Everett Jasmer (born in 1952) is a retired driver who was the original owner and creator of USA-1 out of St. Cloud, Minnesota. He used to own Off-Road Specialties and was a former drag racer.
Career[]
In 1979, he became friends with Bob Chandler at a local mud bog. Everett pulled Bigfoot out of the mud with USA-1, he is currently seeking out anyone with photos or video of the event. Three years later, Jasmer began his career.
Early in his monster truck career, he sported an engineer/conductor's hat. however would later adopt the cowboy hat permanently. At the inaugural Hall of Fame, he dug out the engineer hat to appease die-hard fans. In 1983, he raced Bob Chandler in Bigfoot on That's Incredible.
He was a very skilled mechanic as he owned his own performance shop. He would sell the rights to the shop in the mid 90's in an attempt to focus on his monster truck program and its revival attempts. He allowed the Hall brothers to run a USA- 1 body on Executioner in the early '90's. He also let other drivers run the USA-1 name on their trucks. Those included Kirk Dabney & Randy Brown.
Everett owned several other vehicles over the years including drag racing cars and 4x4s. One of Everett's favorite vehicles is the Corvette. His daily deliver truck for the shop was featured several times as "Silver Bullet" in the film Take This Job and Shove It and has gained a small following in recent years because of movie fans and magazine archives featuring the truck.
He had a somewhat rebellious attitude as stated in a feature put on by TNT on Tuff Trax. For many years he would come to interviews and sponsorship meetings in non-formal/professional clothing, normally being a denim outfit or his team apparel, as well as the fact he has sported a beard and long hair for the majority of his life. This would give him a "take me for who I am" approach and appeared successful.
Opinion on freestyle[]
Jasmer is best known for being passionate, yet stubborn about racing and his perception of freestyle and current state of monster truck racing and the sport itself, but appears to have relaxed on those views as the truck now competes for various promotions and series, he previously deemed unsatisfactory. His stance for a long time was that the sport has become professional wrestling on wheels, as most trucks have "over-the-top gimmicks", drivers were to provoke rivalries, and on occasion formats set up so certain trucks would meet in certain races. His preference leaned more towards drag racing on straight line tracks. He recently admitted in an interview his longtime stance was not the best financially, but recent success has proven satisfactory.
Post-retirement[]
He is also known to collect a lot, his shop being filled with many unused spare parts, three unfinished chassis that were to become race trucks, various items sporting USA-1 names or similar patriotic novelties, and prototype or unused officially licensed USA-1 merchandise. Everett is also an avid fan of model building, hence an almost 30 years relationship with AMT.
In 2011, he was into the inaugural International Monster Truck Hall of Fame class.
In 2015, he started leasing the name to Roger Gauger, who ran it on his own Concussion Chassis as a team truck to Quadzilla. It proved more successful than past attempts to resurrect the name. Gauger even won two championships in Full Throttle Monster Trucks. Gauger ran it until 2017.
In 2021, Jasmer sold the entire USA-1 operation to James Trantina III.