Since the height of his fame in the 1970s, the name Evel Knievel has become a byword for daredevil lunacy. The American stuntman finally pegged it in 2007 from lung disease – a highly improbable way to go for the man who broke a world record 433 bones performing all manner of ridiculously dangerous feats. His speciality was motorbikes, jumping over – or in some painful cases, not jumping over – cars and buses, having graduated quickly from the crates of rattlesnakes and two mountain lions he narrowly cleared during his first public performance.
Evel (real name Robert) didn’t do anything by halves. He was fired from his first job at a mining company for popping a wheelie in a digger, severing a power line that blacked out a nearby town for hours. He just wasn’t destined for a normal life. Just as the Joie Chitwood Auto Daredevil Show made an impression on the eight-year-old Evel, so a box of slides hidden away in his grandparents’ attic had a powerful effect on author Garrett Colton. Garrett’s grandpa Jack Cooper had been a car salesman, and had met Evel in Las Vegas. The two men hit it off, and Evel suggested he travel down to Oklahoma to jump the cars at Jack’s Cooperville dealership. Discovering a dusty box marked “Evel Knievel slides & film, 1972” was the first Garrett had heard about his grandfather’s friendship with the stuntman, but after extracting the full story from the taciturn Jack, it’s now available in a tastily-designed publication. Find out if Evel cleared the cars or ended up in intensive care in Evel Comes to Cooperville, from Done to Death Projects.
