Mining for any substance is hard, gruelling and dangerous work but it was even tougher before today’s high standards of safety and occupational health came into being. Apart from the multitude of physical mining accidents, which were all too common, there was also silicosis – or miner’s consumption as it was known locally – to worry about. Caused by breathing in tiny particles of silica, quartz or slate, over time silicosis affects the lung tissue and can ultimately prove fatal. Regardless of the dangers (or more probably because he just didn’t have any other viable options) Bobby Knievel landed a job with the Anaconda Copper Mining Company after leaving school, and worked in the Stewart and Emma mine shafts a mile below the surface of the richest hill on earth as a contract miner, skip tender and diamond driller. ‘I did every job in the mine from the top to the bottom and I remember my first cheque – $57 for a week’s work.’
Apart from silicosis there were other potentially lethal hazards, including the constant threat of cave-ins, fires, floods and the escape of poisonous gases, not to mention the additional and usual hazards of working with heavy equipment in a poorly lit environment where temperatures often soared above 100 degrees. Conditions were so bad that more than 2,100 miners lost their lives in Butte’s deadly labyrinth of mine shafts over the years, 168 of which perished in a single fire in 1917. Knievel soon discovered it wasn’t for him. ‘I could hardly wait to get out. I had many friends killed in the mines [from] accidents; ore dumped on them in the shafts and killed falling to the bottom, and being crushed to death in the slopes. I just wanted to get out.’
Knievel did have one other option open to him apart from working down the mines and that was to work in his father’s Volkswagen dealership, which he had opened upon his return to Butte in 1956. But Bobby, perhaps needing to find his own way in the world or maybe because he still harboured a grudge against his father for abandoning him, declined the offer and stuck with his mining job, however desperate he was to get out of it.
Salvation from the pits eventually came in the form of a driving job for the same Anaconda company. Bobby could escape the perils of the mines by driving his less fortunate colleagues to and from work. It was a safer and more comfortable job but Bobby found it mundane work and often spiced it up by trying to scare his passengers witless, to the point where he claims they refused to ride with him any longer. The final straw in his career at Anaconda came when he reputedly told a colleague to drop a giant boulder into the back of a truck he was driving so that he could perform a ‘wheelie’. According to Knievel, the truck reared up so high that it brought down overhead power cables and led to his dismissal.
Glad to be out of the mining business, an experience he would ‘never forget’, Knievel was nonetheless still short of career options and decided that his physical prowess would be put to better use in the US Army. He joined the 47th Infantry in the late 1950s (most probably 1958, though Knievel himself offers varied dates) for one year’s full service to test the water. As a non-team-player and a young man who did not respond well to authority, the armed forces may have seemed a strange choice, but for Knievel it represented one of the few opportunities to escape the grimness and hopelessness of Butte. He had to give it a try.
Knievel was stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington, and although he initially claimed he hated his time in the Army his opinion appeared to have mellowed in later years when he was asked if it was a particularly grim period in his life. ‘Not really. I served two years in the infantry full-time then seven years in the Reserves when I was in my twenties, but it was okay. I even managed to do a bit of pole-vaulting, sky-diving and parachuting.’
Despite becoming proficient in the use of Browning automatic rifles, it would seem that Bobby’s premier contribution to Uncle Sam was in his role as a member of the Army’s pole-vaulting team where he could stand by his own merits – just the way he preferred it. Having already become a proficient ski-jumper, his pole-vaulting prowess (he claims to have been able to clear a bar at 14 feet) seemed to prove that jumping really was in Knievel’s blood, one way or another.
Whatever his true feelings about the Army, he didn’t enjoy the experience enough to sign up for any longer than the minimum term, and after a short period of service he opted out, even though he didn’t have any other immediate prospects.
Once again it was his love of sport that provided the prospect of a possible alternative career. Having attended a summer hockey school at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks in 1959, Bobby saw a glimmer of hope in carving out a career as a professional ice-hockey player.
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