White Plains’ 4th Best Personal Blog

You know how there’s some famous people you thought were long dead? That’s what I thought about Evel Knievel. Then I heard he had passed away yesterday at the age of 69. Apparently he had been in pretty bad shape for a while, but hung on until his body finally gave out. The motorcycle daredevil, whose glory days were in the 1970s, was a little bit before my time, but in many ways inspired the Super Dave Osborne character that became pretty popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s as I got old enough to watch and appreciate parodies and that sort of thing.

Anyway, back to Knievel for a second. The main reason that his death had an impact on me is that he was one of the first, maybe the first, pop culture icon I remember. Why? Because of pinball.

After my family moved to Valparaiso, Ind., when I was around nine, I found myself at the Thupvongs’ house — Dr. Kosin Thupvong was one of my dad’s partners — fairly often because they seemed to host all the get-togethers for the Northwest Indiana Thai community. In their basement, they had an Evel Knievel pinball machine. (For some reason, I remember it being a little different than the one partly pictured above, but I couldn’t find any different versions when I Googled so maybe my memory is failing me. You kind of get the picture either way.) I was weirdly fascinated by that machine, not so much because of Knievel but because I had never really seen a pinball machine up close before, much less played one. I thought it was pretty awesome.

By contrast, I didn’t even think Knievel was real. I just figured they made up a character to make the machine look cool. Surely a real person wouldn’t be named Evel. Or be on a pinball machine. I can’t remember exactly when I found out he was real, but it didn’t surprise me that much because I guess I just always thought of him as fictional or, at the very least, larger than life. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.