October 22 - Pretty Boy Floyd

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On this day, in 1934, the bank robber known as Pretty Boy Floyd was gunned down in a cornfield outside of East Liverpool, Ohio. Charley Arthur Floyd was born in Bartow County, Georgia on February 3, 1904. His family moved to Oklahoma when he was seven and he lived an uneventful life for the next eleven years. His life of crime started in a fairly small way: he stole $3.50 from the post office (the equivalent of about $51 today). He was caught, served a minimal sentence and pretty much disappeared for the next three years. I think it’s safe to assume that he engaged in multiple petty thefts in multiple places before getting caught again, this time in St. Louis, Missouri. Floyd had moved up to payroll theft by this point and this time his sentence was for five years. He was parolled after three and a half years in early 1929. His incarceration didn’t seem to have the desired effect on him as things only escalated from there.

Floyd drifted into Kansas City following his release from prison and found willing partners in criminal elements within that metropolis. He began robbing banks and was suspected in a series of robberies over the next several years, although actual evidence linking him to the crimes seemed to be hard to come by. In 1929 alone, he was arrested and released three different times: twice in Kansas City, once in March in connection with a robbery and again in May for vagrancy, and then once in Pueblo, Colorado, again for vagrancy. He might have looked like a hobo during this period of his life but it was during the same time that he earned his nickname, Pretty Boy.

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Floyd briefly did some legitimate work in the oil industry around Oklahoma (although it may have simply been him casing the joint in preparation of robbing it). For reasons only known to him, he insisted on wearing a button down shirt and dress slacks to work in the oil fields. The rougher workers naturally noticed this and began calling him a pretty boy. If that was the only place it was ever used, that would have been the beginning and the end of his nickname. When he did finally steal the payroll however, the payroll master inserted it firmly into the story by describing Floyd as “a pretty boy with apple cheeks” in the official police report. For the record, Charley hated his nickname (and probably would have shot anyone dumb enough to use it in his hearing) but the press loved it and the name stuck.

Had he stuck to merely robbing banks, Pretty Boy Floyd might have stayed a low to mid-level criminal, bouncing in and out of jail for decades. His status, as it were, became elevated because people started dying whenever his gang pulled a job. It started with an Akron, Ohio police officer, killed in a robbery on March 8, 1830. Pretty Boy was arrested for that murder but couldn’t be proven to have been at the robbery and released. He was arrested for a Sylvania, Ohio robbery a few months later and actually convicted of the crime. Sentenced to 15 years in an Ohio prison, he served none of it, escaping from custody. All of this activity brought him to the attention of the FBI and landed Pretty Boy Floyd on their 10 Most Wanted list. He proved to be a slippery character to catch again.

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The killings (and the robberies) continued. In March 1931, Pretty Boy was suspected in the murder of two rum runners. His gang killed a patrolman in Bowling Green in April. He himself killed a federal agent in July. The following April, the sheriff of McIntosh County, Oklahoma was killed trying to arrest Floyd. With all that going on, you might think that law enforcement would be throwing everything they had into taking him down. And it isn’t that they weren’t. They just had a bigger obstacle standing in their way then they could overcome: public opinion. People saw Pretty Boy Floyd and his gang as modern day Robin Hoods and did all they could to aid and abet him. Why? Somehow a myth got started that whenever the Floyd gang robbed a bank, they would destroy mortgage documents while they were there. To common citizens wallowing in the Great Depression, the chance to get out of debt like that was the stuff that dreams were made of. The fact that there is zero evidence of any mortgages being even accidently destroyed during one of their heists wasn’t enough to quash those dreams either. But the myth was strong enough to keep Pretty Boy out of the clutches of the law.

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Federal pressure to bring Pretty Boy in reached a boiling point on June 17, 1933 after a shootout that became known as the Kansas City Massacre. When the smoke cleared from the fight, four law enforcement members lay dead, including one federal agent. Pretty Boy and his associate, Adam Richetti, became the prime suspects. Both men would deny with their dying breaths that they had anything to do with the incident and there was only sketchy evidence that they were even in Kansas City on the day in question, but J. Edgar Hoover was convinced of their guilt. As a result Pretty Boy moved up to the number two slot on the List. It would still be another 16 months before he was finally caught.

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On July 23, 1934, federal agents gunned down Public Enemy #1, John Dillinger, outside a theater in Chicago and Pretty Boy moved into the top spot. He would elude capture for three more months only to be finally done in by a foggy night. On their way west from Buffalo, New York on October 18, 1934, Pretty Boy, Richetti and two women slid into a telephone pole in eastern Ohio because of the reduced visibility. Nothing was injured except the car. Floyd and Richetti sent the two women into nearby Wellsville to get a tow truck and have the car put back into working order, while the men whose faces were in every post office in the country waited by the side of the road. It turned out to be a fender bender both men would quickly regret.

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Just after dawn the next morning, two motorists saw a couple of guys in suits (and not threadbare hobo suits but obviously classy duds) sleeping near the road and thought that was a little suspicious. They informed the Wellsville chief of police, John Fultz, when they got into town. Fultz took two of his officers out to the sight to investigate. As soon as Floyd and Richetti saw the law, Richetti took off for the woods. Pretty Boy drew a gun and engaged in a brief battle with the officers, wounding Fultz, before entering the tree cover himself. Other members of the force joined the hunt. Richetti was captured fairly quickly but Pretty Boy remained on the lam. The FBI gladly added their own agents to the search shortly thereafter.

It’s hard to know where exactly Floyd hid out for the next couple of days. What we do know for sure is that he made his way to East Liverpool, about five miles away, by October 22. He had a friend who owned a pool hall there, where Pretty Boy reportedly had his last meal. He was then hitching a ride out of town when officers spotted him and he tried to make a run for it on foot, through a nearby cornfield. What you think happened next depends entirely on which version of the story you want to believe. Some say that local police fired first and wounded him enough to drop him in his tracks. The FBI’s official report said the locals weren’t even there. The locals claim the FBI says that because they ordered a local man to finish Floyd off at point blank range and then tried to cover it up. Whatever way it happened, the outcome was the same: Pretty Boy no longer matched his hated moniker and would never have a chance to destroy anyone’s mortgage ever again.

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Since his demise, most portrayals of Pretty Boy Floyd have tended to romanticize him and his actions. Woody Guthrie even wrote a song in 1939 about his exploits that compared foreclosing bankers to outlaws, with the moral edge given to the outlaws. Some have even gone so far as to claim that Floyd’s crimes were just a natural result of the crushing economic forces of the Great Depression (in spite of the fact that his started stealing stuff several years before the stock market crash). When really he was just a spectacular example of a ruthless criminal who got what he deserved in the end. Which, of course, doesn’t make him any less entertaining.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Roger E. Broggie

October 21 - First Transatlantic Voice Transmission

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On this day, in 1915, words spoken in Arlington, Virginia were almost instantly heard in Paris, France for the first time. In 1915, telephone calls were nothing new. Alexander Graham Bell had first asked his assistant to come to his office in 1876 and the first wireless call had traveled over 650 feet between buildings at Bell's Laboratory complex just four years later.The first telephone exchange was established in Hartford, Connecticut in 1877 and calls were zinging back and forth between Boston and New York by 1883. The first pay phone was established in 1889. But even though the technology of telephones was making leaps and bounds throughout the turn of the twentieth century, it was still pretty limited in scope. You could only call someone who was part of the network and the network was still slowly expanding out of the Northeast part of the United States. Your aunt down in Alabama or your cousin in California or your business partner in France were still unavailable by phone. Not that technicians at the American Telegraph and Telephone Company weren't hard at work trying to fix that.

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A good deal of the success of early radio (and therefore early telephone) innovations can be given to the ego of Alexandre Gustav Eiffel. When he designed and built his famous tower for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, he got pretty attached to it. He knew that it would have to remain useful if it was going to be allowed to stick around so, in 1898, he added an antenna to the top of it. Paris agreed that he'd made a good addition and, rather than tear it down for scrap metal, allowed the Eiffel Tower to remain. Not only was that an aesthetically good decision in the long run, it also provided a boost to tinkerers in radio waves around the world. Nothing like having the tallest man made structure to work with.

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AT&T technicians had developed equipment powerful enough to jump the Atlantic by 1913 when they made the first radio transmission between their labs in Virginia and the Eiffel Tower. That was simply a series of signals testing the difference in longitude of the two end points. Two more years would pass before technology was able to handle the human voice. On the morning of October 21, 1915, an AT&T engineer by the name of B.B. Webb said "hello" into a radio mouthpiece in Arlington and had it beamed into the atmosphere. Shortly thereafter, two other technicians at the Eiffel Tower, A.M. Curtis and H.E. Shreeve, heard not only Webb's greeting but several other phrases ending with "Goodbye, Shreeve." A new era in communication had begun. Sort of.

AT&T put out a press release touting the decidedly one way conversation. It was only one sided in that the guys in Paris couldn't respond though. The same transmission had been detected in the opposite direction in Honolulu, Hawaii. The company did acknowledge, however, that atmospheric conditions had to be pretty perfect and that existing equipment needed to be improved quite a bit, but it was a good start. And indeed it would take eleven more years before the first two way conversation spanning an ocean would occur between New York and London. Can you guess what the topic of that 1926 chat was about? The weather, of course.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Mary Blair

October 20 - Eugene V. Debs

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On this day, in 1923, Eugene V. Debs, America’s preeminent Socialist, passed away in Elmhurst, Illinois. The son of French immigrants, Eugene was born in Terre Haute, Indiana on November 5, 1855. He dropped out of high school at the age of 14 and began working for the local railroad, earning 50 cents a day degreasing engines. After two years of cleaning duty (as well as occasionally painting freight cars), he had the opportunity to move up to the position of fireman (the guy who kept the engine’s boiler stoked) which more than doubled his pay. He spent most nights for the next three and a half years  travelling between Terre Haute and Indianapolis. In early 1875, Eugene became a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and remained active in the union for almost twenty years. He was elected to represent his local brothers at national conventions and help various offices (including editor of the monthly newsletter, Grand Secretary and Treasurer) until 1893. And that was in spite of the fact that just six months after joining the union, Eugene left the railroad to pursue a degree in business administration.

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If the business interests of Eugene weren’t enough to brand him a capitalist at this point, his writings as editor of the BLM newsletter did. The early days of railroad unions were all about how members could improve their lives through things like honesty and temperance. The founders and leaders of the BLM were strongly against using strikes as a way to get what workers needed. Of course Eugene expected that railroad management would also treat workers with respect and equality. You can probably already see where circumstances are going to break down and change the course of his thinking. Eugene was proud of the fact that the BLM had never authorized a strike from its inception in 1873 up until 1887.

 After the Burlington Railroad Strike of 1888 in Chicago (a complete defeat for the unions), he began to realize that unions needed to organize along industry lines rather than around specific jobs. After stepping down as General Secretary of the BLM in 1893, he organized the American Railway Union, which was open to every railway laborer regardless of skill level or discipline. The ARU was a much more united front and quickly won its first strike against the Great Northern Railroad in 1894. Buoyed by a relatively painless success, the ARU went on strike again in 1895, this time against the Pullman Palace Car Company. Things did not go so well. Pullman was much more powerful than Great Northern and had the ear of President Cleveland. Eugene tried to argue against the strike at an ARU convention. It wasn’t until the number of strikers doubled that he gave in and supported it. In spite of 80,000 ARU members joining in the strike with legitimate grievances against Pullman, the federal government was able to get an injunction against them (because Pullman cars did business with the Postal Service, the official charge was obstruction of the US mail, a felony). Cleveland sent the Army in to enforce the injunction and force it they did. In the end, 30 strikers were killed, $80 million worth of property damage occurred and Eugene found himself sitting in federal prison.

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Prior to the Pullman Strike, Eugene was pro-business and pro-working man. He truly believed that solutions could be found to benefit both sides. He’d even spent a tern in the Indiana State Senate as a Democrat trying to do just that. The six months he spent in prison completely transformed his position. Not only was the ham handed way the government had handled the strike still fresh in his mind, but he was soon inundated with books and pamphlets from virtually every Socialist in the country, all of whom thought he might be sympathetic to their cause. He was. And he had nothing but time to digest all the material coming his way. When Victor L. Berger, a socialist newspaper editor from Milwaukee, paid Eugene a visit, he almost found that he was preaching to the choir. Eugene emerged from captivity a fired up convert to Socialism.

The American Railway Union had been effectively destroyed by the Pullman Strike. In 1896, Eugene met with remnants of the ARU, convincing them to join forces with the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth, a purely Socialist organization that was intent on building a Socialist colony in the state of Washington. The merged group was called the Social Democracy of America. The SDA was a house divided from the very beginning. The majority felt it best to develop colonies to show by example that their ideas worked. A vocal minority, including Eugene, wanted to form a political party and win the country over through the ballot box. By 1898, the minority had split from the SDA to create the Social Democratic Party of the United States with Eugene as the chairman of its board.

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Eugene’s first campaign for President of the United States, as the SDP candidate, happened in 1900. He only garnered 0.6% of the popular vote. In the summer of 1901, the SDP would join forces with a group that split off from the Socialist Labor Party of America (the oldest Socialist party in the country) to establish the Socialist Party of America, again with Eugene at its head. He would run for President as a SPA candidate in each of the next four elections. In 1904, he received 3% of the vote and doubled that to 6% in 1912, the biggest vote a Socialist candidate has ever received in the United States (he actually came second in Florida that year, pushing the incumbent, President Taft, into third in that state). His final run, in the 1920 election, would net him over 913,000 votes, his best total ever, in spite of the fact that he wasn’t actually eligible to run. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

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In between his runs at the Oval Office, Eugene continued trying to unionize every worker in not just America, but the entirety of Earth. In 1905, he was instrumental in creating the Industrial Workers of the World. At its peak in 1917, the IWW would boast over 150,000 members in three countries, but it regularly came into conflict with the other major union, the American Federation of Labor. The IWW considered the AFL to be too conservative, and the AFL considered the IWW to be too willing to embrace both socialism and anarchism. Both organizations still exist today but in radically different forms. The AFL-CIO is one of the world’s largest, most influential unions with over 12,000,000 members. The IWW can barely scrape together a total of 5,000 members spread across five countries. It’s not hard to see which approach is more sustainable, even if it’s highly debatable which is more effective.

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As part of the leadership of the IWW and the SPA, Eugene frequently gave charismatic speeches to rally people to his causes. As President Wilson guided America into World War I, Eugene’s speeches became more and more against Wilson, his policies and the US involvement in Europe. Even after the Espionage Act of 1917 was passed, effectively limiting the free speech of anyone who spoke against the government, he didn’t stop with his rhetoric, he merely chose his words more carefully. The semantic tiptoeing didn’t mitigate the fact that he’d made an enemy of the President. After a speech on June 18, 1918 in which he urged resistance to the military draft, Eugene was arrested and charged with ten counts of sedition. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. He appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court but his conviction was upheld.

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As a result of his incarceration, Eugene was also disenfranchised, meaning he no longer had the right to vote or run for office. That didn't stop him from running a presidential campaign from his prison cell in 1920. He assured everyone that being disenfranchised wouldn't be a problem because he would pardon himself once he'd won. It was, of course, a moot point. Before, during and after the election, Eugene repeatedly petitioned the Oval Office for clemency (or a pardon would be fine, too) but his requests fell on deaf ears. Wilson wasn't interested. Once Warren G Harding was in the White House in 1921, Eugene found more sympathetic ears and his sentence was commuted to time served, ending on December 25, 1921.

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While his prison term may have been shortened, his incarceration had already taken its toll on Eugene's health. He would never recover from his time behind bars even though recovery became his main occupation for the remainder of his life. The one highlight of his final years was probably in 1924 when he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, by a Finnish Socialist, for his work opposing the Great War (even though it was admitted he only did what he did because he considered the war a capitalist tool). Spoiler alert: he didn't win, but not necessarily for the reasons you think. A Nobel Peace Prize wasn't awarded to anyone in 1924. Which means it probably is for the reasons you think as the committee decided giving it to no one was preferable to giving it to Eugene. But, as they say, it's nice to be nominated.

Eugene entered Lindlahr Sanitarium in Elmhurst, Illinois in 1926. He would pass away from congestive heart failure there in October. Since then, Eugene's views have crept further and further into mainstream thinking. Popular current Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has long proclaimed himself to be an admirer. Eugene's house, located on the campus of Indiana State University, has become a museum and is listed as a National Historic Landmark. And, love him or hate him, in 1990 he was added to the Department of Labor's Labor Hall of Fame, completing his transformation from fringe seditionist to champion of the people.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Frank Churchill

October 19 - Anna Lee Aldred

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On this day, in 1939, Anna Lee Mills became the first licensed female jockey in the United States. Born April 19, 1921, in Montrose, Colorado, Anna Lee was part of a large family that included just as many horses as it did people. Her father and mother bred, trained and raced horses and four of her siblings became rodeo performers and champions. Anna Lee naturally began riding shortly after she learned to walk and had already won her first race (on a pony, of course) by the time she was six. Before she was a teenager, she was racing (and winning) on tracks all over Colorado and Wyoming as an amateur. As she neared adulthood, she looked around and thought, why couldn’t I do this professionally? All she needed was a license. Surely that wouldn’t be too hard to get, right?

As it turns out, not terribly easy either. Anna Lee had to actually leave the United States in order to get a license. She travelled south to the Agua Caliente Racetrack in Tijuana, Mexico and applied there. Even though Agua Caliente had already been running all female amateur races as a gimmick, track officials were still reluctant to give her what she wanted. They scoured the rule book but couldn’t find anything that prohibited women from being professional jockeys (and apparently nothing they could conceivably misinterpret instead). So they concluded that, yes, she could be licensed and handed over the small wooden shield that granted her a place on the starting line of professional races.

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Anna Lee jumped right into the racing circuit, apparently losing her first race by a nose. She more than made up for that in auspicious beginning by winning dozens of races over the next several years at state and county fairs all over the country. She wasn’t done growing however. By 1945, she’d shot up to 5’ 5” and weighed 18 pounds more than the even 100 she’d been when she got her license. You might still think she was still pretty petite, but in the racing world every inch and pound is crucial. So Anna Lee retire from racing and, after teaching herself some riding tricks, joined the rodeo circuit. For the next five years she wowed audiences as she rode around arenas actually standing on the saddle of a galloping horse or switching things up and hanging off the side of a horse by one foot. It’s hard to say what initially attracted the attention of Wayne Aldred of Raton, New Mexico but, in 1950, Anna Lee consented to marry him and retired.

Anna Lee didn’t stop riding horses when she began helping her new husband on his cattle ranch. She would continue to ride most days for the next 51 years. She would occasionally head up riding schools for local youngsters and, after she and Wayne split up after 35 years of marriage, she moved back to Montrose and helped move horses around before the races there every year. Right up until she fell from a horse and broke her hip at the age of 80. Only then did Anna Lee give up the thing she loved most in this world. Even after she moved into a nursing home, though, she continued to sleep under the comfort of a horse blanket. In 1983, she’d been inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame and you can see her 1939 license and a pair of her riding silks at their museum in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2004, she was honored with a spot in the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame.  And on June 12, 2006, the racing pioneer and woman who once said “God forbid I should go to any heaven where there are no horses” breathed her last in the same town she’d breathed her first. She was 85.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Body Wars

October 18 - Candy Cummings

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On this day, in 1848, William Arthur Cummings, inventor of the curveball, was born in Ware, Massachusetts. William made his sort of professional baseball debut at the age of seventeen when he became a pitcher for the Brooklyn Excelsiors. I say sort of because the Excelsiors were one of the teams in the National Association of Base Ball Players, an organization that predated true professional leagues. All teams in the NABBP (notice the two Bs, signifying that the name of the sport was considered to be two separate words at this point) started out as amateur. As baseball increased in popularity and teams began secretly paying some of their star players in order to keep them on the roster, the NABBP decided in 1869 that teams could become professional as long as they declared that they were and therefore somehow upheld the integrity of the sport. The Exelsiors never went professional but continued to play against the teams that did. It was an arrangement that didn’t last for long.

By 1871, all of the professional teams of the NABBP no longer wanted to be burdened with having to play amateurs and they formed the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. Only one team that made the transition between those two organizations still survives today: the Chicago Cubs (although they were called the Chicago White Stockings during those years). As many as thirty teams were part of the NAPBBP during its five year run. The problem was that many of them were based in towns that were simply too small to support a professional team, places like Rockford, Illinois and Middletown, Connecticut. As a result, in 1876, six teams from the NAPBBP (Chicago, Boston, Hartford, New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis) joined with two independent teams (Cincinnati and Louisville) to form the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs. The National League still exists today as one half of Major League Baseball but there is disagreement over which group is actually the first professional sports league in the world (MLB doesn’t recognize the NAPBBP even though it technically came first).

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But getting back to William. He played with the Excelsiors for two seasons before switching to the Brooklyn Stars, another amateur team, for three more. His pitching prowess earned him the nickname “Candy” which was often given to young men of the era who were considered experts at whatever it was they did. Candy made his NAPBBP debut on April 22, 1872 as a pitcher for the New York Mutuals. He would play for three other teams over the next four years: the Baltimore Canaries, the Philadelphia White Stockings and the Hartford Dark Blues. He stayed with Hartford when the team joined the National League in 1876, racking up a 16-8 record with the team before switching to the Cincinnati Red Stockings for his final season in 1877.

Following a disappointing 5-14 year with the Reds, Candy left the National League to become the first president of the International Association of Professional Base Ball Players. The IAPBBP was a short lived rival to the National League that could call itself international because it included two teams from Canada. Perhaps the only claim to fame that the IAPBBP can genuinely muster is that in 1878, Pitcher Bud Fowler became the first known African-American to play organized professional baseball, 69 years before Jackie Robinson.

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Candy credited the invention of his famous curveball to hours spent at the Massachusetts shore hurling seashells into the ocean with his cousins. Noticing that the shells had a distinct curve to their trajectory when thrown a certain way, Candy, already a baseball aficionado at that point, wondered if he could get a baseball to do the same thing. With a bit of practice, he found that he could. He supposedly used a curveball for the first time in 1867 with the Brooklyn Excelsiors but he couldn’t use it effectively until he was with the Brooklyn Stars and partnered with a catcher named Nat Hicks. Up until that point, catchers stood about 20 feet behind a batter making it nearly impossible to field anything other than a straightforward pitch. Nat stood directly behind the batter and could field curveballs with ease. Of course this is just Major League Baseball’s official version of how the curveball came to be. Other people claim that Harvard University pitchers were doing it as early as 1863 and some say it didn’t come about until Fred Goldsmith did it in 1870. While it’s not possible to definitively prove any one theory and the debate will most likely rage on for several more generations, most of the credit across the board is given to Candy.

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Candy ended his career with a 145-94 record, a 2.49 ERA and 259 strikeouts. He was also the first pitcher to record two complete games on a single day, September 9, 1876, when the Hartford Dark Blues beat the Cincinnati Red Stockings 14-4 and 8-4 in a double header. Following baseball, Candy owned a paint shop in Athol, Massachusetts and received royalties from a railroad coupling that he invented. He passed away on May 16, 1924 in Toledo, Ohio at the age of 74. Fifteen years later he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

 Also on this day, in Disney history: The Jungle Book

October 17 - Evel Knievel

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On this day, in 1938, Robert “Evel” Knievel was born in Butte, Montana. Robert’s parents divorced before he was even two years old and both of them moved out of Butte, leaving Robert and his new brother, Nicolas, with his paternal grandparents. He liked to say that his later choice of career was due to those grandparents bringing him to a Joie Chitwood Thrill Show when he was eight, but he had a rebellious, daredevil streak in him from the beginning. He dropped out of high school halfway through to get a job in the nearby copper mines. He was fired from that job after he popped a wheelie with one of the mine’s earth movers and severed the city’s main power line. His unemployment status only exacerbated his recklessness. He crashed his motorcycle after a highspeed police chase in 1956 and ended up in jail on charges of reckless driving. It was then that he gained the nickname Evel. In the next cell over that night was another chronic troublemaker who already had a nickname, William “Awful” Knofel. The police started calling him “Evil” Knievel by association. Robert leaned into the name but deliberately changed the spelling because he didn’t want people to think he was the bad guy, something that would have an ironic bent to it for at least the next several years.

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Following his stint in jail, Evel began channeling his need for thrills into more productive areas. He began participating in rodeos and ski jumping competitions, going so far as to win the Northern Rocky Mountain Ski Association Class A Men’s championship in 1959. He then joined the army and learned to pole vault. After his discharge, he got married and started a semi-pro hockey team called the Butte Bombers. To promote the team, Evel convinced the Czechoslovakian Olympic team to play an exhibition game against them just prior to the 1960 Olympics in Squaw Valley, California. Evel was ejected from the game in the third quarter and left the stadium. When the game finished, the Czechs went to the box office to collect their share of the proceeds only to discover that all the money had disappeared. It couldn’t be proven what had happened to it and the US Olympic Committee ended up covering the expenses to avoid international embarrassment. Since his hockey dreams obviously weren’t playing out, Evel then started the Sur-Kill Guide Service, guaranteeing hunters that they would bag their big game or their money back. His business was highly successful, but only because he was poaching animals from Yellowstone National Park.

Evel decided that he needed to stop committing crimes after his latest run in with the law and began racing on the motocross circuit. He did reasonably well but couldn’t make enough money to support his family. After breaking his collarbone and shoulder in an accident, he did what anyone addicted to reckless behavior would do: he began selling insurance. He was good at it but didn’t feel like the company was willing to promote him fast enough, so he quit. The Kneivels moved to Washington and opened a Honda dealership. At a time when Japanese imports just couldn’t compete in the market. The business folded and Evel began working at a motorcycle shop in Sunnyside. It was there that the owner’s son, future World Motocross Champion Jim Pomeroy, taught him how to do stunts on a bike. You can guess where Evel’s plans went after that.

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Remembering the stunt show he saw as a child, Evel thought that could be his ticket to prosperity. Singlehandedly putting together his first gig, he jumped a 20 foot long box of snakes (with two mountain lions thrown in for good measure). He barely made it over the snakes with his back wheel hitting the far edge of the box, but he survived the stunt, a statement that would basically describe everything he did for the rest of his career. He also realized that the only way to make good money was to hire a crew to do all the planning and publicity so he could concentrate on the stunt. He found a sponsor, put together a group of mostly reliable people and got ready to take the stunt entertainment world by storm.

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Evil Knievel and His Motorcycle Daredevils debuted on January 3, 1966 in Indio, California and was an instant hit. The second show in Hemet was rained out but the third in Barstow was a go. Right up to when Evel jumped too late during a new stunt, was hit in the groin by a speeding motorcycle and flipped fifteen feet in the air. His injuries landed him in the hospital and broke up the group but they did not stop him from performing (or continuing to injure himself). While other stunt performers were jumping over water or animals, Evel began jumping over cars. And he would add more cars to the line each time he revisited a venue in order to get people to come back out and see him. Eventually his misses became even more legendary than his successes, most likely because he kept surviving incredible crashes. Evel finally gained some national attention when Joey Bishop had him as a guest on The Joey Bishop Show in March 1968. That appearance led to more fans and bigger paychecks for each stunt.

 

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With an eye towards publicity, Evel was willing to jump just about anything with a motorcycle. He attempted jumping the fountains at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas (a crash that landed him in the hospital for several weeks). He planned to jump the Grand Canyon but was denied access by the federal government so switched to jumping the Snake River in Idaho using private properties (his rocket, it wasn't a motorcycle this time, technically made it across that canyon but was blown back in by the wind; Evel only sustained minor injuries in spite of being strapped to a lead weight that hit the bottom of the gorge). In 1971 he set a world record that stood for 27 years by jumping 19 cars. He set another record that stood for 35 years when he jumped 50 stacked cars in November 1973. A third record was made in October 1975 when he jumped 14 buses at King’s Island Amusement Park. That record stood for 24 years and was one of the highest rated episodes of ABC’s Wide World of Sports ever.

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The King’s Island jump was also Evel’s final major jump. He planned to jump a tank of live sharks in 1977 (a stunt that may or may not have inspired Arthur Fonzerelli later that same year) but called it off when a crash during rehearsal injured a cameraman.  For the last few years of his career, he was content to play announcer while his son, Robbie, launched his own career in the family business. Of course his retirement may have had something to do with his assault conviction as well. A former promoter of his was publishing an unflattering book about him, accusing him, among other things, of being a batterer. Evel, his arms still in casts from the shark accident, tracked the man down at the movie studio he was currently working at and beat him unconscious with a baseball bat. The subsequent lawsuit and jail time caused Evel to rightly lose every endorsement deal he’d worked so hard for so long to obtain. With no one willing to partner with him anymore, he was bankrupt by 1981.

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It’s hard to say how much Evel learned from suffering the consequences of his bad behavior. He remained largely unapologetic about his actions for the majority of his life even as his health declined throughout the Nineties. He was diagnosed with Hepatitis C, most likely contracted from one of the dozens of blood transfusions he’d received during his career. A last minute liver transplant in 1999 saved his immediate life but it was already too late for the long term. He would be diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable lung disease, a few years later and that, along with diabetes, is what would ultimately end his life. In April of 2007, Evel appeared on Hour of Power with televangelist Robert Schuller to announce his newfound belief in Jesus Christ. Whether that signaled an actual change in his life or was just a man hedging his bets against imminent death, we’ll never really know. Just over six months later, Evel would pass away on November 30, 2007 in Clearwater, Florida at the age of 69.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Jack Wagner

October 16 - Noah Webster

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On this day, in 1758, the Father of American Education, Noah Webster Jr., was born in what became West Hartford, Connecticut. Noah came from an established family: his mother was a descendant of William Bradford, the Governor of the Plymouth Colony, and his father’s ancestor was one of the first Governors of the Connecticut Colony. Both his parents placed a high importance on education. His mother taught him spelling, math and music until he was old enough to attend a local school run by the Evangelical Society. Noah considered his teachers there to be so awful that he vowed to make the educational system better for future generations. At the age of 14, he started studying Latin with his minister in preparation for college and became a freshman at Yale two years later.

Noah’s time at Yale coincided with the early years of the American Revolution. As a result of the fighting going on, his classes had to frequently change not just rooms within the university but whole towns. He easily graduated in 1778 but didn’t really have any plans for the rest of his life. He tried teaching for a short while but found the working conditions to be terrible and quit. He then began to study law under Oliver Ellsworth, a future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Noah passed his bar exam in 1781, but since there was still a war going on, couldn’t find work as a lawyer. So he returned to Yale and earned a Master’s degree.

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With credentials in hand, Noah moved to Goshen, New York and established a private school for the children of parents who could afford the best education money could buy. The money the school provided allowed him to write a number of early textbooks. His most famous textbook would be the “Blue-Backed Speller,” so called because its cover was blue though its actual title was The American Spelling Book. It would hang around for decades teaching generations of American school students how to spell and helped create the competition that only a handful of kids in each school actually enjoys, the spelling bee. Noah also provided a basis for grammar and reading education with separate textbooks for each. In an effort to improve the educational system, he followed the ideas of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, adjusting his lessons to a child’s cognitive development, mastering basic concepts before adding new, more complex layers of understanding onto that foundation. Nowadays that might not seem to be a radical method of teaching, but back then it was.

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While teaching the rich kids of Goshen and developing his textbooks, Noah also wrote a series of articles praising the American Revolutionary effort and declaring that the split with England was by its very existence permanent. His writing brought him to the attention of major players in the federal government. In 1793, Alexander Hamilton enticed him to give up teaching and move to New York City (then the national capital) to edit the newspaper of the Federalist Party. Within months, Noah had founded the city’s first daily newspaper, the American Minerva, which would continue to be published until 1904. He was a staunch defender of Presidents George Washington and John Adams, a stance which caused opponents of their policies to brand him an incurable lunatic and a pusillanimous, half-begotten, self-dubbed patriot (some things never change). Between his newspaper articles, textbooks and political essays, Noah was one of the most prolific authors at the beginning of the nation. A bibliography of all his known works runs to over 650 pages all on its own. And that doesn’t include the work he is arguably most famous for producing.

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In 1806, Noah published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. He claimed on the first page that it contained 5,000 more words than any other dictionary. The following year he began revising and expanding his dictionary. The new edition would take him more than twenty years to compile. Along the way, Noah learned twenty-eight different languages just so he could determine the origins of certain words. His main goal behind the book was to homogenize the language of the United States as much as possible, including grammar usage and spellings. Many people think that he invented the American spellings of English words (think color vs. colour), but he just favored simpler, more phonetic spellings and borrowed them whenever he found them. He finally published the first edition of his new dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language, in 1828. It reportedly contained over 12,000 words that had never been published in a dictionary before.

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Though dictionaries would eventually become highly venerated works, Noah’s first edition only sold 2,500 copies. That didn’t stop him from immediately developing a second edition, even though he had to mortgage his home in order to finance it. Plagued with debt the rest of his life, he still managed to get the second edition published in 1840. His efforts would go largely unrecognized during his lifetime. Just after revising the dictionary’s appendix a few years later, he would pass away at the age of 84 on May 28, 1843. You can probably guess the last name of the brothers who acquired the publishing rights to his seminal work from his estate. It was George and Charles Merriam. And the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is still published today.

It should be noted that Noah added one other significant accomplishment to his resume during his lifetime. In 1831, he successfully lobbied Congress to overhaul the national copyright statutes for the first time. The length of initial copyright was doubled to 28 years and musical compositions were protected for the first time.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Ham Luske