Latest / Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People / Rocket Cars & Broken Bones - The Story of "The Mad Canadian" Ken Carter

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Rocket Cars & Broken Bones - The Story of "The Mad Canadian" Ken Carter · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_06: Alright, everybody, thanks for joining today on Dirtnap City.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_06: Um, we have um Alex, the the co-host with the most, and then we also have a super fan who's joined us for a couple of episodes.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_06: Uh Al from Austin.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_06: Al, how's it going?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_06: It's going great.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_06: How are you guys doing?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_06: We're doing well.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_06: We're we're enjoying a little bit of springtime in Texas, which, you know, it's it's gonna go from we had a little bit of cold and now I think it's 85 degrees, but you gotta you gotta take that while you can, because that's a whole lot better than it will be in June or July.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and there's people that are in blizzard conditions right now, so we can't complain about uh weather in the 80s for sure.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_06: You mean you mean like some of our um friends up in Canada?
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_06: Or New York?
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_06: New York, yeah, yeah.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_06: Uh up that away.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_06: Well, uh, you know, I heard this statistic that like something like 90% of all Canadians live within 100 miles of the U.S.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_06: I told you that, didn't I?
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I pay attention.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_06: That's all I was trying to say.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_04: I I thought it was 70% of all statistics were made up on the spot.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, that's a good one.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_06: Um I learned that from you.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_06: I feel I feel seen.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_06: Today I want to talk about uh a guy who was born in Montreal uh in 1938.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_06: Now, this is kind of an interesting fact about him.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_06: I I really got wrapped around the axle about this.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_05: I think I know who it is.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, 1938.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_05: I think I know who it is.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_05: You want to say?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, well, you'd be mad if I get it.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_06: I don't think you're gonna get it.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_06: Okay.
• 1:40
  unknown: Go.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_05: Marcel Marceau.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_06: No, no, no, no.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_06: Quite quite quite a different person.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_06: So this this guy was born in Quebec, uh, Montreal, Quebec, in uh but here's here's the thing I got wrapped around the axle about in the in a good way.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_06: He was born on September 5th, and he also died on September 5th, and he was born in 1938, he died in 1983.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_06: Are you a numerologist?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_06: This is like that Lincoln Kennedy thing, right?
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_05: Well, kind of.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_05: Uh it turns out Marcel Marceau is French, not Canadian.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_06: Well, they're there they're you know, Quebec, right?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_06: That's pretty French.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_06: He he was actually born, his name was Kenneth Gordon Polsk, but he went by the name Ken Carter.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_06: Have you heard of Ken Carter?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_06: No.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_06: He was also known to many because of what he did for a living as the mad Canadian.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_06: And by mad, they didn't mean angry, they meant uh like he did these crazy stunts.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_06: He was a stunt car driver.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_06: Hmm.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_06: We've we've talked about evil can evil.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_06: One of the best episodes we've ever done was Evil Knievel.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_06: This was Canada's equivalent to Evil Knievel.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, really?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_06: Ken Carter.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_06: So AW, you you told me about him.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_06: I think we were on a bike ride or something a few weeks ago, and you were telling me about this documentary um that was called Um The Devil at Your Heels about this guy, which is a little slow.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_06: It's it's you know, it was made by the the Canadian government, it's not super well polished, you know, it's all kind of shot in that old school look.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_06: But the the most interesting thing, well, let me back up a minute.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_06: He was born in Montreal, lived in a kind of working class neighborhood, dropped out of school, and started traveling with a team of Daredevils.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_06: Now, how cool would it be if somebody asked you what you do for a living and you said, I travel with a team of Daredevils?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, that'd be great.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_04: That is what I do.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_04: I what it's okay.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_06: Well, that's true.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_06: It's true, it's true for you, but it's it's uh it's aspirational for us.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_06: He he started jumping all over North America.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_06: So he would come over to the US side, he would, he would jump um uh these cars over rows of buses, he would jump them over rows of uh trains, other cars, uh ponds, anything you could jump over.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_06: He would build a ramp.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_06: But where he really started to get a name was he pioneered the use of these rocket cars.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_06: So it's it's it's like he would take a stock car and put a rocket engine in it, start that thing up, hit speed very, very quickly, and jump a long, long way.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_06: Was this like in the 50s and 60s then?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_06: He was kind of getting into it in the 60s and into the 70s.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_06: So you're saying he was uh um contemporary of evil canivals?
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_06: He was.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_06: He was.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_06: He definitely uh he wanted to be.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_06: I think he felt like Evil Knievel was respected, but he wanted to be that guy that did the big shows, right?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_06: Because what he mostly did was traveled around from city to city, these little little racetracks, you know, where people go to watch racing and watch um automotive stuff, and he would do these shows at though at those places, and he and he had a team of people, he had a bus.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_06: Um uh, you know, it had said something on it about like suicide or something.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_06: It was, you know, he was he was pretty punk rock and um nerdy at the same time.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_06: But the way he decided to get his uh game up to the status of Evil Kinevil was he wanted to do a really big jump.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_06: Now, think about it.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_06: I I know AW knows this, but Alex, the place that I go in the summer, you know, you know what that river's called, right?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_06: Um St.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_06: Lawrence.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_06: The St.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_06: Lawrence, yeah.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_06: So the St.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_06: Lawrence is a river that comes out of Lake Ontario and goes all the way from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_06: It is in some places three or four miles wide.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_06: It's huge.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, it's it's you know, it's basically draining the Great Lakes, so it's gotta be big.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_06: Um, AW's been up there, he's seen it.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_06: It's a pretty impressive river, huh?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_04: Beautiful.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_04: It's absolutely beautiful.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_04: Growing up in South Texas, I feel like you know, if I had a better arm, I could throw a rock across virtually any river down here.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_04: You you can't even see the other side.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_06: And when you do look across, you're looking at another country.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_06: If you're in the U.S., you're looking at Canada, and if you're in Canada, you're looking at the U.S.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_06: Or you might be looking at an island in the middle that is one of those two.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_06: Well, his idea was to take one of these rocket cars and jump over the St.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_06: Lawrence River from uh Canada to the US in 1976 to celebrate the bicentennial of the US.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_06: I don't think many Canadians would do that these days.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_06: They're they're they're not as friendly to us as they used to be.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_05: And I can't imagine that evil can evil was cool with that.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_05: He must have been livid.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_06: No, no, no, no.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_06: He actually so so this all took this all took place around uh 1976.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_06: You know, they were they were plant planning this whole thing you're a couple of years in advance, but they they raised money from ABC.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_06: You remember the wild world of wide world of sports?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_06: Of course.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_06: Remember the remember the tagline for that?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_06: The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_06: Yes.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_06: And what happened with the agony of defeat?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_06: I could I can always picture this.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_05: The what was the the um the visual?
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it was the was it a ski the ski?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, ski jumping, totally crashing, just like ah, you know, skis and and poles and everything flying everywhere.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_06: Well, wide world of sports um sponsored this.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_06: They gave him$250,000 in the 70s.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_06: Now that was in like 2025, 2026, about a million and a half bucks today to to make this happen.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_06: So he found a spot in on the St.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_06: Lawrence River, and he found it was a spot that had an open field.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_06: It was kind of farmland.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_06: It was in Morrisburg, Ontario, 50 acres of farmland, and he built this giant ramp.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_06: And he wasn't gonna jump all the way to the US mainland.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_06: He was gonna jump onto an island that was on the US side.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_06: The the kind of international line goes down the middle of the river in some places, and on some places it goes on one side of the islands or the other.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_06: But he was gonna jump across the international line, not not checking with customs or anything, just literally land on the US side and um parachute down.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_06: So so he got this rocket car.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_06: What kind of car would you pick, Alex, if you were gonna jump the St.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_06: Lawrence River and you wanted to attach a rocket to your car?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_05: Just a regular car, you mean?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it was a production car that was modified.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_05: So just project production cars, and then they would put a rocket on the back of it, correct, with jet fuel.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_04: It was it was a major engineering modification, but it's kind of like saying the um like stock car racing, you know, technically that's a stock car, but it's oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so they they really spent a lot of energy engineering into this.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, if they're all the same, it'd be cool to get one that looks like a you know a station wagon.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_06: Would you do like a like a Kia or a um or a Sorrento?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_05: A station wagon with wood paneling would be the punk rock to do it.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_06: So like a so like an old Buick station wagon would be your choice.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_05: Sure.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_05: You know, a green Lamborghini also would be kind of cool, right?
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_05: True.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_05: Well, his his choice was a Lincoln Continental.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_05: I told you.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_05: Like something like, yeah, more in line with the station wagon.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_06: Um, yeah, very, very large, very boxy car.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_06: Um, he had a crew of of engineers, you know, he had this$250,000 equivalent of 1.5.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_06: So he had he had people going in and um pushing dirt to make a ramp.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_06: He had uh engineers that were building the rocket car.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_06: He had to put little wings on it so it didn't like lift off the ground.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_06: They were they were kind of these stupid little wings on the side.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_06: You can actually see the the failed jump on YouTube if you just type in um you know St.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_06: Lawrence jump, um, Ken Carter.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_06: Or the whole movie, or you can see the whole movie on YouTube.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_06: So so unfortunately, there were delay after delay.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_06: So bad weather.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_06: Um also the engineers were having trouble with the fuel tank.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_06: It kept exploding, like they would test it and it couldn't handle the pressure, and so the fuel tank would explode.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_06: That's not good.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_06: Um, they had problems with uh at one point they had problems with the people that were helping them, like the crew went on strike because they weren't getting paid, so all kinds of delays.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_06: Well, after like four years of these delays, um, first of all, ABC got cold feet and quit giving him money and said, We're not we're not gonna pay for this anymore.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_06: Um and then he had a few other backers that wanted to do this.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_06: He originally, like the first time he was gonna do it, there was a huge crowd that showed up all along the side of the road, they're all parked there, they're all watching, and then something happened and he didn't do it.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_04: Didn't they also like coordinate with the St.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_04: Lawrence Waterway?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_04: They stop traffic, all ship traffic.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_06: Yes, yes, that's right.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_06: I forgot about that.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_06: So so no freighters going by, they've got it all opened up, and he doesn't do it.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_06: I think the first time might have been weather, um, like it was raining or something, and then and then you know, six months later, because they have to reset everything.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_06: You can't just go the next day for some reason.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_06: It had to be a long wait.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_06: So the next time he was gonna do it, right before he was about to take off, there was something that happened that spooked him and he and he aborted and he didn't do it.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_06: So, third time, they've got like six people watching on the side, they've cut the film crew down significantly.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_06: They've got um, you know, all the things that were gonna make the hype have kind of gone away.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_06: Instead of, I think for the first two times, they had big speed boats that were gonna be the rescue boats if they needed them.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_06: This time they had one little dinghy, it was just a little one of those little, you know, with the thing on the back, the tiller.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, it was it was kind of pathetic.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_06: And they decided that Ken Carter had lost his nerve.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_06: So uh well, AW, you tell the story of what happened next.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, okay, sure.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_04: So there is there was the a speculation that there was a problem.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, there was a problem with the jump and the backers, and they demanded that Ken Carter come to a finance meeting, you know, like an hour away.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, and they got him out of there.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_04: And uh what happened in that moment, they got a substitute driver to go, and I think that's where you want to pick up.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_04: But the speculation is that uh they were worried that he had lost his nerve and he was always gonna find a reason to delay, to delay, to delay.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_04: And so they got him away from there uh with this other person at the ready to do the jump.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_06: So the so the other person, it's a name you've heard probably, Alex.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_06: Um, he was actually a stunt driver that worked for Ken Carter.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_06: His name was Kenny Powers.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_06: That was actually his real name.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, nice.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, both these guys had kind of like these handlebar mustaches and kind of um, you know, afro kind of hair, you know, like like uh white guy afro kind of hair, and we're both, you know, 70s smokers, very 70s, yeah.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, classic macho 70 stuntman.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_06: But both of them had the look.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_06: Well, so they get they get Ken Carter off to Ottawa, and then they decide they're gonna do this with um Kenny Powers.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_06: So Kenny Powers gets in the car, he's never driven this car before.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_06: And by the way, driving a rocket car is not easy.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_06: Ken Ken Carter had actually trained to drive a rocket car because it's hard to keep on the road, it's it's very hard to control.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, Kenny Powers had never actually driven a rocket car before.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_04: The car was also when we talk about being engineered, it was uh sized to Ken Carter's uh body and size.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_04: And Kenny Powers was like eight inches shorter.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_04: Oh and so could he even touch the pedals?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's true.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_06: They're stuffing him in there.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_06: So so I have to say though, if you watch the documentary, you're you're very um I'm very impressed by Kenny Powers because he he they're they're all trying to delay, they're like, Oh, we need to do the safety check to we're doing the countdown.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_06: He's like, No, we're going.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_06: No, we're going.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_06: Let's go now.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_06: Let's go now.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_06: And and he like literally within they they were gonna count down from five minutes.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_06: He's like, No, you don't need to count down from five minutes, count down from five seconds, and I'll go.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_06: And so they he changed the countdown from five minutes to five seconds.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_06: He waved away all the safety people and all the checks and everything, and he pushed go.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_06: And what happened, hey Dub?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_04: So uh he he he hit the end of the ramp and he launched, he made it up the ramp, he made it up the ramp, and he immediately uh fell to earth and he fell to water, fell to water, but I will say uh he he was so close to the shore that the boat didn't matter that people walked from the shore to the car, it was like two feet of water to remove him from the car, and he was seriously injured, yeah.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, vertebrae, but they're just ripping him out of the car, and I'm thinking, oh, but uh yeah, I I don't remember the reason, but uh for some reason the car air got underneath the car, and the car, instead of going straight, kind of went up and and that was it.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_06: It was because the ramp had not been engineered properly and and was bumpy, and so it caused the car because it was going so fast it caused the car to bounce and it got air under it, and then the chute deployed prematurely, and which also happened on the Snake River Canyon, right?
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_06: The chute deployed prematurely, but it you if you watch this thing, he just goes flying into the air, the chute's behind him.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_06: He has two chutes, and one of them is just spinning, it's not even open, and the other one sort of opens, falls into the water, they wait out to get him because all they have is this little dinghy for a rescue boat, and he's given the thumbs up and all this stuff, and then Ken Carter finds out that this all happened, and he's pissed because it was supposed to be his jump.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_06: He was mad because he thought powers could have been killed since he hadn't done all the training that that Ken Carter had done.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_06: But it turns out the two of them stayed friends for the rest of their lives, according to the movie.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_04: Well, uh, so it was there was like, why would they be friends?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_04: Well, this guy betrayed him, right?
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_04: And so um there was there was some question about that, and it and I I don't want to steal if you're going this direction, but the thought was the getting uh Ken Carter out of there was actually orchestrated by Ken Carter.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_04: Oh and Kenny Powers looked at him as a father figure and said, I got you.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_04: I got you, I will do this for you.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_06: And we'll make it look like you wanted to do it.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_06: Yes.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_06: Uh I didn't pick up on that.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_06: Was that in the movie?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_06: Was that in the documentary, or was that something you read separately, or it's in the podcast?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_04: Can yeah, can we cross-reference a podcast?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so uh Heavyweight uh did this story, and they followed the Kenny Powers story uh pretty pretty deep, and they spoke to his widow, and uh and they were asking, you know, why why would they still be friends?
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, she's like, you know, Kenny Powers loved Ken Carter and would have done anything for him, and he would have never done anything to hurt him.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_04: And uh that was then the speculation that okay, maybe this was done to really save face for Ken Carter.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_06: Well, what a what a setup, what a shenanigan.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_06: Well, of course, Kenny Powers is injured, um fished out of the shallow water.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_06: Ken Ken Carter is is playing angry, and there's some press conferences that are in this documentary with him where he does look pretty angry.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_06: I can't believe they did this to me.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_06: And you know, if he's not if he's not really mad, he's acting pretty well.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_06: Sure.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_06: Um, so he goes about his way of jumping, but he has this void in his life because remember, we talked about how he wanted to be like evil can evil, he didn't really have um that big stunt that would put him on the map.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_06: And so he had talked about, I think there were some other things he was talking about jumping, like you know, just in the planning phases, some some kind of big um big jumps that he wanted to make, um, or go back and redo the the St.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_06: Lawrence jump.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_06: That was something that he still thought he could do, but he had to make a living, so he would go around doing these little um little shows, little, you know, kind of podunk um uh towns like Peter's Peterborough, Ontario.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_06: And in Peterborough, he was jumping over a little lake.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_06: And the first time he tried it, he didn't he had the rocket car.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_06: That was his trademark, and it was kind of like a it was like a supra, maybe, or a or a Dotson, maybe it was a little Dotson, and he couldn't control it and he steered off the edge of the ramp and crashed into the water.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_06: They had given him oxygen, and and actually frogmen went out and like dove down and pulled him up, but he had an oxygen tank that he had just in case he landed in the water, and it actually came in handy.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_06: He survives, he breaks his foot, and then he promises um he promises that he is going to come back um like six weeks later and do it again.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_06: Like before the organizers, the the landowner, the people that own this um track didn't even know, but he just throws it out there.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_06: I'll be back on Labor Day to do this again.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_04: It's a good promoter.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_04: You got to put a deadline.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_04: That's how you make things happen.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_04: You create a deadline, things happen.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_06: I don't care if your dog's at the vet, we're doing this.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_06: Uh so so he so he ends up uh going back uh the second time, and this time um there's there's a race that happens ahead of it.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_06: Um it's a racetrack in Peter, Peterborough, um, Ontario, and the race runs long, so it gets dark, and so they paint his car bright yellow so that people can still see it.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_06: This is like at mid 11 p.m.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_06: or 1 a.m.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_06: He still wants to do the jump the second time he's attempting to jump this uh thing.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_06: And apparently he was in good spirits.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_06: He, you know, they did all the safety checks and everything.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_06: It's like 11:45, people are ready to leave.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_06: They've been watching racing all day, they've probably been you know drinking Budweiser or Molson or whatever.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_06: And he tells them to put a little extra fuel in the car.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_06: Like, I think I need a little extra fuel.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_06: And the way these rocket motors work is they just basically burn out the fuel and then they stop.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_06: So it's like this really big hit of energy, and then and then it's gone.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_06: But it's enough to get him over.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_06: He's worried he's not he landed in the water last time because he drove off the ramp.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_06: He's worried he's not gonna make it, so he hasn't put a little extra, and then this time he goes sailing into the air over the lake, the little pond, over the trees, and actually a hundred feet past where he was supposed to be on the other ramp, and lands upside down in a parking lot.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, and that was the end of Ken Carter.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_06: Really?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_06: Massive injuries, yeah.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_06: Um wait, wait, did he die?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah, he was pronounced dead on the way to the Peterborough Civic Hospital.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_04: It was Man, that was uh that took a took a dark ending, man.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_06: Um well the the car the car had uh roll cage, but when you see the video of this, it you actually see how How um high he was, and it wasn't expected, and it literally did a 180.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_06: Like the the the weight distribution on the car wasn't even, so it flipped over and just landed on on the top and just crushed him down in there.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_06: They got him out.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_06: I think he actually survived um but died on the way to the hospital after that.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_06: But but you know, it was a pretty sad day for the people fans of racing and fans of stunts.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_04: I I would guess that he, you know, I don't want to make light of that, but he died doing what he loved.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_04: You know?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_04: That's true.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_04: That was his whole life.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_04: Um the beginning of that movie is is one of my very favorite uh scenes or or just events, and he's at one of those old stock car races, and he jumps like eight cars and and he crashes at the end, and and they have a camera inside, and this is 1970s technology.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_06: This wasn't a GoPro, this was this was some kind of film camera.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_04: He hits the you know, he lands hard.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_04: I think he breaks his ankle, he's injured.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_04: They pull him out again, they just rip people out, you know, and uh it's it's almost cliche how he behaved, and they've got him on a stretcher, and he's like, you know, bring me the mic, bring me the mic.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_04: Oh yeah, yeah.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_06: You wanted to make an announcement to the audience.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I'm gonna be here tomorrow night.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_04: Don't go away.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_04: Be sure and I mean it's like it was so awesome.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_04: You know, that was what he loved.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_06: They don't make them like that anymore.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, they do.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_06: Well, I forgot to mention actually one thing about the St.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_06: Lawrence jump.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_06: ABC actually did hire Evil Knievel to be a special correspondent to that jump, the the one that that um he didn't do over the St.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_06: Lawrence.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_06: And he evil Knievil came out and met with Ken Carter and actually reported you know to the public on camera and also back to ABC Sports and said, That ain't gonna work.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_06: It's not gonna happen.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_06: Evil was very skeptical.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_05: So I'm confused on why they would be friends.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_05: I would think knowing what we know about Evil Ken Evil, it doesn't seem like he would like a Canadian kind of honing in on his territory.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_06: Well, they weren't they weren't necessarily friends.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_06: This was ABC using him as a correspondent for this.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_06: Like bringing in a subject matter expert that knows these kind of jumps and saying, so so so the only have not liked each other.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_06: The clips you see, they're very civil to one another.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_06: And I think Ken Carter was a little starstruck, honestly.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_06: But Evil's kind of um like shaking his head, and and the whole in the clip where where they were live on the news and and evil can evil's interviewing Ken Carter, he's like, dude, this isn't gonna work.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_06: You know, he's he's very skeptical that this thing is planned out enough.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_06: And I think the budget he was trying to do it on wasn't enough.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_06: He he was really fighting against weather, and you know, you mentioned that the water was so shallow.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_06: The St.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_06: Lawrence is um is uh a variable level, it'll go up and down.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_06: And so at the end of the season, it was October when he did that jump and landed in that shallow water.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_06: The water is way, way lower.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_06: You know, it's probably 10 feet lower than it was at the beginning of the season when he was supposed to jump.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, interesting.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_06: And so so that's why he landed in this little muck, you know, that was I think it was 500 feet off the end of the ramp that he flew and landed in this muck.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_06: But yeah, it it was interesting to see the dynamic between evil and him.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_06: Um so I I did read a couple of subreddits about this, and this was one of a few of my favorite quotes from from the subreddit.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_06: This is uh uh is it damn that's interesting was the subreddit.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_06: And Assaulted by Maud said, Was there any math involved in this stunt?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_06: And Honey Bucket DJ said, Jet car plus ramp equals F yeah.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_06: And then another another character uh whose whose name I can't even say because it's so obscene, uh said on on Reddit, the math checks out.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_06: And then another guy says, It's meth math.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, there you go.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_06: And then another guy says, more like Mulson math.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_06: There you go.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_06: I thought that was pretty good.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_06: Um and and you know, there might have been some cocaine involved.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_06: This was the 70s and 80s.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_04: He did ask for more fuel in the car.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_06: He didn't know.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe it was more fuel elsewhere.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_04: So, you know, one thing about um that I heard on um on heavyweight was a they talked to Kenny Powers' um widow and and her son, and whether or not the character Kenny Powers was you know completely based on on the character from Eastbound and Down.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_04: Eastbound and Down, thank you, yeah, was based on Kenny Powers or not, they they felt like it was, and they weren't looking for you know anything other than just kind of closure of you know, because they enjoyed, they would watch Eastbound and Down and they would laugh.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_06: Because they would see things that that Kenny Powers would have said.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_04: They would they would hear the kid would hear his dad, and and the spouse was like, Oh yeah, and they would just laugh knowingly, which is so awesome, you know, to get that solace.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's cool.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_05: Well, let me ask you this.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_05: Um, we've talked about some daredevils on the show before.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_05: We've talked about Evo Kinevo, we've talked about the Walendas, oh yeah, yeah.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_05: To some extent, Harry Houdini, I think, was a little bit daredevil, right?
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah, fair.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_05: Um where do you think the Wright brothers fit in all this?
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, they're they're not considered that at all, right?
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_05: They're American heroes who started spaceflight, but was there a little daredevil in them too, or were they so precise and measuring twice and cutting once, and they were technicians and they weren't like these fools, or do you think they kind of got lucky that it worked?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_06: They were more like Neil Peart, the professor of drumming versus um the animal of drumming, you know, the John Bonham, you know, just crazy, right?
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_06: Um I I hadn't ever thought of them as Daredevils, but at the time what they were doing was absolutely deadly, right?
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_06: People were dying with this all the time, and they were breaking ground.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_06: But I also kind of see that they put the work into the science to make sure it would work, they were brilliant enough.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_06: I don't think Ken Carter put the right team together to actually make his stunt work.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_05: But if but you you mentioned that scene on the river with all these people.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_05: I think that's every time the Wright brothers flew, it was a similar scene.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, if if if if television had been around back then, ABC probably would have televised all of their flights too.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_05: So I wonder I wonder how much daredevil those guys had in them.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_04: Where does the engineering stop and the daredevil begin?
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_04: Like it's like there is a a spectrum.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_06: That is a great I I can tell you exactly where it stops and the other one begins, is when they get in their own aircraft and fly it, right?
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_06: If they had a test pilot that would do it for them, then they're just engineers.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_06: But as soon as they as soon as they say, All right, Orville, I'm taking it up, you know, hold my beer.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, but if you've got if you've got Kim Carter over here and you got the Wright brothers over here, or Evil Knievel over here, where you know, where does that blend change?
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_05: Sure, and you gotta throw Neil Armstrong into that mix too, probably.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_06: Well, I I actually do you you you segued this well.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_06: I do want to bring up a couple of other stunt men.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_06: Um, of course, Evil Knievel, you know, he was he wasn't um he was the most famous Daredevil, at least American of all time.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_06: Um he kind of made crashing part of the show, was his thing.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_06: But I I found some others that I thought were kind of interesting that you might not think of as Daredevils.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_06: There was a guy named Dar Robinson Robinson.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_06: Have you heard of Dar Robinson?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_06: No, he was actually a Hollywood stunt man who did his own stunts, and he was one of the first people during the 70s and 80s to start doing these free falls himself, doing this kind of stuff that you hear Tom Cruise doing these days, but but he actually did all these stunts and was in films and and credited in a lot of films, but nobody knew his name because he was, you know, he was a step-in for somebody else.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_06: Um the other one is uh Jackie Chan.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, if you've ever seen like Rumble in the Bronx or uh those movies he's done with Chris Tucker, he is he is doing those stunts, he's climbing up those walls, he's jumping off of things, he's just an amazing stunt man.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_06: And and what I think is really cool about Jackie Chan is he would show all the bloopers.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_06: Like at the end, that was one of the things that a Jackie Chan movie at the end, you would see all the times he messed up.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_04: That was cool.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it was cool.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_06: And then another one, uh Zoe Bell.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_06: So Zoe Bell was Uma Thurman's double in Kill Bill.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_06: Um, she was in a movie called Deathproof, but she was probably considered the greatest female stunt performer, Hollywood stunt performer of all time.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_06: But that leads us into another whole realm, and and we're almost done, but I want I want to go through this realm fictitious stunt performers.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_06: Anybody got any of those?
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_05: You mean like uh Super Dave Osborne?
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_06: Yes, yes.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_05: So I ended up watching the only one I can think of.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_06: Well, I ended up watching several long time worth of Super Dave.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_06: It is so funny.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_06: It is so the way he did that and the way he was so deadpan and so confident, um, and and you know, yeah, it's gonna work out, I think we're gonna get this done.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_06: And then he ends up like biffing it every single time.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_06: If you haven't seen Super Dave Osborne, please people go watch that.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_06: Um, then there were two others that came up in the uh fictitious category that I actually didn't know about, but I kind of I knew about, but I didn't know their names.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_06: You guys know who Colt Sievers is?
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_06: No, that name does ring a bell.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_06: That was um the fall guy.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_06: That was the fall guy.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, Colt Seavers was the fall guy.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_06: So, so uh, and then I've actually never seen this movie, but it came up several times.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_06: It was uh Hot Rod, the movie Hot Rod, Rod Kimball.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_06: So Rod Kimball was sort of the antithesis of Superdave.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_06: He was um he didn't have a lot of backing, he was kind of bootstrapping everything, and he would also fail sometimes, but he did it um he did it with a lot less grace than Super Dave.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_06: Superdave would always just walk away from it like I'll do it, I'll get it next time.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_05: So yeah, and then of course, um um there's uh Rick Dalton from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_05: Uh the uh DiCaprio character who was um uh Cliff Booth's stunt man.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_06: Is that the one with um Brad Pitt?
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, Brad Pitt, okay.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_05: He was Brad Pitt's stunt man.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I I thought Brad Pitt was really good as the stunt man in that.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_04: That was good.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_05: Wait, Brad Pitt was the stunt man.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_04: Brad Pitt was the stunt man.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_05: That's right.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, yeah.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_05: I got it backward.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_05: He was Cliff Booth.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_06: Well, um, if you like stunts and all that stuff, definitely check out our episode about Evil Knievel.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_06: And also, uh to Alex's point, check out the one about the Wright brothers and and um maybe Neil Armstrong because they were those guys.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, they had some big cojones.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_06: I'm just gonna say that.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_04: They already got a lot of lindas, I was just gonna say that is actually an amazing story and an amazing family.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_04: True to Little Gorge, uh, many years ago, uh saw that with Alex, and it is it's pretty cool.
• 33:59
  unknown: Yeah.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_06: Well, and and and actually the flying Welindas, um, I have to say, of of our episodes from I think last year or two years ago, whenever we did that one, that's actually a pretty popular episode.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_06: A lot of people really responded to that.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_06: The title, families that fly together sometimes die together.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_06: All right, everybody, this is Dirt Knapp City.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_06: If you love uh stories about interesting dead people, uh please feel free to subscribe, and we will see you next time.