This is the grave of Evel Knievel.

Born in 1938, Robert Knievel was a crazy motherfucker. He was born in Butte, home of many crazy people. The elevation, the space, the poverty, the mine tailings, it’s a lot. His parents split when he was boy and both left Butte and neither wanted him, so his grandparents took him in. In 1946, the stuntman and daredevil Joie Chipman came to town for a show. Knievel went and later said he loved it and from that point forward, wanted to be that guy. Could be a later memory standing for the truth, who knows. Unsurprisingly, this was not a guy who thought much of school. He dropped out after his sophomore year of high school and got a job in the mines, as a drill operator working for Anaconda, the beast itself. But all of that served to feed his habit of his motorcycle, which was every second of his free time and every penny of his spending money.

Knievel loved anything that could lead to death. Riding his motorcycle like a maniac was great, but so was rodeo and ski jumping, which he was pretty good at. Jumping things became a thing. He joined the Army in 1959 and was quickly picked up by officers as having unusual athletic ability, so he was sent to the Army track team, where he pole vaulted. Hard tour of duty there. Somehow when he got back to Butte, he started a semi-pro hockey team, convinced the Czechoslovakian national team to play an exhibition for money in Butte, got himself thrown out of the match a couple minutes in for fighting, and then probably walked away with the money as he left the arena. In any case, the money had disappeared. So I mean, this is a wild dude.

To support himself, Knievel worked as a hunting guide, where he took it upon himself to lead the fight against the culling of elk in Yellowstone National Park, arguing that if there were too many elk there, they should be captured and moved elsewhere to build up hunting in other parts of the West. He actually met with Mike Mansfield and Stewart Udall after hitchhiking to D.C. and made his case and eventually the practice was stopped. He then sold insurance for awhile and moved to Moses Lake, Washington, the only remotely interesting thing that has ever happened in that town. There, he started a motocross business and started learning motorcycle tricks.

Knievel, a born hustler, was able to convince investors to fund his stunts and started building up his ability to do them and the financial wherewithal to make it work. He chose the name Evel as his stage name in the late 60s both because it was badass but also because Evil would have connected him too much to the Hell’s Angels and he had no interest in motorcycle gang criminality. He found some other crazy people and in 1966, they started performing at a festival in Indio, California. Just a few days later, he tried a new stunt, jumping while spread-eagled over a speeding motorcycle coming at him. He didn’t time it right, the machine hit him in the groin and threw him 15 feet into the air. He spent the next month in the hospital. He got out, told everyone he was going to do the same stunt in the same location, and this time did not get hit in the dick.

All the injuries meant that his idea of a traveling show didn’t work because not everyone was that insane, so Knievel became a solo act, building up his reputation by jumping over cars. And then lots of cars. Soon it became 15 cars. He started to get attention and showed up on late night talk shows and in Vegas. He got to know John Derek and convinced the director to film him for future use (again, total hustler all the way). When he bet all his remaining money on blackjack in Vegas, he did a shot of Wild Turkey, walked outside, and attempted to jump 141 feet over cars at Caesar’s Palace. He failed and ended up back in the hospital, but now he was the sideshow attraction he always wanted to be. He was famous and nothing would stop him but death. Amazingly, he never did kill himself.

Knievel wanted to jump the Grand Canyon but the government wouldn’t let him die that way. So he decided to jump the Snake River Canyon near Twin Falls, Idaho. He hired the boxing promoter Bob Arum to run the show. It finally happened in 1974. They had created some crazy motorcycle with incredible power and also a parachute so he wouldn’t die. The power was actually enough for him to make it but the winds made it so that he just missed. The parachute only saved him because he didn’t actually land in the river. Otherwise, he would have drowned.

There were so many jumps, so many broken bones, so much insanity. It’s too much to list it all. But he was famous in that 70s style, where people were famous for super weird things. There was a 1977 biopic starring himself with Gene Kelly and Lauren Hutton because….I have no idea why. The film is supposed to be horrible. I know, it’s shocking. He also had toys made of him, which sold about $125 million of goods between 1972 and 1977. There’s a solid role model for the kids! The 80s were rough for Knievel. He beat up a guy and that got a lot of publicity and cost him sponsorships. Also, the 80s were not the 70s and what was once cool now seemed passé. He had something of a comeback in the 90s.

Of course, Knievel got his son Robbie into the family business too. He was never the media sensation his father was but did a lot of televised jumps in the 90s that I do somewhat remember.

Somehow, what killed Knievel was bad lungs and diabetes, which didn’t happen until 2007, when he was living in Florida. He was 69 years old. How is that even possible? Right before he died, he did the inevitable and showed up on televangelist Robert Schuller’s Hour of Power TV show to talk about his conversion to Jesus Christ. Amazingly, it wasn’t jumping that killed Robbie Knievel either, in 2023. It was pancreatic cancer. He was 60.

Evel Knievel is buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Butte, Montana. Who gave the eulogy? Matthew McConaughey. Why not?

If you would like this series to visit other stuntmen and daredevils and the like, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Harry Houdini is in Queens and Sam Patch is in Rochester, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

The post Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,963 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Scott has posted what I intended for the first part of my post this morning.  The birthday book makes clear that there’s no way anyone involved in any way could ignore the signs that he was trafficking young women and girls. So here’s the second part.

Yesterday was bracketed in the morning by the NYT’s deep dive into Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship with JP Morgan. The short version is that he was spinning off suspicious behaviors – using lots of cash, starting accounts on behalf of women – that alerted many people at JP Morgan. But he had one major enabler, Jes Staley, who persuaded others to go along with him. We still don’t know where the money came from.

In the evening, we saw the release of the birthday book. A great many people were happy to wish Epstein a very happy birthday and more fucks of children. They knew. When that many people know, someone who only rode on his plane and didn’t fuck children had to know. But that camaraderie certainly would have urged men to join in the fun.

There are a great many names in that book, many without last names, as is the way people sign birthday cards. Epstein knew who they were from the first name, the handwriting, the shared experiences.

Epstein collected people. He wanted to know and be known by people, mostly men, at the top of their professions. He liked scientists. Five of them appear in the birthday book: Gerry Edelman (biology, Nobel), Murray Gell-Mann (physics, Nobel), Stephen Kosslyn (psychology and neuroscience), Martin Nowak (mathematical biology), and Lee Smolin (physics). Others have been mentioned as Epstein associates, including one who has gotten in trouble at several universities for sexually harassing students. Edelman and Gell-Mann have died since then, but the others are still around.

I’m recalling that the early 2000s were a time when other rich people wanted to festoon their parties with scientists and were willing to fund various activities to acquire those scientists. I had a more idealistic view of such things at the time and tried to get into a few of those circles, but they were mostly looking for male ornaments.

A couple of the university-attached groups associated with this culture developed scandals, and I’m vaguely recalling one group associated with a magazine that never showed up with anything publicly wrong, but my sense of it was creepy.

Which all is to say that the early 2000s were a time of pseudo-intellectuality associated with sex and misogyny. It might be worth looking more broadly at that time.

The post People In The Book appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Hello, wealthy person! Are you ready to admit that piling up Birkin bags and “collectible” cars is slowly leeching away your soul? Are you tired of pretending that a $500 bottle of wine tastes meaningfully different than the one your personal assistant gets at BevMo? Most important, do you want to drive your frenemies straight up the walls because you are still ostentatiously collecting expensive things at a massive scale, but everyone is forced to admit that it’s because you are such a good person?

It's time to start getting buildings named after you! Oh, do Brooks and Madsy have a new yacht? Pfft. Get yourself a classy granite slab on a building at the local university and watch them seethe. Don’t forget to drive the nails all the way in: “Oh, darlings, a yacht! How nice for you. It’s so lovely that you feel free to spend money on pure pleasure. We haven’t made it out sailing even once this season. We’ve been so busy with the opening of the Cancer Center.” You will win that brunch at the hunt club. Absolutely crush it.

It’s easier than you think. Right now, colleges and universities are absolutely gagging to name a building after you. You used to have to go to a lot of boring dinners and serve on tiresome committees as a windup to get your name bolted to a load-bearing wall, but since the Trump administration has started yanking NIH grants, extorting universities for hundreds of millions of dollars, and openly rooting for the destruction of American higher education, our cherished pedagogic institutions are in danger of collapsing. Like taken over by crows and coyotes collapsing. University development officers are highly motivated right now. There are meth addicts with more chill.

This isn’t a plaque for your living room, not a trophy to leave in your home office in precisely the right place for visitors to see it if Oops! Did you leave that pesky door open again? This is not some flimsy certificate of appreciation or an awards dinner that starts fading into the past the second you have downed the last bite of your flourless chocolate cake.

This is a building, a behemoth of bricks and mortar and ductwork. For about five million dollars, you can put your name on it permanently, forever, stabbing the hearts of your enemies long after you are gone. That’s a bargain and a half. And again: Even our most prestigious universities are in real danger of collapsing. Development officers are currently tasked with scrounging for change in their couches and cupholders. I bet you can knock a couple hundred thou’ off that asking price. A couple million will get an entire program named after you. I bet you can get a wing for a million flat.

Remember that professor who made you feel stupid and insecure in college? Would you like to drive him into an absolute lather of complicated frustrations? Endow a chair for him. He will, for the rest of his academic career, have to introduce himself as “Professor Nelson Dweebmeyer, the [Your Name!] Chair of Chemistry.” He will also have to write a report to you every year to prove that he’s using your endowment money well. The humiliation will eat away at his health, and he will have to go to the [Your Name!] Center for Advanced Cardiovascular Care every goddamned time he needs a checkup.

On that note, donating to university medical centers before you get sick is an incredible one-two punch of showing your commitment to the community while acting in naked self-interest. Research that family medical history, choose your building wisely, spend a couple of decades reaping the accolades, and then rest easy knowing that they take extra-good care of you when they walk under your name to get to work every day.

Donating to research works too! If you open your window and angle an ear just right, you will hear hundreds of scientific researchers running around with their lab coats flapping in the wind screaming “But we almost had a cure!” Their grants are either gone or in danger of getting yanked because of things like their study had the word “integrated” in the title and there is nothing they can do to make the Trump Administration understand that they’re talking about integrating amino acids. There is lifesaving research right now that you can step in and save and — most important — put your name on. And they will thank you profusely.

Do you live in California? Remember that part when everything was on fire? Make a nameworthy gift to a small cell lung cancer lab or a burn center today, right now, and you will have incontrovertible proof that you are a part of the solution instead of someone whose view-blocking palatial estate uses enraging amounts of water.

And if you have enough money? You don’t even need to be a serious person about it. I know of at least one campus that has two different buildings that have been graced with the same name, and yes, of course they are a frantic little hike apart. Watching people break heels and scatter papers as they steeplechase from one building to the other, trying to figure out where their appointment or 8 a.m. class is? That, my wealthy friend, is power. Don’t forget to “accidentally” tell Brooks and Madsy to go to the wrong one.

And sure, you can play it straight and name that orthopedic wing or particle accelerator after yourself or a loved one, but if you’re really loaded, why not test a few boundaries? If your gift comes with naming rights, that means you have the right to pick any name at all, does it not? Keep putting another million on the pile until the university president grits her teeth and says that yes, actually, she would be delighted to name the new stem cell lab after your great-great granduncle, Ignatius Q. Fahrtenhoffen. Name it after your dog and force them to announce that today’s budget meeting will be in Colonel Fuzzywuffles 415. Make them pull out a duck call, a pair of castanets, and a slide trombone to even pronounce the name of your building.

Fancy cigars and tacky gold plating are kid stuff. Real prestige comes from saving a piece of the American higher educational system. Real power comes from stopping years of cancer research from disappearing. Real respect comes from funding a children’s hospital. You know, like the one that just announced hundreds of layoffs because those monsters are killing NIH grants and cutting Medicaid. (By the way, red state Trumpers whose reaction to a children’s hospital laying of staffers is “Ha ha, Los Angeles deserves that”? You should know that Children’s Hospital Los Angeles takes in children from all over the country for little things like transplants and complex heart surgeries and cancer care. So, if you aren’t moved by the fact that children will die because of this, maybe think about the fact that “your” kids are going to be harmed by this too, which is how these things freaking work.)

So pull out your wallet and make a positive difference for both the world and your permanent reputation. Because other people can focus on that bummer poem all they want: Ozymandias had mad respect for a couple hundred years. You will too.

This piece originally ran at Ali Davis’s new newsletter joint, The Camelopard. Go subscribe her!

From Most Prisoners In Hawaiʻi’s WWII Internment Camp Were Korean, by Kirsten Downey (Honolulu: Civil Beat, 5 September 2025). While hundreds of Japanese-Americans were the first held at Honouliuli, many more Koreans followed:

The Honouliuli internment camp in central O’ahu is best known in Hawaiʻi as the place some 400 Japanese Americans were detained during World War II.

But new research is bringing to light the fact that Koreans were the largest single population group there.

In fact, there were seven times as many Koreans held there as Japanese Americans. Of the 4,000 people held, about 2,700 were Korean, captured elsewhere and brought to Hawaiʻi, and about 400 were Japanese Americans who had been living and working in Hawaiʻi when the war broke out.

The Koreans were prisoners of war who fell into American hands as U.S. forces made their way across Oceania fighting Japanese imperial forces, who had seized lands all across the Pacific, including in China, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and French Indochina (now Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), Guam, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Most of the Koreans were in fact doubly prisoners: The Japanese, who had invaded and conquered Korea in the early 1900s, had conscripted many of them against their will. Dragooned by the Japanese, they then ended up American prisoners when the Japanese garrisons fell.

The little-known fact that Koreans made up the lion’s share of residents at the internment camp is becoming the focus of new academic scrutiny and discussion.

Korean Prisoners Identified

Last year, researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi’s Center for Oral History began a new collaboration with the National Park Service to collect accounts from the Korean or Korean American descendants of people who were detained at the camp or who worked there to incorporate this new information into current understanding and historical interpretation.

This work builds on the scholarship of Duk Hee Lee Murabayashi, president of the Korean Immigration Research Institute in Hawaiʻi, and Professor Yong-ho Ch’oe, who taught Korean history at the University of Hawaiʻi and was the author of a book about Korean immigration to Hawaiʻi called “From the Land of Hibiscus: Koreans in Hawai‘i, 1903–1950.” Ch’oe died last year.

Murabayashi has identified the 2,700 Koreans held at Honouliuli, providing their names and home locations, which is helping people identify their deceased relatives.

…

‘A Complete Shock’

The fact that so many Koreans were present in the camp during World War II has come as a surprise even to the Korean community.

“Until a few months ago, I certainly did not know about Koreans who, during World War II, ended up as prisoners of war right here in Hawaiʻi at Honouliuli Internment Camp,” said David Suh, president of the United Korean Association of Hawaiʻi, at a recent talk hosted by the park.

“It came to me as a complete shock,” said Edward Shultz, former director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi and the immediate past president of the Korean American Foundation.

…

As the war progressed and American forces began advancing on Japanese-controlled strongholds, they took a number of Koreans into custody as prisoners of war, bringing them to the internment camp at Honouliuli. According to the National Park Service, hundreds arrived after each battle in the Pacific, including from Guam, Peleliu, Tinian and Palau, sometimes intermingled with Japanese prisoners.

Following the 1944 battle in Saipan, the NPS reported, about 350 Koreans arrived, all noncombatants, many with bullet and slash wounds. The bullet wounds came from the American troops, but the Koreans also appeared to have been victims of sword attacks by Japanese, suggesting they suffered systematic abuse.

Relations between the Koreans and the Japanese Americans at the camp became at times so strained that they had to be kept separate from each other, said Professor Alan Rosenfeld, the associate vice president of academic programs and policy at the University of Hawaiʻi, who has spent years studying Honouliuli.

“There are archival incidents of Koreans and Japanese fighting,” said Mary Kunmi Yu Danico, director of the University of Hawaiʻi’s Center for Oral History, who is leading the project to gather oral histories of the descendants of people who lived or worked at the camp.

…

Word began to seep out in Hawaiʻi that Koreans were there, probably because the American military hired some local Korean Americans to serve as translators and guards at the camp.

The first published report that Koreans were living at Honouliuli came in the pages of the Methodist Church bulletin in 1944, according to Murayabushi [Murabayashi!]. Church leaders had apparently been told that many Korean men in their 20s and 30s were being held there, and that they were bored and lonely. The first notice about their existence came when the church asked if anyone had spare musical instruments they would be willing to donate so the men could entertain themselves.

Later, church leaders began organizing an outreach to them, delivering Christmas gifts and arranging to loan them books.

That means there may be people living in Hawaiʻi today who recall those years and those interactions. Murayabushi [Murabayashi!], Danico and Ogura are asking people to come forward to share those memories.

For an earlier blogpost about Korean POWs in WW2, see Koreans, Taiwanese, and Okinawans Among Japanese POWs. See also Origins of Korean POWs in Hawaii, excerpted from an article by the late Yong-ho Ch’oe, mentioned above. Prof. Ch’oe was a fine scholar and a kind gentleman.