Knievel may have decided to go straight but he would continue to have run-ins with the law throughout his life, even after he had given up trying to make a living from crime. His skills as a bank robber appeared questionable anyhow and are perhaps best summarised by his childhood friend Paddy Boyle who once said of Evel, ‘Actually he wasn’t a bank robber cos he never got nothing. I think that’s why he started jumping motorcycles – cos he couldn’t make it as a burglar.’
Further pressure for Knievel to find a legitimate job came with the birth of his and Linda’s first child, a son, Kelly Michael Knievel, on 21 August 1960. Now with a wife and child to feed, Bobby needed not only to find a source of regular income, he also needed to ensure he wouldn’t be facing a lengthy jail sentence and leaving his family helpless.
In 1961, Knievel formed the Sur-Kill hunting service, another scheme which was not quite above board. Bobby would assure his clients that he knew the countryside of Montana so well that he could lead them to whatever game they chose to shoot, thereby guaranteeing them a good day’s hunting. The problem was, much of that game was to be found only in protected national parks and was therefore off limits to hunters. Bobby being Bobby, however, wasn’t about to let a small matter like that stand in the way of business.
It was during this period of being involved in hunting that one of the stranger episodes of Knievel’s life occurred. Hearing that the US Department of the Interior had decided to cull half of Yellowstone Park’s 10,000-strong elk population to maintain nature’s balance, Bobby decided to intervene in what would prove to be his first ever publicity stunt. He (illegally) shot an elk in the park then cut off its antlers and slung them across his shoulders and set out to hitchhike all the way to Washington DC in protest at the cull. After all, how could a hunting guide like Knievel expect to make any money if there were no more elk to shoot? Bobby, backed by the Montana Fish and Game Commission, wanted to initiate a relocation programme so the elk could be re-homed all over the state for hunters to legitimately shoot. Bobby could then run his business legally.
Knievel claimed he gave the antlers to President Kennedy himself and told him, ‘If you don’t do something about this immediately your son John-John will look at the head of an elk on a nickel like my kids do the head of a buffalo.’
Whether or not he actually gained an audience with the president (he was pictured in local newspapers with the antlers but JFK was conspicuously absent) it is nonetheless doubtful that a 22-year-old hitchhiker from Butte would have single-handedly persuaded the government to complete a U-turn on its culling policy. Even so, Knievel had played his part in stirring up publicity for the campaign and the idea was abandoned and a programme instigated whereby the elk were transported to sites across Montana as fair game for hunters. For the elk it was a stay of execution; for Knievel the trip represented a double victory. The first bonus was that Bobby now had some elk he could legally lead his clients to as part of the Sur-Kill experience, but the other plus point was to be far more important in the long-run. Bobby’s picture had appeared in the Washington Post along with details of his plight, proving to Knievel for the first time that publicity wasn’t that hard to come by if you just used a little imagination.
Hitchhiking may have been his only means of getting to Washington but it had added a novelty factor to the trip, as did the elk antlers. Knievel had discovered he was a natural at promoting himself and his ideas, and the lesson would not be lost on him.
Somewhat surprisingly, Bobby tired of the hunting game before he could take advantage of the new elk policy and decided to try his hand at a ‘proper’ nine-to-five job as a car insurance salesman with the Combined Insurance Company of America. He was hired by a certain Alex Smith, whom Knievel later acknowledged as being the man who finally helped steer him away from a life of crime and who ‘probably saved my life’ in doing so.
Knievel has never been short of boasts when talking about his skills as a salesman, but given the phenomenal manner in which he managed to promote and sell himself to the world some years later, they perhaps aren’t completely idle. He claimed he broke all company records for selling 110 policies in one day to staff at the Warm Springs mental hospital in Montana and quipped that he ‘might have even sold some policies to the patients’. There have been comments from more than one party over the years that Knievel in fact sold all those policies to mental patients. Whatever the case, he also claims to have gone on to sell an incredible total of 271 policies in that same week. But, if the stories are to be believed, then Bobby became a victim of his own success. Feeling he should have been rewarded with very swift promotion after his success in the field, Knievel determined he was going to ask the president of the company, Mr W. Clement Stone, for just that; he demanded, rather arrogantly in a face-to-face meeting, to be promoted to the position of vice president. Not surprisingly, Stone declined and Knievel immediately resigned. ‘He refused me and I quit. He said he was sorry to see me go and wished me the best of luck. I thought I’d regret it but in every adversity there is a seed of benefit. Mr Stone taught me a lot about the value of a positive mental attitude and he taught me to do the right thing by others simply because it’s right.’
Significantly, as well as being president of Combined Insurance, Stone was also a self-made millionaire and author, and his book, The Success System that Never Fails, became one of Bobby’s favourites. Preaching the benefits of a positive mental attitude, Stone’s book would be a constant source of support and guidance in the making of the star that was Evel Knievel. Also present at the meeting between Knievel and Stone was Napoleon Hill, another author who promoted the benefits of positive thinking. Hill had written a book called Think and Grow Rich, and while Knievel had been trying to do just that over the last few years with varying degrees of failure, he would have the art mastered within the next ten years and would be rewarded with riches beyond his wildest dreams. All he had to do was think of a field in which he could grow rich.
‘I could do a wheelie either sitting on the motorcycle or standing on it better than anyone else in the world.’
Having flunked out of school, tried his hand at so many occupations and moved from one sport to the next, it seemed that Bobby Knievel would never be able to maintain enough interest or enthusiasm in any particular field to make a decent living. He was too restless, too ambitious to make something of himself and too opposed to knuckling down and accepting a regular nine-to-five job. The only real constant in his life, the only thing he hadn’t tired of since his schooldays, was riding motorcycles. Bobby simply loved to fool around on bikes.
Motorcycles had first entered Knievel’s life when he was 15 years old, although he had fantasised that his bicycle was motorised long before that. He was given his first motorcycle by his father while visiting him in El Sobrante, California, where Robert senior had eventually settled with his second wife Jeanie Buis and had three daughters: Christy, Renee and Robin. After working as a bus driver for a time, Knievel’s father had managed to save and borrow enough money to open a Volkswagen dealership in Berkeley (he would later return to Butte and open another dealership there), and while young Bobby was visiting his father presented him with a little British-built 125cc two-stroke BSA Bantam – a massively popular machine at the time and one which was responsible for launching countless racing careers as well as the less-travelled route Knievel would eventually follow on two wheels.
It might have seemed an extravagant gift, given the relative poverty Bobby was accustomed to living in, but it may have been his father’s way of assuaging his own guilt at deserting his son at such a young age. And, as the bike was part of a trade-in on a car sale, it probably didn’t cost him too much.
As well as running a garage, Robert Knievel also raced cars on occasion in local events. He was never serious enough about the sport to attempt to make a career out of it but he was a competent driver and was responsible for generating Bobby’s interest