During that formative period in the early '50s, 15 year old Robert Craig Knievel gained the singular nickname that would establish him as a legend, largely due to the delinquent influence of his older brother, Nick.
"The first one to call me 'Evil Knievel,' his name was Nate McGrath. He was a baseball umpire, a friend of my family's. My brother and I stole his hubcaps and he called me Evil Knievel. It sort of stuck with me all my life. Later I changed the 'i' to an 'e'."
Growing up with his grandparents in Butte, young Bob's fledgling career as a stunt demon might have been nipped in the bud (or possibly in the emergency room) had it not been for his father, Bob E. Knievel, who came through with an influential present.
"I used to go and visit my Dad quite a bit when I was younger," Evel recalls. "He was in the Volkswagen business in Berkeley, and they lived in El Sabranti, outside of Oakland-he and my stepmother and my sisters.
"My dad gave me my first motorcycle when I was about 15. It was a BSA-125 Bantam, just a little bike. Two-stroke. Looked like a full-size motorcycle, but it was real small."
Back in Butte, young Bob pursued a rigorous program of athletics that would uniquely prepare him to become the phenomenon called Evel Knievel. Throughout high school and the proceeding years, Bob Knievel excelled in a variety of sports, building up, if you will, an impressive track record.
"I pole-vaulted when I was in high school," Evel says. "And I ski jumped. I retired the Rocky Mountain senior men's class-A ski jump champion-I won the cup twice. I've got a lot of trophies from cross-country skiing as well as ski jumping and track and field."
With his options in Butte limited to either a life of petty crime or establishing himself permanently in the work force of the city's bread-and-butter industry, copper mining, Knievel saw military service as his most viable way out, and enlisted in the Army.
"I was in the infantry. Carried the B.A.R.-Browning automatic rifle. And I worked with Fandango torpedoes-torpedoes shaped like a big hot dog, about six-feet long. You trip 'em with a wire. I pole-vaulted on the Army track team, I ran the hurdles and the 220."
After his discharge, Knievel pursued a career as a professional athlete, returning in 1959 to one of his high school passions.

"I played junior hockey and senior A and pro hockey for the Charlotte Clippers," he says, referring to the old Eastern Hockey League franchise. He implies that he wasn't crazy about the prospects it afforded, adding, "It's a tough way to make a living. Didn't pay very much."
Knievel the entrepreneur took over when he returned home. He rented the Butte Civic Center and brought in his own semi-pro team, the Butte Bombers, installing himself as owner, general manager, and player-coach.
"We went undefeated for two years. Then the team that beat us was the Czechoslovakian Olympic team. Our team was all Canadian kids from Montana State and the University of Montana."

Following his hockey playing days and echoing his father's work with VW, Knievel invested in a couple of Honda dealerships in Washington state with a partner named Darell Triber. They established their inaugural shop in Spokane at the beginning of the '60s, and soon opened a second in Moses Lake.

Figuring that a Cliff Major-style demonstration was a good way to drum up business, 24 year old Bob Knievel flashed on a publicity brainstorm-one destined to change people's impressions of him forever. Recognizing the old hoop of fire as a thing of the past, Knievel decided that something a little more spectacular might cause enough of a ruckus that all the Hondas he had in stock would be sold by the end of the day.
"They had a racetrack in Moses Lake," Knievel remembers. "And we took boxes that held coffins, that were six and a half feet long, and stapled them together. We put rattlesnakes in there and then had mountain lions at both ends of it."
Either Knievel was going to spearhead one hellacious campground roundup, or he was hoping to borrow whatever mighty strange house pets they keep up in the Northwest. As it turns out, Knievel had an eminently more playable card up his sleeve, as far as acquiring such a menagerie was concerned.
"The guy that ran the zoo up in Cooley City-at the dam-his girlfriend was a friend of mine. She used to come into the store and sit around all the time, and go to lunch with me, and this, that, and the other thing, so she talked him into doing it."
Knievel planned to jump the entire box. Instead, he came down short and landed square in the middle of its squirming, slithering contents.
"The end of it came out and the rattlesnakes got out. All the people ran like hell and I was on a motorcycle, so I just got the hell away from there. The snakes were crawling up the hills under the crowd. The mountain lions were just crouching around there. They grabbed them right away."

After the snakes had been driven from Moses Lake in 1965, Knievel relocated to Orange County and began racing Norton Scramblers on the AMA circuit. In order to capitalize on his publicity- (and income) generating jumping ability, Knievel got together with some like-minded riders and, after a period of rehearsal, Bob Knievel and His Motorcycle Daredevils, out of Hollywood, CA, took to the road.
"I put a whole show together," Evel remembers. I felt the American public would support a motorcycle daredevil show-because of the great job Honda had done creating the slogan, 'You meet the nicest people on a Honda.' And they did, I drew a lot of people to the show. But when I'd get hurt the show would suffer because there was no finale."
The other riders would suffer as well when Knievel was unable to sign their paychecks.
"The first time I was ever hurt I broke my right arm between the elbow and the shoulder right in half, a compound fracture. In Missoula, Montana. Short on the jump.
"So I had to discontinue the show and just go on my own. I'd go to the racetracks and make a deal with the owner of the racetrack to get 50 percent of the gate and help them promote the race and the show and the jump."
Promoting the jump was the easy part. It was the execution that was a little rougher for the daredevil first billed in 1966 as Evel Knievel at a racetrack jump in Indio, California. While Evel became famous for his prodigious motorcycle jumping abilities, he gained an added dimension with thrill-seeking audiences as he became equally well-known for his spectacular crackups at events in cities such as Tacoma and Barstow.
"I got hurt real bad in Tacoma, Washington," Knievel says. "Had a severe brain concussion. Landed short. Hit the ramp, caught it on the rear wheel. I was riding a Triumph then, T-120 Bonneville. Then a 650 Bonneville Triumph.
"Norton was the first sponsor I had. Then I went to Triumph.
Knievel has claimed that the Triumph 650 was far and away the best bike he ever jumped with. As his reputation and fame began to swell, crowds would flock to see the man with the uncanny handle soar his bike over what were, depending on the fee promised him, increasingly more unlikely obstacles.