt to break into the vault when the Prudential Bank switched headquarters, moved from one side of the street to the other. Knievel and his robbery associates tried to cut through the wall next door, then through the vault, but moved too slowly and had to quit before they reached the money because sunrise had arrived.
Another robbery, which he never admitted, happened at the courthouse. The safe was filled with money, silver dollars. Someone came in through the roof, broke open the safe, and stole the silver dollars. The prime suspect was the local door-knocker, former hockey executive.
“It was the weekend of Lincoln’s Birthday,” Jack Kusler said. “A bunch of us were going down to Las Vegas for go-kart races. On Friday I talked to Knievel. He said he really wanted to go, but he was flat broke. He told us to have fun. The rest of us put our karts on a trailer and went. On Saturday night in Las Vegas, there’s Knievel. He has all kinds of money. He’s got $4,000 spread out on the dice table. He said he got lucky.
“I heard he was stopped by the police on the way back. He had thousands of dollars in silver dollars. He said the same thing, he got lucky. What could they do? Bets are paid off in Vegas in silver dollars. The cops knew he did it, but they couldn’t prove anything.”
Knievel did admit later that he was headed in the worst directions. Most of his accomplices ultimately would have bad fates ranging from death to drug addiction to long stretches in prison. The Butte policemen would be sent away after a celebrated trial. For the moment, though, everybody was young and bulletproof. The people on the dark side in Butte could do anything. They might have had suspicions that bad things could happen, but the bad things hadn’t happened yet.
Every day was exciting.
“I’d see him in a bar,” Clyde Kelley, the grown-up kid who had surrendered his belt to Knievel in the plot against the Butte High librarian, said. “I’d watch him. He’d be looking at the jukebox or the cigarette machine, trying to figure out if it was full of money or not. If he thought it was full, well, he was going to try to figure a way to get that money. That was just the way he was.
“A hustler.”