A New Episode of Distinctly Montana Stories Podcast: How Bobby Became a Legend
Before he was Evel Knievel, before the buses and the canyons and the 433 broken bones, he was just Bobby: a Butte teenager with a bicycle, a reputation, and a talent for separating his neighbors from their money.
The tenth episode of Distinctly Montana Stories follows that kid through the hustles that made his name around town long before the world knew it. There was the hubcap racket, where Bobby would lift a set off a parked car and then, generously, help the baffled owner buy them back. When Marsh's Jewelry on Broadway was burgled, Bobby began quietly letting people know he had gems to move—cheap, and fast—and half of Butte went home delighted to be wearing hot merchandise, right up until they looked a little closer. Later, at the age of twenty-four, he would somehow sell 271 insurance policies to the staff and the residents of Warm Springs State Hospital.
How does a poor kid from the richest hill on earth pull any of this off? The piece, written by Sherman Cahill, doesn't pretend to fully explain it—legends don't work that way. What it does is trace the shape of a young man who was never going to stay in the mines, who wrecked his first motorcycle within minutes of buying it and bought another as soon as his leg healed, and who eventually found himself in a jail cell one night beside a man the police had already taken to calling Awful. What the cops said next would follow him for the rest of his life.
"How Bobby Became a Legend" is available now wherever you listen to podcasts.
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