The American Spectator

TAS Live

This article appeared in the February 2008 issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print edition, click here.

That Sunday, September 8, 1974, my parents were batting the names "Ford" and "Nixon" around our house like verbal tennis balls: Ford, Nixon, Nixon, Ford, Nixon. President Gerald Ford had announced that he would pardon Richard Nixon, igniting a huge controversy. But the only name that mattered to me that day was "Knievel." Later that afternoon, the great Evel Knievel was finally going to get his chance at jumping the Snake River Canyon, in the town of Twin Falls, Idaho. I was eight years old, living in suburban Illinois, and had thought of little else for some time. The great event would not be shown live on broadcast television, though -- only for a fee at theaters and arenas in what was then called "closed circuit television." That I wouldn't see the jump live only added to its allure, of course. I'd have to wait until the following weekend to watch the taped broadcast with my friend Jimmy, a myopic kid with thick, rounded glasses that always seemed to be fogging up from excitement.

Jimmy's father was not unlike a suburban version of Knievel. A boisterous, perhaps unstable man, he retained the pyromaniacal enthusiasms of boys everywhere. He enjoyed detonating objects on his driveway with exotic explosives on almost any day of the year -- especially the Fourth of July, when his home was like an armory. "He'll burn their house down," my mother was always saying. The boys of our neighborhood only hoped that when he did, we could watch.

Jimmy's father was the only adult who seemed excited about the canyon jump -- he was all amped up about torque and rocket propulsion and wind currents, and even asked me what I thought Evel's chances were. I had no thermodynamic opinions to share, but hoped that Evel would succeed so that I could see the reaction of my father, who considered Knievel a maniac but used less generous terms. He seemed offended that a man would willingly subject himself to destruction, when the world was always willing to do it for you.

Later that afternoon, he gave me the news of what had happened: "That nut landed in the river," he said. "He didn't make the jump, but he's alive." It seemed like a concession for him even to mention it.

YEARS AFTER HE LEFT the White House, Theodore Roosevelt went on an ill-advised expedition in the Brazilian jungle, an adventure that nearly cost him his life. When asked why he had braved such danger and hardship, he supposedly replied: "It was my last chance to be a boy." Robert Craig Knievel wasn't that sentimental; gruff and contrary, he didn't pine for lost innocence, probably because he never had much of it to lose. Like great self-promoters before him, he merged the facts and the legends of his life into one narrative, and since it always takes work to sort out such things, most people couldn't tell the difference.

He hailed from the copper-mining town of Butte, Montana, and had worked in the mines there for a time, been a paratrooper in the Army in the 1950s, a semiprofessional hockey player, and maybe even -- the irony is too good for it to be true -- a health and accident insurance salesman. He stole his first motorcycle, and his propensity for violence didn't leave him when success came. At the time of the Snake River Canyon jump, he was most famous for his epic crash at Caesar's Palace in 1967, where he had jumped the casino fountains. The horror of the Caesar's smash-up put Evel on the national map. It also put him into a coma for a month -- or so he claimed. Steve Mandich, a definitive chronicler of all things Evel, cites local news reports showing that Knievel was giving interviews shortly afterward.

Who knows how many American kids Knievel set off to trying to duplicate his stunts on their bicycles? In our neighborhood, we'd use cast-off plywood for ramps and jump over stacks of garbage-can lids. Middle-class American boys, growing up in postwar plenty and comfort, we needed an updated mythology, and Evel supplied it. His one deed -- flying through the air on a motorcycle, neatly bridging the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford -- combined everything a boy craves when he is at play: high speed, noise, excitement, and the tantalizing possibility of disaster. Some said he was a superhero for the 1970s, but beyond his Elvis-like costume, Evel had nothing of the superman about him, as his many transcendent crashes confirmed. Yet that was what made him so awe-inspiring; we knew he hurt, we knew he bled -- but he kept doing it. In a boy's code of virtues, intelligence and discretion lag far behind nerve, and Evel was to nerve what Nixon was to anguish.

Knievel's quest to jump the Snake River Canyon was just about the last great hustle by an American showman in the grand old style. There was the requisite government resistance: Knievel had originally wanted to get permission to jump the Grand Canyon -- no middling craters for him -- but the killjoy Department of the Interior blocked his plans, telling him he couldn't perform his stunt on public land. So Evel cast about for a private canyon, and remembered Snake River. It just so happened to be in a town in which he had spent a night in the drunk tank years earlier.

p>Twin Falls, too, was part of an older lineage: that of the small American town that briefly has the world overrun its streets, and then settles back to obscurity. "We have a nice rodeo here, and a nice fairgrounds and a great fair, but this was way beyond any of our expectations," remembered Doug Vollmer, a local Jaycees member who went on to become the town's mayor. Indeed, when the world arrived in 1974, it wasn't clear that Twin Falls would survive. As a Time correspondent described it: br> /p>

It was a bizarre spectacle, garnished with machismo and the threat of death: the ultimate expression of the motorcycle culture and, according to one Evel Knievel aide, "a blue-collar Woodstock".... crowds awaiting the jump were partying and building bonfires against the night chill. Bikers and their women stripped naked and drove through the fires on drunken dares....Some 25 people lurched off the jump ramp, apparently intent on burning it, but were turned aside by shotgun-toting deputies and the sobering information that Knievel could not perform without his ramp.... At the big moment, the VIP gates were thrown open and the crowd surged forward for a better view, nearly sweeping some onlookers over the canyon's rim....

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