It Begins with a Thirst for Blood 

Jim Moreau stretches in the front seat of his ‘80s red sedan–360,000 highway miles chalked up on the odometer–buttons up a shirt, and then heads down to the fairgrounds to prepare for the evening’s show. After all, everything needs to be shipshape for the moment he sits himself into a beater car (more beater than the sedan) rigged with explosives and blows himself up.

Moreau is not on the bomb squad, nor is he a religious zealot. He is a self-described “hell driver” and travels almost constantly in the summer months, from county seat to county seat—the Champlain Valley Fair in Essex Junction, Vermont today—to turn operational automobiles into mangled ones. He is part of a dwindling class of performers dedicated to entertaining fans at fairs, racetracks, and small circuses. At the fairgrounds, work is inconsistent if you’re an independent hell driver. The more rural the racetrack, the better, as a shortage of live entertainment promotes larger, more captive, crowds. But they can also be a lot more volatile.

It’s hot and Moreau has his shirt off. His 62-year-old body has pinked up like a ham and glistens with sweat under the midday sun, where he is rigging up two charge casings with a legal substitute black powder. It may be legal, but when you tamp it and set it off with an electrical charge, like Moreau is about to do, it still packs a helluva punch. Moreau looks up and wheezes a laugh. He acknowledges that he is, indeed, making a bomb. He hands over a couple bags to your narrator, and before any escapes can be made, Moreau is pouring gasoline into the bags. “Double bag them,” he instructs, as a precaution.

“People are bloodthirsty,” Moreau says with a Maine accent so thick you’d think he just crawled out of a Stephen King movie. “And when they do see blood, then they say they didn’t want to see it. But I can tell you when they come out to the show that’s what they want to see. They want to see somebody not make it.” Remember for a moment that one of the most gawked at sports clips in history is of Joe Theismann’s leg being broken in half by the dreaded Lawrence Taylor during a Redskins vs. Giants game in 1985. Many of those slow motion instant replays came pre-YouTube, where deadly or maiming crash videos consistently rack up high views. “One of the reasons that Evel Knievel was so famous was that he missed a lot,” explains Moreau. “He supposedly broke every bone in his body. People watched him to see him miss.”

Moreau confirms this theory with his own life’s story: “I saw my first thrill show when I was nine-years-old. There was a guy trying to drive a car on two wheels, it was a convertible, and he rolled the car over and it caught his arm between the door and the ground and they ended up amputating his arm. Believe it or not, that’s the show that made me realize I wanted to be a hell driver.” And become a hell driver is what he did—at 62-years-old, Moreau has been at it for 40 some odd years, based in his humble New England abode and striding out for scheduled shows, hoping to latch onto a string that’ll give keep his bills at bay. 

Moreau, like his fellow hell drivers, has a list of accomplishments that could read like a rap sheet: Jim Moreau aka Crash Moreau aka The Maine Maniac aka Captain Explosion has been known to jump a snowmobile over a line of pickup trucks. Also known to consort with other hell drivers, who assist in a deadfall: Moreau is strapped into a car, latched to a crane hook, and suspended one hundred feet in the air before a glamorous nosedive. Moreau has recently been sighted performing The Semi-Tractor-Trailer Steel Wall Domino. He’s regularly set on fire, pinned to vehicle steering columns, and catapulted through motor homes. And he’s known to do this in clown makeup. Distinguishing features are stark white hair, a beard like Santa Claus, thick glasses, and a handlebar mustache. Moreau should be considered armed (with a gearshift) and extremely dangerous (to himself).

After four decades of hell driving, Moreau is scaling it back a notch, though. His body, though unblemished, save one scar that runs up his elbow (“That’s from bashing in a windshield, though,” he explains), can’t take the explosions and the crashes forever. But, how will he earn money? “Basically, it’s the only thing I really know good,” he says. “I used to drive a garbage truck, wash dishes, short-order cook, pump gas—anything that comes around. Now, when you get over 60, they don’t want you. After they see that you leave every summer, they don’t want you.” So, he continues to hustle for shows, and when he gets them, he continues to blow himself to smithereens with the best of them.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, The Sky Crash Pyramid 

Followed by The Hot Shoe!”

Regardless of any description you might read of Crash Moreau, perhaps the best way to understand him and what he does is to take a brief look at the origins of the modern nomad stuntman.

From the late-1940s through to the ‘70s, there were over 30 full-fledged thrill shows, termed “thrillcades,” touring the United States and Canada. There was the Joie Chitwood Thrill Show—where Moreau earned his stripes—and Aut Swenson’s Thrillcade. The thrillcades would send a marketing team ahead to announce the show’s arrival on radio and to slather posters around the towns’ squares and pubs. The performers would travel the circuit together, hauling all the gear, riggings, costumes, and cars to be demolished. They’d hang with the locals and drink at the girlie shows that ran adjacent the thrillcades. 

Different thrillcades had different specialties, different ways to almost die. They promised hell drivers, motorcycle maniacs, and speedway stars in crashing cars. Their posters assured Hood Surfing, The Flying Boardwall Crash, The Sky Crash Pyramid, The People Jump, The Human Battering Ram, The Jerk-Off, The Hot Shoe. Who could resist such promises? There was fire. There were jumpsuits. Sometimes there was vomit for no extra charge. 

The quality and size of the crowds—with timing, location, and marketing factored in—were unpredictable. Some archival photos confirm packed grandstands; some show rickety bleachers with only a few sparsely-seated, wide-eyed kids. The size of the crowd might have impacted the show’s take for the day, but it did not make the fire they drove through burn any less, or the ground they hurdled towards feel any softer. The Instant Convertible stunt still sheared the top off a coupe, The Dynamite Chair still exploded and belched smoke.

One-upmanship was the name of the game. One stunt, called The Tower of Courage (a stuntman stands on a lone tower while a vehicle drives into the tower, knocking it from beneath the stuntman), was revised over and over. It became The Motorcycle Tower of Courage, The Blindfolded Tower of Courage, The Double Blindfold Tower of Courage, The Multi Tower of Courage, and so on. Each successive stunt had to be bigger, louder, and more perilous. But these upticks in action also made setting up stunts more difficult, which started to limit the number of stunts a show could present. Excitement does, after all, have a spot where entropy begins. It appears that even crashing through fire has a law of diminishing returns when it comes to entertainment value.

God Bless America’s Original Crash Test Dummies, 

Or, No, Needlepoint Is Not Sissy

Full-on thrill shows are few and far between nowadays. Changing consumer tastes, gory video games and films, and insurance premiums are all partly at fault. Television shows like Jackass fulfilled the stunt-voyeur’s yearning, while never placing them in the line of fire, never keeping them far from their microwave’s piping hot serving of Hot Pockets. Whatever the reasons, hell drivers like Crash Moreau have to go it on their own as freelance dangermeisters-for-hire. Surprisingly, there are still a few active, and touring, stunt drivers, and a few occasionally band together for a show. Moreau himself has been relegated to a warm-up act, a stopgap between the leaping monster trucks that wow the crowd with each screaming rev. Even the loudspeaker barkers here at the Champlain Valley Fair tack him on to the end of the MMMMOOOONNNNSSSSTTTTEEEERRR TRUCK announcements all day. 

An acquaintance (and sometime rival) of Moreau’s, Rocky Hauri—we had better call him “Rocky Hardcore”—a hell driver from Owasso, Michigan, sports a Grim Reaper (scythe and all) tattoo on his right forearm and a voluptuous Lady Luck on his left. He is a complex man. He loves needlepoint, medium level crossword puzzles, and long walks. “It’s true,” he says. “I like to needlepoint my favorite stunts. I’ve actually had people tell me that it’s sissy to do needlepoint. Can you believe that?” Frankly, it is a little hard to believe anyone would ever even intimate that Rocky Hardcore is sissy, even though he is, for a daredevil, remarkably soft-spoken. His needlepoint does show real skill, and he’s been featured on websites dedicated to the craft.

But Rocky Hardcore is a hell driver through and through, and one of the toughest ever to strap on a helmet. He comes to hell driving honestly; his father was a stunt driver for Swenson’s Thrillcade. A particularly crowd-pleasing stunt Rocky Hardcore has perfected is “Flight of the Batmobile,” stunt where he jumps a motor home painted like the Batmobile, on fire, over other motor homes into a pile of wrecked cars. “You have to have a great visual in a stunt,” Hauri explains of a successful stunt. “Fire helps that, but one thing you should avoid is an overly complex stunt. One time I was setting up a stunt at a racetrack in between events, and it was taking longer than usual, so the crowd started booing me. Try doing a stunt when you haven’t even started it yet and you already got booed.”  

And, regardless of how many times he has been on fire or driven through the side of an RV, Rocky Hardcore maintains that he is not crazy. “I don’t do any crash or stunt where I don’t have a reasonable idea of how it is going to turn out,” he says. “People who perform in rodeos are crazy. They have no idea at all what is about to happen. Think about all the stunts I have done, the garbage trucks I have crashed, the crane drops… I have only ever broken one finger and had a few concussions. That’s an indicator of how we can control the outcome of the stunts.” 

Maybe. Or maybe it really was a good idea to get that Lady Luck tattoo on his left forearm.

Still, the danger that the hell drivers endure is real. In 1992, Doug Danger, a member of throwback motorcycle-jumping duo Team Danger (with Louis “The Rocket” Re), was making what was, considering his past feats, a small jump. He was to send his motorcycle over eleven cars at New Hampshire’s Hudson Speedway. Danger, who had previously bested Evel Knievel’s longest car jump by five cars and held the longest ramp to ramp jump for nearly a decade, completed the leap with no problem. But after landing, due to the shortness of the track, Danger didn’t have the time to turn safely, and he careened into a concrete wall. The crash left him in a month-long coma with seventeen broken bones, including a fractured skull. It took him three years to fully regain his memory. “My memory was completely gone,” Danger recollects. “When I say my memory, I don’t just mean that I didn’t know somebody. I would get up in the morning just like an infant. And when the phone was ringing, I didn’t know why it was making noise. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t do anything. I had to grow up all over again.” 

After a two-year recovery, Danger jumped his motorcycle over the fuselage of a 737 jet. He is at the Champlain Valley Fair today, dressed in a full Fox Racing outfit, looking good and ready for more thrills and perhaps more spills.

And Now, Back to the Dynamite Chair

“I’m one of the only people left that can do a bona fide Dynamite Chair,” Crash Moreau says. “There’s real dynamite. Most people nowadays that have a dynamite act, they only know how to use powder, but I was brought up in the old days. We use good old fashioned stick dynamite, although sometimes it is difficult to buy the good stuff.”  Calling The Dynamite Chair a “chair” is taking a bit of dramatic license. It’s more a non-splintering kneeling structure, made of cardboard and tinfoil. “You get inside the structure, with two sticks of 60 percent dynamite, and you’re kneeling in there, and you set it off about 18 inches from your head, and you blow it up. Basically, the safe card is that the dynamite blows down, out, and away, so you have to have a little resistance between you and the explosion.” 

There’s still a lot of force exerted on the man in the box, however. Moreau has been moved several feet at times. “Almost every time I do it, I lose some consciousness,” he says. Still, this is remarkable, noting that other dynamite men have lost fingers, toes, perforated their eardrums, or had shrapnel or blasting powder launched into their eyes. Some have caught fire due to improper positioning or sporting the wrong clothes. “I’ve singed my moustache,” Moreau says with a chuckle.

Moreau wanders over to a gaggle of early-20-something firefighters. As he explains to them what he’s about to do, their eyes widen. Some of them grin. Moreau has been soaking three layers of clothes in a bucket of water, and one burnt old towel in a tub of gasoline. Tonight, he is going to blow a car up, along with himself, whereupon he will run across the track on fire to a set area where the firefighters, hopefully, will extinguish him with foam.

It’s becoming more and more clear that Rocky Hardcore’s relationship to Lady Luck is more than just platonic, that these men take their lives into their own hands with an almost pathological passion. After all, psychologists have written loads of theories on thrill-seeking behavior. The thrill seeker has a death wish, an imbalance of certain neurotransmitters in the brain that control emotion, a malfunction in its pleasure center. Some call thrill seeking reckless, others a necessary release, even irreplaceable and good for society. Many therapists treat this as an addiction, a search for a payoff that never totally satisfies. “Years ago,” says Moreau, “I was committed to a mental institution. My psychiatrist told me, ‘If this is what you want to do, then do it.’ That’s coming straight from a psychiatrist who ended up getting caught for tax evasion. But, he gave me papers proving that I’m sane, so…”

Crazy or not, the hell drivers love the intensity of their job. They love to sign autographs for bowled over little boys, to bring adventure to otherwise sleepy towns. To them, the stunts never become boring, never lose their exhilaration. As Crash Moreau shared about his previously mentioned crane drop deadfall, where he and his junker car are hauled up in the air, and dropped a hundred feet onto its nose, “I feel the same nervousness every time I am hauled up. I still close my eyes every time.”

The hell driver readies himself. Walking off into the baking sun, which will soon set, Crash Moreau is tranquil and distant like a man on his way to the gallows. Soon, he will get into the car. The explosion will be so powerful the audience will lose a moment of time. And Crash Moreau will run, run across the track, in glorious, thrilling flames.