Evel Knievel Hopes to Jump-Start Hometown’s Fortunes

Decades ago, millions would pause in awe as Evel Knievel, astride a gaudy roaring motorcycle, sailed over fountains, canyons and rows of buses, the stars on his superhero costumes glittering.

A century ago, his hometown of Butte was “the city that electrified a nation” with wire from its copper mines. Butte was famous for its raucous, bustling streets, sometimes dangerous but always exciting, hard against a mountain of copper ore that was steadily chipped away by miners.

These days, the 63-year-old Knievel keeps his tires on the ground, trying to clean up a smudged social record and nurse a battered body. And Butte is searching for a glimmer of the prosperity that dried up when the mines shut down.

Neither wanting to fade away, Knievel and Butte are teaming up to share their knowledge of soaring high, crashing hard and starting over against the odds.

For Butte, population about 34,000, it would mean using Knievel’s image to lure tourists off the interstate and through town, tugging at their pockets along the way.

“Our mines are down. We don’t even have a major industry now,” Butte-Silverbow County Commissioner Ristene Hall said. “We’re kind of in a depressed time, and I’m not sure what we can fall back on. We’re a mining city; it’s all we’ve ever had.”

For Knievel, it would mean free publicity--something the 1970s motorcycle daredevil never shies from--and getting the word out across the West for the “Evel Experience,” a theme park being planned along the California-Nevada border.

“I think it would bring a lot of tourist traffic [to Butte] and I think they need it,” said Knievel, who has homes in Las Vegas and Florida and summers in Butte. “But we need advertising and marketing all over the state of Montana.”

“Evel Knievel Loop” is a still-disputed tourist drive through Butte’s once lively business district that would include displays of Knievel memorabilia and tidbits about his childhood in the mining city.

Hall and fellow County Commissioner Mike Sheehy said billboard signs painted with Butte’s landmarks and Knievel’s most famous image--a helmeted daredevil airborne on a motorcycle with a patriotic paint job--are in the works to promote the loop and Butte, situated along Interstate 90 in southwestern Montana.

Knievel said the three companies building the theme park have agreed to circulate his motorcycles, costumes and toys through town for free, so they could be woven in with other bits of Butte’s history, most of it reflecting a time when the town flourished.

Today, there is not a lot to see here.

There’s “the pit”--Berkeley Pit, 5,600 feet wide and 1,600 feet deep, dug out of a mountainside by generations of copper miners, now abandoned and slowly filling with water so polluted it is orange.

Along the skyline, the cold, black head frames of mining structures bust the horizon and hover over broken ground. Downtown, where the courthouse’s heavy copper doors are proof of better times, businesses are suffering.

Butte’s history was shaped by economic peaks and valleys, prosperity and despair. It is in one of its darker times now. Copper company Montana Resources Inc. shut down a year ago, putting more than 300 people out of work and leaving an already distressed town even more desperate.

Jeff Francis, owner of the Picadilly Museum of Transportation and four other historic buildings in uptown Butte, believes that using Knievel’s image could draw more tourists off the interstate. Francis is committed to dedicating, even renovating if necessary, any one of his properties to display Knievel’s memorabilia as part of a tourism promotion.

“I think it would effectively put Butte on the tourist destination map,” he said.

Sheehy, whose idea to name a street after Knievel evolved into the tourist loop, said people should remain as lighthearted about the loop as they have about other ways to promote Butte.

After all, this is the town that turned the nation’s longest running house of prostitution--finally closed in 1982--into a tourist attraction. Butte even found a way to turn the pit into a tourist attraction, of sorts.

“The Evel thing is something to have fun with,” Sheehy said. “We were a fun community. We still are and we have to show our fun side.”

But some in town question whether Butte should bestow such honor on a man known as the “master of disaster.” His stunts and fast lifestyle left him with a beaten body. He suffered 35 broken bones, has undergone hip-replacement surgery and a liver transplant, and has diabetes and hepatitis C. He’s been in jail and admitted other crimes for which he was never charged.

Linda Beyer circulated a petition against naming a street after Knievel and said she remains opposed to the loop.

“All . . . of the people who signed the petition had seen some very inappropriate behavior displayed by Evel Knievel within this community,” she said. “He has left a lot of debts within this community.”

She declined to say how many people had signed the petition.

Knievel’s history includes charges of tax evasion, solicitation of prostitution and assault, and admissions of burglary.

In 1977, he was sentenced to six months in jail for the baseball-bat beating of the author of a less-than-flattering biography.

At a press club meeting in Butte earlier this year, Knievel admitted burglarizing a Butte bowling alley and a sports shop years ago, and said he once tried for an entire weekend to break into a bank. He called the crimes mistakes of his youth.

Knievel said there is only one thing for his critics to do.

“They’re going to have to get out of Butte’s way,” he said. “Butte, Mont., will do whatever it can to make it a wonderful tourist attraction.”

Connie Kenney, director of the Butte Chamber of Commerce, said even those who wag a finger at Knievel’s moral character would agree that he still turns heads.

“We have people coming in on a weekly basis asking things about him,” she said. “Of all the people [from Butte], he really is the most famous. . . . He really does have a worldwide reputation.”

ABC Wide World of Sports said Knievel’s television ratings for his 1975 hurtle over 13 buses remains untouched by any athlete, even Muhammad Ali. His unsuccessful attempt to leap across Idaho’s Snake River Canyon in 1974 in a jet-powered “skycycle” got headlines around the world.

Hall said that although Knievel won’t open financial floodgates for Butte, he’s still popular enough that there’s no telling who he could attract.

“It might not bring the town back to making it, but I know it’s going to help,” she said. “Even if people just come in, see the exhibit, have lunch and buy gas, it’s going to help.”

Hall said some restaurants have agreed to name sandwiches after Knievel and provide written details about his life in Butte.

Knievel said he’s confident that he and Butte are good for each other.

“I worked in the copper mines there,” he said. “I drove [a] truck in the Berkeley Pit. I have a lot of wonderful friends there, I love the community. . . . I just want the people of Butte to know that I will keep my word to them.”