Evil Knievel Lunch Box

Rob Hardy: The life of Evel Knievel

Everybody knew who Evel Knievel was in his heyday. He made a living doing dangerous things, and had a knack for making them into spectacles that the whole world paid attention to.

If you consider such talents admirable, that will be pretty much all there is to like about him. The great problem with the exhaustive biography "Evel: The High-Flying Life of Evel Knievel: American Showman, Daredevil, and Legend" (Doubleday) by Leigh Montville is that the subject is relentlessly awful, with serious behavior problems and sociopathic traits.

It is also the great attraction to the book; Knievel's was a wreck of a life, but just like a wreck on the highway (or one of his wrecks on a motorcycle landing ramp), it rivets attention. Montville has done fine biographies of other more traditional sports figures like Ted Williams and Babe Ruth, and uses here a florid, breathless style full of apocryphal anecdotes; he interrupts frequently to tell the reader he is about to tell "a story." It is a fittingly lurid way to tell a nasty tale, a cautionary story about how we should be careful who we pick for heroes.

Montville centers Knievel's life around his hometown of Butte, Mont., where he was born in 1938. Butte was a mining town, and the men had tough jobs full of risk. With such clientele, the bars never closed and prostitution was legal. Fistfights were a fit way of resolving disputes. Knievel was eager to take risks, or to talk others into doing so, even when he was young. As he got older, he was always looking for ways to strike gold. A friend who went to bars with him said, "He'd be looking at the jukebox or the cigarette machine, trying to figure out if it was full of money or not. If he thought it was full, well, he was going to try to figure a way to get that money. That was just the way he was.

"He did work in the mines for a short time, but that wasn't his way. He robbed business establishments, even those of friends, and then set up a private protection service to prevent further heists, for those who hired him. One of the times he was in jail, he was there with another miscreant, William Knofel, nicknamed by the cops "Awful."

The simultaneous incarcerations of the two, Montville suggests, got Knievel his nickname when one of the jailers said, "Hey, we got Awful Knofel, and here's Evil Knievel.

Evil Knievel Lunch Box, 4 Bendy Dolls & DVD Lot | Evil BS

You are bidding on a Evil Knievel Lunch Box, Bendy Doll & DVD Lot. The Lunch box is in fair condition, latch closes, but very rusty with paint loss., no dents. The DVD is in very good condition, Evil’s Greatest Jumps, and the 4 Bendy dolls are dirty from storage and outfits have stains on them from age and one has a red marker stain. Shipping and Handling is $10.00 in the US and $18.00 Out os the US, to be paid by buyer.

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