The video below from 1976 is so very 1976. It's an Indianapolis, Indiana TV news report on a 13-year-old boy named Terry—nicknamed Evel Knievel for obvious reasons—preparing to attempt a daredevil jump on his bicycle over 10 trash cans. Looking at this kid, it's hard to believe he's 13, but, well, it was the 70s.
That snazzy orange jumpsuit he's wearing was "loaned to him by his mom."
I appreciate Terry's gravitas, even when things don't go as hoped. I hope he didn't grow up to be like Knievel who was described in a New York Times book review of Leigh Montville's biography Evel as "rude and stupid; a grifter and con man; anti-Semitic; a pathological liar; a sexist pig who beat his longtime wife and slept with hundreds of women."
As a Reddit user pointed out, the reporter is Barbara Boyd, the first Black woman TV reporter in Indiana and one of the first Black women to anchor a TV newscast. Boyd worked for WRTV for 25 years and in 1973 she reported a groundbreaking feature on breast cancer from her own hospital bed following her mastectomy.
