(Here’s the YouTube link to Saturday night’s video: https://youtu.be/kLvaMur5EAs )
Sunday will mark the 45th anniversary of the day when thousands gathered in what was then one of the most remote parts of Tarrant County, a fabled drag strip that for a span of several hours was the center of the sports world as well as the scene of something that resembled cult worship.
In their midst was an American icon, revered as much for the pins and screws that kept his neck bone connected to his back bone – among many other combinations – as his motorcycling daredevil acrobatics.
When Evel Knievel stepped onto the Green Valley Raceway, each step seemingly set off a wind chime, all the metal keeping his frame in place clanging in disorganized notes. Downing a can of WD-40 was far more beneficial than a daily vitamin or celery juice or some such.
On his famed Skycycle II, Knievel, then a 35-year-old stuntman would attempt to jump 11 Mack trucks, soaring into the air from a ramp on one side and traveling 140 feet to his destination, another ramp on the other side.
It happened in, of all places, North Richland Hills.
To tell the story as it developed was America’s leading sports announcing personality, along with a sidekick who would one day be his foil.
“That’s Don Meredith at his best,” said Howard Cosell, “showing you the kind of courage that was uniquely his through all of the years. Evel Knievel’s courage, of course, now a matter of public record.
“Thirty thousand people in North Richland Hills, Texas, to watch Evel Knievel go after his longest leap yet.”
That figure appears to be classic Cosell inflation.
News reports from that day put the crowd closer to half that number, as did a former NRH police officer who was by Cosell’s side. However, as one gentleman recently wrote, history and recollections of the event evolved into Woodstock Syndrome. If you count all those who claim to have been there, you get much closer to the 30,000 figure.
Howard Cosell was nothing if not ahead of his time.
No matter, what was happening at the Green Valley Raceway was a big deal. ABC’s Wide World of Sports and TV’s preeminent sports mouth were there to tell the world about it.
And, apparently, they were doing it live on a Sunday afternoon. Live TV was something Wide World of Sports did rarely, if ever, but news reports from that day reported that the jump, planned for between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. would be shown as Evel’s hair-raising attempt went down.
Or up and then down, depending on if fate was on Evel’s side.
“I was assigned to be Howard’s bodyguard, because there were already people who didn’t like Howard back in those days,” said Randy Shiflet, 64, a retired officer and later a city administrator. “We were up in the little broadcast booth over the bleachers when he made his jump.
“Howard was a character. One of the funniest guys I have ever met. Telling jokes, easy-going. And very, very cordial.”
The plan was for Knievel’s jump to be his next-to-last before retirement and before his greatest, death-defying (in a perfect world) attempt of the Snake River Canyon jump in Twin Falls, Idaho, in September.
The plan at Green Valley was a jump that measured upwards of 140 feet, roughly half the length of a football field and a distance never before spanned by a person on a land-based cycle.
The little, ol’ town of North Richland Hills was the site.
North Richland Hills hadn’t been incorporated all that long when Knievel and his flashy red, mostly white and blue jumpsuit made his appearance. In fact, it had only been since 1953, when the leading citizens of the day voted to incorporate the divvied up portions of Clarence Jones’ dairy farm and make a city they called North Richland Hills. Its charter was approved in 1964.
Ten years later, NRH was introduced to the world, ready or not.
In those early days, NRH had grown to a town on the outskirts of about 17,000. It’s police department consisted of 18-20 officers, including the chief. Today, the department consists of 130-plus officers for a city of more than 70,000.
The gates to Green Valley opened at 9 a.m. that day. It promised to be one to remember.
“If you weren’t working patrol that day, you were working off-duty at Green Valley,” recalled Shiflet, then a self-described 19-year-old “snot-nosed rookie.”
“I think we had Keller, Grapevine, Richland Hills and Haltom City officers there as well. They started showing up early like a rainy day at an elementary school. It was a mob, no doubt about it.”
It was a big day after all. How big?
When Vice-President Gerald Ford, his life getting more complicated by the day, appeared on the Dick Cavett show in 1974. The name “Mick Jagger” appeared.
“Mick Jagger,” the vice president said, “isn’t he the motorcycle rider?”
* * * * * *
I can’t wait to get on the road again. — Willie
The Green Valley Raceway was the brainchild of Bill McClure, a dairy farmer who in 1960 converted a portion of his property into 1.6-mile road course and a quarter-mile drag strip.
It sat in Smithfield, a small farming and ranching area that grew to 400 or so by the time it was annexed by North Richland Hills in what was described as a “bitterly contested” campaign and election” in 1958, according to The Texas State Historical Association.
Smithfield had been named for Eli Smith, the benefactor, who had donated land for a church and cemetery in the town of Zion.
Green Valley Raceway became a popular weekend hangout during its more than 20 years of operation.
“I routinely worked off-duty out there,” Shiflet said. “They had a walkway, a bridgeway, you go up the stairs and walk across the drag strip. They didn’t let anybody stand on that bridgeway when the cars would take off. The best job you could get, especially when they came out with the Funny Cars, was standing up there keeping everybody off the bridge. You had the best seat in the house.”
The drag strip ran south-southeast across where Bursey Road runs today, up to the top of a hill which is near Green Valley Drive.
The start line was near today’s North Tarrant Parkway, nonexistent in 1974, and the finish line was near Green Valley Drive.
Today, the only remnants of the track include a bridge and some guard railing. A drainage channel was once a stock tank on the Green Valley property. A planned plaque marking its place in North Richland Hills history is somewhere in the bureaucratic process, Shiflet believed.
At the time of the Knievel circus in 1974, the track was owned by Bill Hielscher and his wife, Mary.
Hielscher, who went on to own the Texas Raceway, was a renowned drag racer.
At age 30, he made an agreement with Mary. He needed to live with no regrets, and he had an itch to race. He just wanted a year. Mary would support the family while he went off to race.
If he were successful, he would turn professional.
When his six-plus years as a professional were up, Hielscher had become one of his sport’s best, winning 37 AHRA major championship races — nine AHRA championship races in one year – a World Points winner six times in a row and a world record setter at Bonneville Salt Flats.
Hielscher greeted everybody with “howdy,” and “happy trails” as they departed.
He found his footing as a race promoter, “a one-man PR machine,” said Jim Hill, who eulogized Hielscher in print after his death in 2002.
“He was one of the first drag racers to prepare a press kit for media and sponsors, and was known for his ‘anytime-anyplace’ willingness to provide newspapers with the kind of pre-race PR that event promoters rarely could obtain from other racers.”
Meetings and photo-ops with Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were all part of the results of his success.
Hielscher, Hill wrote, also pioneered the “sponsor trailer,” which was hauled along with his race teams to the events he entered.
Nothing was bigger than the show and its sponsors.
As a promoter, the Knievel jump was his Mona Lisa, what with all the personalities and crowds that descended on his track that day.
“I got a real nice assignment because I got to be in that little perch up above the masses with Howard,” said Shiflet, who kindly donated many of the old photos you see of old Green Valley Raceway, including the one below. “I do not recall if there were two officers or four officers up there.
“I was there also two or three years later when Willie Nelson tried to have a picnic there … that turned into a riot.”
Willie Nelson strumming his guitar at a Willie Nelson picnic seemed to be a perfect match for the track, too.
That was a whole ’nother story, but a good one, occurring a couple years after Evel’s jump.
In those days, North Richland Hills had a mass gathering ordinance, which mandated that mass gatherings had to be shut down by 10 p.m.
“Willie didn’t set foot on stage until about five minutes til,” Shiflet said. “Got one song played and the city manager disconnected the power. They wound up arresting the promoter who had pulled the permit. Fortunately for me, they stuck him in my car. While I transported him to jail, everybody else dealt with the rioting, dope smoking hippies.”
It was unclear whether the Hielschers had hired a security firm to supplement the police presence, as they did for the Knievel show.
* * * * * *
I don’t really understand all this stuff. Why do they want to do this? – Don Meredith as Dandy Don.
In the shadow of the old Green Valley Raceway, perhaps a mile as the crow flies, is the Nytex Sports Centre, an ice rink and home to the Lone Star Brahmas of the North American Hockey League.
“As an 8-year-old in the 1970s, you were an Evel fan, that’s what you were,” said Frank Trazzera, owner and president of the Brahmas. “As it turns out, I live literally a good stone’s throw from where the track was. My kids are now 20, 18 and 15. For the first 12 years of their lives I’d drive by and go ‘that’s where Evel …,’ and they’d say ‘Dad, we know that’s where Evel Knievel jumped. We get it.’”
Tonight, the Brahmas will mark the occasion of Knievel’s jump.
The team will wear sweaters matching the jumpsuit Knievel wore that day, along with matching pants and socks. Head to toe, the players will be outfitted to honor the daredevil and showman. The jerseys will go to auction after the game.
There is more to this than the owner’s admiration and proximity to the track.
Knievel had a hockey background.
In 1958, Knievel, then 19 and home from his stint in the Army, founded his own semipro team, the Butte Bombers. He was owner, coach and the starting center for an organization that sounds as if it could have been the model for Will Farrell’s Semi-Pro.
The Bombers were Knievel’s team and on Knievel’s team, Knievel was supposed to star.
It has been written that Evel wasn’t much of a passer, shot every time he touched the puck and always tried to set himself up to shine. A power play? The owner was coming in. A penalty kill? Shift change, in comes the starting center.
He could also be slippery.
When he brought the 1960 Czechoslovakia Olympic hockey team to Butte for a warmup to the Winter Games in Squaw Valley, Calif., the money promised the Czechs – along with Knievel – disappeared.
The U.S. Olympic Committee was said to have been stuck with the bill, presumably to avoid Soviet tanks driven by vodka-inspired navigators.
In addition to the uniforms, Saturday’s festivities at the Brahmas game will also feature a jump by a noted, local “stuntman.”
“I wanted to be a stunt man when I was younger, so I’ve definitely seen a lot of stuff he has done,” said Fort Worth attorney Bryan Wilson, who is better known by his nickname “The Texas Law Hawk.”
“I think he’s amazing and he’s hilarious.”
Though a good attorney of repute, Wilson is better known around town – unless you’ve needed his services – for his zany “Texas Law Hawk” commercials. They are, in essence, parodies of Jim Adler, the “Texas Hammer,” and Brian Loncar, the “Strong Arm,” God rest his soul.
The Law Hawk’s bits frequently include the term “talons of justice” and, often, … a dirt bike.
In one, the commercial, as archived on YouTube, begins with “Talons of justice … due process … do wheelies.” And off the Law Hawk goes on a wheelie on his dirt bike. The commercial ends with the Law Hawk busting through a “window” on his bike, riding in to rescue the unsuspecting, who are being bullied by a police officer, who is demanding they all take breathalyzer examines.
“That’s why you don’t blow!” he scolds, in character, as only the Law Hawk can.
It’s good stuff.
Tonight, during the second intermission, the Texas Law Hawk will attempt to clear 200 cases of Legal Draft Nowhere But Texas beer on his dirt bike, as the Brahmas honor the late, great Knievel.
“I’m not nearly as big of a bad ass as he was,” the Law Hawk said on Friday night. “My dad, who is a structural engineer and tells me I’m going to kill myself on whatever thing I’m doing. ‘Hey, I’m going to put this big ass firework in this acoustic guitar and hold it over my head when it explodes. Do you think that will kill me? He’s like, ‘Well, I hope you have your affairs in order.’ ”
On the schedule for tonight’s 7:30 puck drop are the Pilots of Topeka, Kan. … home to the Evel Knievel Museum.
* * * * * *
That’s the story then today! Dandy Don Meredith, Evel Knievel and Howard Cosell right here in North Richland Hills, Texas. Evel Knievel did the job. – Howard Cosell, Feb. 17, 1974.
The wind that day was cause for some concern, at least from where the verbose Cosell, never afraid of a little hyperbole, sat and observed.
As Meredith was offering Meredith-type things for the viewer from down below, on the track, North Richland Hills police officer John Lynn was chaperoning Knievel to his bike.
Knievel took a drive by to gauge the distance and conditions. He drove back to the start, revved the bike engine and began to accelerate.
Taking off the ramp like a 747, Knievel soared through the North Texas air, easily clearing the obstacles that lay below. He actually went too far, landing not in the sweet spot of the ramp, but at the bottom.
The landing was of such force, a newspaper report observed, “that it almost caused him to spill.”
“He did it! He did it!” Cosell exclaimed on TV.
“Once Evel made his jump, landed and came back around, we came down from the perch where Cosell had done his commentary,” Shiflet said. “The crowd was just overwhelming, swarming Evel. Basically, we had a mob scene.”
A somewhat anxious Knievel, who by then was using a walking stick, whacked an NRH police sergeant in the knee by mistake while trying to keep the crowd at bay, Shiflet said.
“I know Bob was not real happy with Evel whacking him on the knee. That could have gone really bad, really fast.”
A member of the security company the Hielschers hired to assist with crowd control decided to drive a car at a low rate of speed into the ecstatic mob, to break it up.
Predictably, he ran over someone. The ambulance waiting nearby for a possible Knievel wipeout, instead took an onlooker to the hospital for injuries that were not life-threatening, Shiflet recalled.
Afterward, Evel was a little concerned with his back, he told Cosell.
The next day, he begged off a round of golf somewhere in the area, and instead went to see a doctor.
“I went a little too far and hit too close to the bottom of the ramp,” Knievel said the next day. “It really gave me a jolt. Busted something in the lower lumbar region of my back.”
Shiflet, who was standing right next to him, along with Cosell afterward, believed that to be a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.
“There wasn’t anything wrong with him,” Shiflet said.
The jump also wasn’t his next-to-last. In fact, he went on to make seven more successful jumps between his appearance at Green Valley and his famed attempt over the Snake River Canyon in Twin Falls, Idaho. He deployed his parachute at launch.
Knievel’s last successful attempt was in 1976 in Seattle, clearing seven Greyhound buses.
For one day, though, he was here, soaring into history on what used to be Bill McClure’s farm — Evel Knievel, Howard Cosell, Dandy Don and a Woodstock of others.
North Richland Hills, it seems fair to say, hasn’t seen such a day since.