Walter Knott rode spirit to theme-park heights.
“Success comes as you have confidence in yourself,” he said.
“Self-confidence is built by succeeding, even if the success is small.
It is the believing that makes it possible. No man succeeds without
faith.”
With that faith came boysenberries, roller coasters and a cowboy theme park called Knott’s Berry Farm.
The amusement spot in Buena Park, Calif., just north of Disneyland,
boasts 5 million visitors a year, ranking among the top funfair draws in
America.
The 160-acre plot — from which its Orange County city thrives with
motels and restaurants — originated with a 1920 germination from Walter
Knott (1889-1981).
“Walter Knott possessed the persistence that very few people have ever had,” said Jay Jennings, author of
“Knott’s Berry Farm: The Early Years,” “He believed that anything was possible if you tried hard enough.
That’s why he stayed in the fields and kept farming despite his many
early failures in growing vegetables and fruit.
“Knott loved agriculture, turning weed patches into crop-yielding
gardens. He learned at an early age (9) how to contribute to the
family’s income by selling produce from his crops to railroaders who
lived near the Southern Pacific track. Knott’s grandmother Rosamond
Dougherty was another big influence. She moved in with his brother,
mother and himself and shared exciting stories about her adventures in
the Old West, which later motivated Knott to build his Ghost Town at
Knott’s Berry Farm.”
The man simply had a “unique combination of having clear goals in
mind along with an almost obsessive work ethic,” said Christopher
Merritt, co-author of
“Knott’s Preserved.”
“Even in the face of adversity (i.e., attempting to grow grapes in the
Mojave Desert prior to cultivating his farm in Buena Park), he stuck to
his overall plan and simply did not give up, when others would have more
quickly come to their senses and moved on to other, less daunting
prospects.”
Star Power
John Wayne, who had a Knott’s Berry Farm theater named for him,
called Knott “a true image of American capitalism. He takes pride in the
efforts of his organization and the quality of his product. … I delight
in calling him a friend.”
Another actor, Ronald Reagan, took time out from his California
governor duties in 1968 to laud Knott as “one of America’s great
patriots, one who has successfully climbed to the very top rung of the
ladder of success … yet one who has always been careful to see that he
left each rung of that ladder in good repair so those who followed would
have less trouble in climbing life’s ladder than he had.”
Walter started his rise not far from Buena Park — in San Bernardino, born to Elgin and Virginia Knott.
“Walter Knott overcame many hurdles and hardships,” said Jennings.
“First was the death of his father at age 6, which meant that he and his
mother couldn’t keep their family farm due to financial hardships. When
Knott was a sophomore in high school, the small bit of farmland he and
his cousin owned in Coachella Valley was destroyed by a November freeze.
Knott moved back to Pomona and worked in the fields all week, then
jumped on a train to drop produce off and take orders at various cities
on the line. It was grueling but profitable.”
Walter was 21 when he married Cordelia, his bride of six decades and the mother of their four children.
With their Pomona house, life looked nice and easy. Only, Knott
wanted a farm, even in the rough California desert. “Think of it: 160
acres of land to call our own if we live on it for three years!”
Cordelia reacted with tears, foreseeing “coyotes, rattlesnakes, no
inside plumbing, no running water, not even a house but a humble adobe
dwelling,” wrote the biographer Helen Kooiman. “Sand. Hardship. ‘Walter,
you can’t mean it!’ ”
He did. “Those desert years were some of the best years of our life. …
The hardships we endured made us tough,” said Walter. “After what we
went through there, nothing could faze us.”
Finding Traction
By 1920, Walter was moving back to the Los Angeles area — and found
his gold mine: Buena Park. He took up his cousin Jim Preston’s offer to
join a farming partnership.
“His farming dream was still alive, and Knott leased 20 acres of land
along Grand Avenue from William Coughran, which Knott later bought
outright,” said Jennings. “This was the land that Knott’s Berry Farm
would later be built on.”
Knott made money selling berries at a roadside stand that grew into a building called Knott’s Berry Place in 1928.
Then came Walter’s eureka moment. Discovering Anaheim park chief
Rudolph Boysen’s mix of blackberry, loganberry and red raspberry, Knott
started growing the boysenberry in 1933.
Depression? What Depression? Knott suddenly had a hot seller in
boysenberry pie and jam. With Cordelia weighing in with her chicken
specialty, their restaurant boomed.
“Few people who went down the road from Buena Park to the sea could
resist the temptation to stop at the Berry Farm, either for a chicken
dinner or for the berries,” wrote Norman Nygaard in “Walter Knott: 20th
Century Pioneer.”
By 1937, wrote Kooiman, “waiting lines were so long, he couldn’t see the end.”
This was after a banker turned him down for a loan with a dismissive
“highway restaurants fail when they try to expand,” noted Jennings.
Knott found the means, and payroll was about to rocket — from 25 in 1936 to 350 in 1947 to 2,000 in 1972 to 10,000 now.
“My greatest satisfaction in life,” said Knott, “is knowing that some
widow, some young person or other human being can come here and find an
honest job and win the biggest prize life has to offer — self-respect.”
Those early employees felt Walter’s tenet of goodwill toward
customers: “This is more valuable than what we actually sell here on the
farm. Goodwill doesn’t develop simply. It develops only through years
of integrity, fair dealing and honest toil. We’ve worked hard to develop
this, and we want you to help us maintain it.”
Riding High
With the food good, Knott wanted the farm’s entertainment to be even
better. So he added amusement to the mix in 1940, sparking Knott’s Berry
Place & Ghost Town with a Western theme. In the coming years he
littered it with Calico Square, Calico Saloon, Calico Mine Ride and the
bandit-thrilling Calico Train, taking the name from a town he had turned
into a tourist attraction in San Bernardino County between Buena Park
and Las Vegas.
“Walter Knott is credited with many crucial innovations that paved
the way for his many successes,” said Jennings. “The first was cutting
out the middleman so he could keep more profits from his farming and
selling directly to grocers.
Then came the boysenberry, incorporated
into punch, jams, jellies and pies at Knott’s Berry Farm for over 80
years.
Yet another successful business venture came from the Chicken
Dinner Restaurant that has been serving their world famous chicken for
80 years as well. To accommodate the long lines, Knott built Ghost Town
in 1940.
Word of mouth traveled across the country, and within a few
years, Knott’s Berry Place (which became Farm in 1947) was one of the
most successful amusement parks in the United States and still is to
this day.”
Nowadays, Knott’s Berry Farm spotlights six live shows, 18 family rides and 10 roller coasters.
Also in the complex is a rendition of Independence Hall, replete with a 2,000-pound bell, dedicated on July 4, 1966.
Cheers rang in the coming years, especially from Reagan: “He’s been a
participant in every worthwhile cause that you can imagine. He has
never said no to anything charitable or to anything in the community. We
need a couple hundred million more citizens like Walter Knott.”
Reagan became president in 1981, the year Knott died at age 91. His descendants sold Knott’s Berry Farm to Cedar Fair Entertainment for about $250 million in 1997. The parent company, based in Ohio, has
seen its stock rocket 900% since 2009, with record net revenue of $1.24
billion in 2015, although it doesn’t publicly break out individual park
sales among its 11 amusement sites.
“Walter Knott is indeed an inspirational figure,” said Jennings, “in
the sense that he started with very little and through sheer will power
and positive thinking (failure was not in his vocabulary) found the
farmlands that he needed to grow his fruits and vegetables and then
expanded and bought more land as the years progressed and then
capitalized on what customers wanted: good food, good preserves and good
old fashioned Old West entertainment, which really couldn’t be found
anywhere else, at least until Disneyland opened in 1955.
“Walter Knott started as a simple farmer and eventually became the
owner of one of the world’s most popular and successful amusement parks.
Talk about inspirational.”
Photos Courtesy Jay Jennings
Bucky Fox is an editor and author in Southern California.
