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 shut 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.
One impressionable eight-year-old who was fascinated lived in Butte, Montana. Or so he always said. He said that his grandmother took him to the Chitwood show and he always remembered it, especially the rider who did tricks on a motorcycle. Knievel always was quick to say that the earliest notions of doing what he did were inspired by Joie Chitwood’s heroics.
Which, of course, made Evel Knievel a direct descendant of Lucky Teter.
The Wide World of Sports segment was run three weeks after the Ascot jump, on March 25, 1967. The show, which started in 1961 as a summer replacement on ABC, had become a staple of Saturday afternoon television in the 5:00–6:30 time slot, offering coverage of a smorgasbord of sports that existed outside the familiar choices of football, baseball, and basketball. Technology dictated that many of the events were taped and often shown on an exaggerated delay.
The Knievel jump was shown in the middle of the 100-lap motocross race, which was won by Van Leeuwen, a first prize of $1,750. Bill Fleming was the announcer, a classic baritone boomer, a man who projected a definite excitement in his voice. He interviewed Knievel in one segment, then came back for the jump in another.
The Knievel in the interview was the young man on the rise, the insurance salesman, white shirt and sedate brown tie, quiet tan sports coat, boy’s regular haircut, pleasant smile, slight squint into the sun. One hand held on to the other, the way someone would stand in the back of a church or in front of the class giving a book report. Fleming proclaimed him “a most unusual young man” and said that his “specialty in sports” would be to jump fifteen automobiles on his motorcycle.
“Have you ever jumped fifteen before, Evel?” Fleming asked.
“Bill, I never have,” the clean-cut daredevil said. “I missed a jump in the northwest part of the United States over thirteen, and I was hospitalized and laid up for over five months. And I sure hope that doesn’t happen today.”
“How many cars were you attempting at that time?”
“Thirteen.”
“Thirteen and you missed it?”
“I did.”
“You’re trying fifteen today?”
“The parachute’s ready, the motorcycle’s ready, and I’m ready. And I’m not going to miss today.”
The jump segment went perfectly. Knievel changed into the black-and-yellow leathers he had worn with the Daredevils. The words “Evel Knievel Motorcycle Daredevils” and “Hollywood” were sewn in black on the back of his yellow leather vest. A line of black stars went down the sides of each of his yellow pants legs. He looked good.
After the usual false start, part for safety, part for drama, he hit the ramp at the proper speed, stood up, held the front wheel high, landed at the proper spot, kept riding. Fifteen cars were gone. The record. ABC showed the jump again, and Fleming, at the end, boomed that this was “a wild way to ride a motorcycle.”
In households across the United States, any memories from the jump no doubt were consigned to the same mental wastebasket that contained Wide World pictures of lumberjack competitions, Ping-Pong matches, and perhaps pairs figure skating or bull riding, but for Knievel this was another line for the résumé. He was legitimate. How legitimate? He was on Wide World of Sports.
He also was signed to a string of shows at Ascot Park. Part of the ABC picture of the jump showed J. C. Agajanian walking around on the sidelines in his cowboy hat, then standing by the side of the landing ramp to watch the jump as closely as he could. He obviously liked what Knievel did, and especially liked the jump in attendance.
There are people who have an inherent knack for grabbing attention. This kid certainly had it, had it as much as anyone J. C. Agajanian ever had seen in the most attention-grabbing city in the United States. Knievel was in the Long Beach Independent only a week after the jump, talking about the proposed canyon jump. He made it sound like a historic and newsworthy undertaking.
“I feel that the thing has significant value to people right now and in the future,” he told columnist Rich Roberts. “It’s just like Lindbergh when he flew across the ocean. People said, ‘Why does he want to fly across the ocean, and if he does, so what?’ Well, now we’re all going across the ocean, although we didn’t know then that there was any significant value to it.”
Roberts, unable to stop himself, did mention that Lindbergh was flying an airplane. Knievel would be trying to fly a motorcycle.
“That’s the only way to fly, baby!” Knievel replied, Roberts wrote, in “a moment of exuberance.”
In the next two months, the daredevil would do at least three shows at Ascot. He would jump fifteen cars, fourteen cars, finally sixteen cars, all jumps successful. He also put together a reconstituted daredevil show called “The Evel Knievel Stunt Show of Stars” just for Ascot and a motorcycle convention in Sacramento. The only holdover from the Motorcycle Daredevils was Butch Wilhelm, the midget. The other stars were the best riders from the Tourist Trophy steeplechase races, the first generation of motocross at the track. Van Leeuwen, Eddie Mulder, Gene Romero, Rod Pack, Bryan Farnsworth (who had to race under the name “Clutch Cargo” because he was employed in the motorcycle industry), and Swede Savage were familiar Ascot names.
The shows were slapstick hilarious. Everybody buzzed around, did wheelies, busted through flaming boards, made a lot of noise. Clutch Cargo dressed up like a woman, riding a motorcycle out of control. It was a circus.
“One night the flaming boards didn’t burn like they were supposed to burn,” Van Leeuwen said. “Everybody looked at everybody else. Nobody wanted to hit those boards. Knievel, he just said, ‘Fuck it,’ and took off and went through ’em, one after another, blam, blam, blam. He bruised his knuckles. He was woozy at the end.”
Rod Pack had an act where he climbed to the top of a very tall telephone pole. After appropriate dramatics, he dove off the pole. A pit had been dug, filled with a number of large inflated air mattresses, and Pack landed fine, but the effect from the stands was that he had landed on the ground and was seriously injured. He milked the moment, then bounded up, happy and healthy.
Wilhelm, the midget, still had problems riding his miniature motorcycle. One skit involved a pickup truck hitting a collapsible outhouse. The walls fall down. Wilhelm comes flying out on the miniature motorcycle. The pickup truck chases him. He collides with a fake brick wall, falls down. The men in the pickup truck grab him, throw him in the back of the truck, appear to beat him up, then throw a dummy from the truck that looks like him. All of this worked fine on one given night … outhouse, chase, fake brick wall, into truck … except for the ending.
“I was driving the truck,” Van Leeuwen said. “I can hear the midget just screaming in the back. I said to myself, ‘This guy’s a great actor, making a lot of noise.’ Then they threw the dummy out and the guy still was screaming. Turned out he’d broken his collarbone when he hit the fake brick wall. I could see the bone just sticking out.
“He was in a lot of pain. He still was supposed to jump the toy cars with his miniature motorcycle. Said he couldn’t do it. Knievel comes out of his trailer and says, ‘Get back out there. You don’t do that fucking jump, you don’t get paid.’ He did the jump.”
Knievel fit into the group with the motorcycle racers, everybody young and fearless. They drank hard, partied hard, chased the Hollywood night. Van Leeuwen, Mulder, and Farnsworth were early TT champions, traveled around the country to race. (“I found a life right there,” Eddie Mulder said years later. “Motorcycles, beer, all those pretty women. What was wrong with that? I never had to grow up and get a job. I just raced.”) Savage would switch to Indy cars and die from injuries suffered at the 1973 Indianapolis 500. Pack already had a certain amount of fame. He was the first man to make a recorded jump from an airplane without wearing a parachute. The stunt on January 1, 1965, was captured in a photo spread for Life magazine. Pack jumped out of the plane without the chute. Bob Allen, his friend, jumped from another plane 1,500 feet away with an extra chute. Pack and Allen met in midair. Allen handed Pack the second chute. Pack slipped into the chute, pulled the rip cord, and landed safely. He now did a lot of stunt work in movies. Mulder also was a stunt man. He said Knievel was not.
“Stunt work is very precise,” Mulder said. “You have to take a lot of orders, follow orders, for everything to go right. Knievel was not very good at taking orders from anyone.”
Knievel was the last arrival to the motorcycle group, but was the fastest talker, the self-promoter. He was the same commanding presence he was everywhere else, with one exception. The unspoken truth was that he couldn’t ride a motorcycle nearly as well as these other guys.
“Between you and me and the skeletons in the closet, Evel Knievel was not a very good motorcycle rider,” Eddie Mulder said. “He just didn’t have the natural talent. Plus, he wasn’t in good physical shape. Never was.”
He did have one quality in abundance that nobody else in the group had.
“He was crazy,” Mulder said. “Just crazy. He was a character, man.”
The final Ascot show was on May 30, 1967, and Knievel soon was back in Butte. He scheduled a string of jumps in the state of Washington. More than any place, even Los Angeles, the Pacific Northwest was where he performed in his early career. The area was dotted with little racetracks and fairgrounds, and he knew most of the proprietors—or at least knew their names—from his racing days and motorcycle sales time in Moses Lake and Sunnyside.
A couple of lists eventually would evolve, dates and records of his jumps, looking as official as a major league baseball schedule and results, but some of the earliest jumps would be missing. Any number of jumps happened in a publicity vacuum, never reported in any newspaper, remembered or only half-remembered by the people who were there.
An example was a jump Knievel performed for Ted Pollock, the promoter and owner of the Yakima (Washington) Speedway. Maybe it happened around this time. Maybe earlier. Maybe later. Pollock was sure that it was one of Knievel’s first jumps in the state. He had never met Knievel before he scheduled this event.
“He showed up one day, asked if I would promote a jump here,” Pollock said. “We talked, and he said he’d want $3,500. I agreed and asked if he wanted $1,000 in advance. That floored him. He said no one ever had offered him an advance like that before.”
The two men agreed on a date—whatever it was—and a promotion. He would jump ten Pepsi trucks. Not the big ones, the smaller Pepsi trucks. Pickups. The show was scheduled for a weekend night, and Knievel appeared that day to set up his equipment. He was alone, traveling with a little house trailer that he parked in the middle of the infield. The Pepsi people somehow had made a mistake and sent thirteen trucks instead of ten. Knievel, as he put up his ramps, said that the extra three trucks might as well be added to the line. He thought he could clear thirteen trucks.
Except a couple of hours later, he thought he couldn’t. He called Pollock and expressed his fear.
“Come down and have a drink with me in my trailer,” Knievel said to the promoter. “Talk with me.”
Pollock was taking care of his ten-year-old son, Tommy, for the day, so he went to the trailer with his son. They sat around a cramped table with the daredevil. The daredevil said they should have whiskey. He pulled out three glasses, poured a shot of Wild Turkey bourbon in each. The two men and the boy all drank, just like that. The boy’s eyes were opened very wide.
“It was okay,” Ted Pollock said later about his son’s debut with hard liquor. “There’s worse things to say than you had your first drink of whiskey when you were ten years old with Evel Knievel.”
Knievel kept drinking.
He outlined his concerns. He never had jumped thirteen Pepsi trucks, never had gone that far. There was a finite limit to the power and possibilities of one man and one motorcycle. This well could be it. He still would jump, mind you, because he had said he would, but he did not think he would land safely. The news was both a relief and a burden to Pollock, a relief because he would not have to refund any ticket money from a good house, a burden because he didn’t want the death of this stranger on his soul.
The afternoon moved into the evening, and the evening moved into showtime, and the promoter noticed that the bottle of Wild Turkey was pretty much empty and no one else had joined the party. Knievel was shattered, drunk. He still said he had misgivings about the jump, but he left the trailer to cheers, staggered to the bike, kicked her into action, and went down the ramp. The takeoff was perfect. The flight was uneventful. The landing was perfect.
“The guy couldn’t walk,” Ted Pollock said. “But he could jump thirteen Pepsi trucks.”
Pollock would wind up promoting seventeen Knievel jumps in the Northwest.
The summer trip through the region—not promoted by Ted Pollock—was not a great success. The crowds were fine, four thousand people the number quoted at most stops, but he crashed in three of his four jumps. He cleared thirteen automobiles from Centralia Dodge at the Lewis County Fairgrounds in Centralia, Washington, on June 9, 1967, then appeared the next day to speak at the Seattle Cycle Show at Exhibition Hall in Seattle on a bill that included actor Nick Adams and Miss Cycle, Linda Humble, but his next three stops all ended with hospital visits.
In Graham, Washington, he tried to jump sixteen Volkswagens at the Graham Speedway on July 28, 1967. He was supposed to be moving at seventy miles per hour when he went off the ramp, but was only at sixty. He came up short. The front wheel hit the sixteenth car, and he bounced and rolled, bounced and rolled, for nearly seventy feet. He wound up with a concussion.
“I don’t feel too bad,” he said from the hospital. “They haven’t taken any X-rays yet, though. I guess I’ll be here for another four or five days.”
What did he remember from the crash?
“I can’t remember anything after hitting the car,” he said.
He promised from his bed that he would return in three weeks and complete what he started out to do. He returned on August 18, 1967, faced the same sixteen Volkswagens, and crashed again. He completed the jump but couldn’t hold on to the handlebars. He broke his left wrist, his right knee, and a couple of ribs. He was back in the hospital again.
On September 24, 1967, five weeks later, still in recovery from the broken left wrist, right knee, and assorted ribs, he tried to clear sixteen Allen Green Chevrolets at Evergreen Speedway in Monroe, Washington. His failures were spelled out in the ad for the event: “Two months ago he tried to clear 16 Volkswagens and wound up in the hospital twice.” Again he completed the Evergreen jump, cleared all sixteen Chevys, but landed hard enough to compress his spine. Back in the hospital.
“A motorcycle coming down thirty feet at seventy miles per hour gives you a terrible jolt,” he said.
A losing streak in this business had consequences.