R.I.P Evel Knievel:
I have no idea how I missed it but I just read that Evel Knievel, perhaps the only motorcycle stuntman you’ve ever heard of, died at the end of last month. He was 69 and had been ill from diabetes and an incurable lung disease.
In the 60s and 70s, Knievel became an American folk hero by staging elaborate daredevil stunts on his motorcycle. Rising to fame from a jump over the fountains at Ceaser’s Palace in Las Vegas in 1969 (video above), he launched his motorcycle over canyons, trucks and flaming school buses. He quit jumping in 1980 on doctor’s orders that nothing was left in his body except "scar tissue and surgical steel."
What I like best about the Evel Knievel legend is its "only in America" quality–a post-war poor kid, gone daredevil in the Space Age gone conservative businessman in the Reagan Era, all done in a stars and stripes jumpsuit. Knievel reinvented himself from petty Montana hoodlum (including a name change. He was born Robert Knievel) into celebrity via an activity most onlookers considered a novelty not entertainment. He became famous by owning a category and being the only recognizable face in it. Without him, there’d be no Richard Simmons, no Jimmy Buffet, no Weird Al, no a hundred other famous people who are famous by being the the only one’s of their kind. If that kind of willed individual acclaim ain’t American, then I’m moving to Mozambique on Thursday (via Smith Magazine).