Morgantown celebrates the 100th birthday of native son Don Knotts with a festival this July.
Back around 1940, moviegoers at Morgantown’s Metropolitan Theatre sometimes got a little extra for the price of admission. Between movies, a gangly teenager would amble out, sit down at center stage, and arrange a Charlie McCarthy dummy on his knee. His jokes weren’t original, but his delivery was earnest.
That ventriloquist was Don Knotts. The future comedy legend was well-known locally when he was in high school, for reasons just like this one—he took any opportunity to get in front of an audience.
Jesse Donald Knotts’ brothers were already teenagers when he was born in 1924. His mother, Elsie Knotts, rented rooms to college students for extra income during the Great Depression. Knotts tells of some rough childhood years in his autobiography, Barney Fife and Other Characters I Have Known. His father suffered a mental breakdown before he was born, eventually becoming unable to work and, occasionally, violent. His brother Earl, who went by “Shadow,” kept things light through humor. He was Knotts’ first comedic inspiration. Radio was another source of inspiration, and Knotts practiced Jack Benny’s famously flawless timing.
After his freshman year at WVU, Knotts was drafted into the Army and spent the war as the ventriloquist member of a company of entertainers who performed for troops in the Pacific. A seasoned performer when he returned to college in 1945, he married fellow WVU student Kathryn “Kay” Metz and, after graduation, headed with his wife to New York to make it as an actor.
Make it he did. Knotts worked on the popular radio program Bobby Benson and the Bar-B-Bar Riders and the soap opera Search for Tomorrow. Acting in the Broadway production No Time for Sergeants in the mid-’50s, he and fellow cast member Andy Griffith found lifelong friendship. And in 1957, he became a regular on The Steve Allen Show. It’s easy to imagine Elsie Knotts settling in front of the TV after dinner Sunday evenings to watch her youngest son in the show’s Man on the Street sketches.
As the five years Griffith and Knotts originally intended to do The Andy Griffith Show neared its end, Knotts transitioned to film work. Many of the movies he made over the following decades—1966’s The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, for example, and 1975’s The Apple Dumpling Gang—were box office successes.
So in 1979, when Knotts was invited to play the wannabe swinger landlord Ralph Furley on the sitcom Three’s Company, he was an actor who required no audition. Co-stars John Ritter and Joyce DeWitt couldn’t believe their luck. When he showed up at the studio to read lines, DeWitt told one Knotts biographer, she and Ritter kept pinching each other. The first time he walked onto the soundstage, the live studio audience applauded for minutes.
Knotts was in his mid-70s when he met comedian Jim Carrey, a huge fan who did a great impression of his idol. Filmmaker Ron Howard tells about making the 2000 film How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Carrey, in the lead role, was increasingly burned out by the big fur costume and the oppressive green makeup. One day, to cheer him up, Howard arranged for Knotts to visit the set. Carrey was high up at the mouth of Grinch’s cave when he spotted Knotts below. “I only wish the cameras were rolling,” Howard later told CNN’s Larry King, “because here he was in the Grinch costume doing Barney Fife, you know, and it was—it was hilarious.” Carrey thanked Knotts for making him smile, and especially for The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.
When Knotts died in Los Angeles on February 24, 2006, at the age of 81, newspapers across the nation ran retrospectives on his career. And he and the Metropolitan Theatre ultimately came together again. In 2016, a bronze statue by Morgantown sculptor Jamie Lester depicting Knotts with an open-hearted grin on his face was erected in front of the theater. Project organizer John Pyles, who remembered Knotts visiting his school with his ventriloquist dummy, said a few words at the unveiling. “It’s just a happy occasion to have this great statue of Don, remembering him.”
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