Life of Evel: Evel Knievel Read Free Page A

birth to another child, Bobby’s younger brother Nick. It was not an uncommon scenario under the circumstances. Living conditions were extremely tough for any young family in America during the great depression and having two young children to clothe and feed stretched many families to breaking point. The Knievels were no exception. Knowing they would struggle to provide a stable and secure upbringing for their children, the decision was taken to hand the boys over to their paternal grandparents, Emma and Ignatious Knievel. While Robert Senior believed a brighter future might lie in California, Ann moved to Nevada, and the young Knievel brothers were left with their grandparents in a small house on Parrot Street in Butte, unaware at such a young age of exactly what was happening to them and why.
    Ignatious J. Knievel owned a tyre shop in Butte and worked long hours trying to make it more profitable than it actually was. While it was no gold mine it did put food on the table and clothes on Bobby and Nick, a burden the ageing couple could well have done without but a duty they fulfilled to the best of their ability. With Ignatious devoting so much time to the shop it fell mostly to Emma to raise the boys and instil in them the rights and wrongs, the do’s and don’ts, that would prepare them for life in a difficult world.
    Having been taken in by their grandparents at such an early age, Bobby and Nick quite comfortably and naturally called them ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ and, apart from the greater age gap, life in the small Knievel house probably felt much like that of any other working-class family in Butte. There wasn’t much to go around and survival was a daily struggle, as Evel explained many years later: ‘Everything that my grandparents got they worked morning, noon and night for. Nothing was ever given to them and nothing was given to me; I either worked for it or stole it.’
    As soon as Bobby and Nick were old enough to play outside in the streets they found out what it really meant to be a resident of Butte. Pimps, prostitutes and drunks were everywhere, and one of the boys’ earliest childhood pastimes was throwing stones at prostitutes in order to bait their pimps into chasing them down the street. And it wasn’t as if Bobby had to go out of his way to locate the city’s prostitutes; a good many of them were working quite literally on his doorstep. ‘There were 500 prostitutes working in one square block on Mercury and Gallina Street and my grandfather’s tyre shop was right on Gallina Street. I was raised right in it. Blonde Edna’s whorehouse was right across the street from it [his grandparents’ house] and Dirty Mouth Mary’s was on the other side.’
    When he came of age, Knievel stopped throwing rocks at prostitutes and began throwing money at them instead. ‘In ten years in these whorehouses,’ he admitted, ‘I must have spent at least five or six thousand dollars, at three dollars a time. Every whore in this town knew me. There just wasn’t anything else to do there but go into a bar or a whorehouse. When you got tired of going to the whorehouse, you went to the bar.’
    But as a kid there were often more conventional games to be played than pimp-baiting, and Big Sky Country was a better place than most in which to play them. Like any young American boy, Bobby loved playing cowboys and Indians, and since Montana had been as much a part of the Wild West as anywhere else in the States it formed the perfect backdrop for escapist cowboy games. Television cowboy Roy Rogers was Bobby’s greatest childhood hero and he would spend hours pretending to be him, dressing up in a makeshift cowboy outfit complete with sheriff’s badge and his grandfather’s hat. By the time he reached his mid-teens, Bobby even had a real horse, Alamo, gifted to him by his step-grandfather, Roy Buis, to add a touch more realism to his escapades. It would have dumbfounded the young Knievel to imagine that he would not only