Evel Knievel and the Orange County Fall Fair

What was the O.C. Fall Fair? Why was Evel Knievel in O.C.? And why was he so glum?

The photo at the top of today's post shows famed stunt performer Evel Knievel (center, in wide lapels), along with Happy the Clown and others at the first week of the first annual Orange County Fall Fair in 1977. Notice that Knievel himself doesn't look all that happy. Things were a little complicated for him just then. In fact, a few days later, on November 14th, he would surrender himself at the Santa Monica Courthouse and began a six-month sentence for assault and battery. Two months earlier, Knievel had beaten his former promoter, Sheldon "Shelly" Saltman, with a baseball bat for writing a book which the stuntman said portrayed him as "an alcoholic, a pill addict, an anti-Semite and an immoral person." (Boy, there's nothing like beating someone to a pulp to prove how moral you are, right?) Anyway, Knievel lost his endorsement deals, work dried up, and he soon filed for bankruptcy. More on him later.

That first Orange County Fall Fair was held November 8th to 21st, 1977 at the Los Alamitos Race Track (and 10 acres of its parking lot) in Cypress. Entertainment included carnival rides, the Happy Time Circus (including clowns and high-diving dogs), and a bluegrass band called Montezuma's Revenge. There were dozens of contests, which were mainly aimed at students. Categories ran the gamut from agriculture to homemaking, from hog calling to wilderness survival, and from cake decorating to frisbee golf. There were dog, cat and pygmy goat shows. But most notably, there were about eleven horse races each day. In fact, the real reason for the Fall Fair was that state law allowed horse racing at fairs, which let Los Alamitos effectively extend their season and even hold what was billed as Orange County's first thoroughbred racing meet. 

The midway at the first Orange County Fall Fair, 1977.

Most of the fair wasn't very popular, but the horse racing brought big money, including $300,000 raised for the expansion and rebuilding of the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa. For the following few years, the Fall Fair remained roughly the same. But over time it became more and more focused on the track. By 1980, racing at the Fall Fair was pulling in an average of $2.2 million each of its twelve days. But then the State legislature allowed more racing days at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park and a lot of the action left the Fall Fair. Profits plummeted for the 1981 Fall Fair. In an October 1982 article, Los Angeles Times staff writer John Cherwa wrote, "Orange County's annual excuse to hold thoroughbred racing starts today wit the Orange County Fall Fair... And fair better describes the quality of the horses rather than the event since the latter has been reduced to a few educational exhibits."

Naturally, the Fall Fair dwindled over the years and by 1986 it was being held during summer and was (more accurately) called "The Orange County Racing Fair." In 1991, the Racing Fair was held over three weeks in the summer and lost about $200,000 in revenue. The following year it was scheduled for a similar block of time, but the Orange County Fair Board was already backing away. There were now more horse racing events in Southern California for the public to chooses from, off-site betting was on the rise, and the financials didn't pencil out anymore.

Racing at the Orange County Fall Fair, 1977.

But back to the photo at the top of this post. Why was Evel Knievel at the Fall Fair that day in 1977? The local newspapers seem to make no mention of his attendance. The likely reason was that Knievel and his wife, Linda, owned a champion Appaloosa show horse. And it's known that there were Appaloosas at the Fall Fair. 

Knievel had already spent a good amount of 1977 in Southern California, promoting his movie, "Viva Knievel!," doing stunts, and of course, beating the aforementioned Shelly Saltman.

And although primarily associated with his hometown of Butte, Montana, Robert Craig "Evel" Knievel had an interesting history with Orange County that dated back even before his fame, when he was just starting his stunt jumping career. According to an article in the Sept. 2, 2023 Cowboy State Daily (Wyoming), it was around 1967 when Knievel befriended bartender Tim Perior at Marty’s Cocktail Lounge (1766 N. Tustin St.) in Orange and convinced him "to foot the bill for a ramp-to-ramp jump over a couple of pickup trucks parked end-to-end." The story goes that Knieval practiced for the jump in a vacant lot at the Woods GMC dealership at 1710 S. Anaheim Blvd, by the I-5 Freeway in Anaheim.

This was around the same time Knievel began regularly using the name Evel. 

Orange County International Raceway from the air.

This was hardly Knievel's last noteworthy experience in Orange County. Memorably, there was the night in 1974 when he was booked to jump over ten Mack trucks with a Harley-Davidson XR-750 at the Orange County International Raceway in Irvine. "Attendance has been dragging, and we're going to try and built up some new interest," OCIR president Blaine Laux told the Orange County Register. "We aren't certain Evel will draw enough to pay additional costs, but we'll give it a go."

He not only made the Irvine jump successfully, but also without any injuries. The San Bernardino County Sun said he "put on a 30-minute show" before an audience "of 12,000 fans."

In 1976, Knievel made an appearance at Toys R Us on Harbor Blvd in Anaheim, promoting the Ideal Toy Company's wildly popular Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle toy. In the 1970s and 1980s he also played in a number of local charity celebrity golf events, including tournaments in Los Alamitos and Mission Viejo. 

Knievel with Rev. Schuller at the Crystal Cathedral, 2007.

In the last year of his life, Knievel -- never before a religious man -- had a profound spiritual awakening and prayed for forgiveness for the sins he'd committed throughout his wild, freewheeling life. On Palm Sunday, 2007, he was baptized by Rev. Robert H. Schuller at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, where he then gave impassioned testimony on Schuller's "Hour of Power" television show. It was the last big leap Knievel ever made in front of an audience, and it left quite an impression on those who saw it. When he died later that year, Schuller flew to Montana to officiate his funeral.