America's All-Too-Human Superman

By Harriet Barovick

For those who grew up watching him on TV, Evel Knievel was much more than a self-promoting daredevil with 38 broken bones to his credit: he was a flawed superhero. Sure, the motorbiker's bravado was insane; he jumped cars, buses, canyons and the fountains at Las Vegas' Caesars Palace (above)--a feat that landed him in a coma for a month. He also liked to drink and was once jailed for assaulting a writer with a baseball bat. Yet whether he cleared his intended target or behaved nicely was beside the point. Evel, who changed the spelling of his adopted name (he was born Robert) to clarify that he was not that bad a guy, uplifted a generation dazed by Vietnam and Watergate. America, he said, "needed somebody who would spill blood and break bones ... who wasn't phony." He made it a point to be that person. Knievel, who had incurable lung disease, died at 69 after years of ill health.