Knoxville's own Evel Knievel, Jack E. "Mad Jack" Fielden, didn't just perform stunts for glory. He performed them for business publicity, attracting customers to his store.
Fielden's first store, Powell Salvage Furniture Liquidators, opened in 1975, but his antics took off after he opened the Furniture Warehouse Outlet on Baxter Avenue. Marketing tactics included jumping off buildings, smashing furniture and surviving his own "hanging."
The daring feats worked. Between wacky commercials and print ads, as well as Fielden's real-life stunts, customers bought into the whole charade. He became a local celebrity.
His early commercials for the Furniture Warehouse Outlet featured him jumping through a glass table, destroying mirrors with a baseball bat and wrestling a goat.
'He was larger than life'
Within a year of starting his zany advertising, sales grew from $30,000 a month to $129,000 a month, Fielden told the Knoxville News Sentinel in 1979. "The attention really drove his sales. People really wanted to come see him," his son Eric Fielden told Knox News recently.
Jack Fielden began preparing to jump from the roof of his store in 1979. "'Nobody would pay any attention if it was easy,'" he told the News Sentinel that year. "'There has to be that element of danger to it. They know I damn well could kill myself.'"
He'd practiced for around 60 hours, he told the News Sentinel in early 1980, jumping from lower levels of the 65-foot building in preparation.
"'This is a real dangerous stunt,'" he said. "'I have found out the hard way. I have bounced off those mattresses onto the concrete a few times ... and that's hard on skin.'" He completed the jump on Friday, March 13.
Eric Fielden, who told Knox News he was present for most of his father's stunts, recalled his dad jumping off another building, Bill Meyer Stadium. His father was a skydiver, and completed over 800 jumps, Eric Fielden said. "He was larger than life."
Stunts - and sales - on fire
In 1981, Jack Fielden trained with Hollywood stuntman Dar Robinson, who had completed jumps off the Houston Astrodome and the CN Tower in Toronto, the News Sentinel reported in 1981.
Robinson worked alongside other stunt performers such as actor Burt Reynolds to advise them on their daring acts. He stayed at Jack Fielden's house for four days in 1981, according to a Furniture Warehouse Outlet ad in the News Sentinel. Two weeks later, an ad announced a tunnel of fire stunt "Co-Ordinated by Dar Robinson."
Jack Fielden successfully pulled a rickshaw full of furniture through the flaming tunnel, according to Channel 26 footage posted to Vimeo by the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, a department of Knox County Public Library.
Stuntman legacy
When a crowd noticed someone scaling the United American Bank building in 1981, they assumed it was Jack Fielden. As it turned out, it was his "understudy," Ron Broyles, who peppered the building's windows with "Mad Jack for Mayor" and "Mad Jack Did It" stickers on his way up.
At the top, Broyles was arrested for trespassing and defacing private property, and the bank subsequently sued Jack Fielden. That incident wasn't Fielden's only brush with the law. Over the years, he dealt with various legal issues, both personal and professional.
Jack Fielden later filed for bankruptcy, the News Sentinel reported in 1986. He wasn't paying enough attention to his business, he said, and once he realized that, it was too late. His stunt legacy carried over to a new job at Harry Lane Chrysler Plymouth, which invited customers to "see Mad Jack Fielden" in a 1988 ad.
His son carried on his legacy. "He was god-like to us," Eric Fielden said of his father. "Some people are like that, and he was one of them." Eric Fielden trained with his father, and at stunt performances, his job was to collect and repair his dad's parachutes.
Witnessing these antics rubbed off on Eric Fielden. "It made crazy things like that normal," he said. "I was a mini daredevil my whole life." He dabbled in stunts himself as a kid, jumping off buildings with friends and leaping off his bike while riding downhill.
Eric Fielden also followed his father, who was a Marine sergeant, into military service, joining the Army and serving as a paratrooper. "The strongest way a kid could look at their father, that’s how I looked at him, Eric Fielden said. "It’s great growing up feeling like you got a super dad."
Eric Fielden also remembers his father as an early foodie and upper-level chess player.
Jack Fielden lived in Knoxville until his death in 1997.
Hayden Dunbar is the storyteller reporter. Email hayden.dunbar@knoxnews.com.
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