Don Knotts

A young Don Knotts and his figure Danny, not long before Knotts made sure the two of them never worked together again. Photo: Travalanche (Trav S.D.).

You know Don Knotts. The shaking hands, the darting eyes, the deputy who couldn't holster his own gun without an incident.^[1] Barney Fife won him five Emmys, five nominations, five wins, no losses.^[2] Ralph Furley kept him working into the eighties.^[3] What most folks don't know is where all that nervous energy first found a stage: a boy in Morgantown, West Virginia, talking through a sock on his hand because he couldn't afford the real thing yet.^[4] Pull up a chair. This is the ventriloquist Don Knotts used to be, and the story of exactly what he did to get out of it.

A West Virginia kid, a sock, and a house with trouble in it

He was born Jesse Donald Knotts on July 21, 1924, in Morgantown, the youngest of four brothers.^[5] His father Jesse struggled with mental illness and alcoholism for years, and the house could be a frightening place for a small kid. His father died of pneumonia when Don was thirteen.^[5] His brother Shadow, the family's gifted physical comedian, was the one Don studied and copied. Shadow died of complications from asthma in 1941, and it hit Don hard.^[5]

What got him through was the movies and radio comedies playing at Morgantown's Metropolitan Theatre, and two skills he taught himself as an escape hatch: magic, and ventriloquism.^[5] By high school he was doing his ventriloquist act right there on the Metropolitan Theatre's own stage, between the movies, for whoever happened to be in the seats.^[13] One retelling of his early years has him working as a chicken plucker to scrape together the money, practicing first with a sock over his hand until he could afford a real figure.^[4] He named that figure Danny.^[6] With his buddies Richie Ferrara and later Jarvis Eldred he built an act called the Radio Three, writing their own material and playing it for churches and school assemblies around town.^[5] He'd later call his years at Morgantown High "the happiest and most fertile" of his life: senior class president, forever telling jokes at assemblies.^[5]

Here's a detail I love. When he got to West Virginia University to study drama, he tried out for the campus radio station. They turned him down flat, told him his voice wasn't right for radio.^[5] Write that one down, folks. The campus DJs at WVU said no to the voice that was about to spend the next five decades on television and radio, in front of the entire country.

Special Services

He'd finished one year at WVU when the war came for him. Drafted in 1943, he was assigned to the Army's Special Services Branch, the units built specifically to keep the troops entertained.^[2] He shipped out to the western Pacific islands in a G.I. variety show called Stars and Gripes, a comedian now wearing a uniform.^[7] The people running the show weren't interested in Don Knotts, comedian. They wanted Don Knotts, ventriloquist, and they insisted that most of his stage time go to Danny.^[2] A whole generation of American vents got their start this way, handed a stage by an Army that needed acts. Knotts is the one who found a way to give his back.

Danny goes overboard

Here's the legend, and this trade has earned the right to keep it. There are two versions, and the archive holds both, because the one he told is as much a part of him as the one that happened.

Version one is the one Knotts told on himself, in his own 1999 memoir. He says only that he'd grown tired of the act, and that when his unit shipped out from an island in the Pacific, he simply left Danny behind on the beach and reported him missing in action.^[8] Ventriloquist Central's own tribute page tells it the identical way, and calls it the funniest sentence in their whole directory: he "left Danny on the beach and reported him missing in action."^[2] That's the version the business has passed around for fifty years, and it's a good one. Then there's the version from the man who was standing there.

Al Checco was actually there. A fellow soldier in the unit and Knotts's friend for the rest of his life, Checco remembered the real moment: Danny simply didn't turn up for a show one day, and when Checco asked what happened to him, Knotts just shrugged it off. "Well, I don't know. I don't know."^[9] Knotts never came clean about it while he was still in uniform. But years later, privately, he let Checco in on what actually happened: he'd heaved Danny over the rail of the troopship, into the Pacific Ocean, and swore for the rest of his life that he could still hear him hollering as the water closed over him.^[9]

A grown man deliberately drowns his own dummy at sea, then spends fifty years telling people he simply lost track of him on a beach. Folks, that's not embarrassment. That's a bit. He was already working a crowd. He just hadn't found his real stage yet.

Andy Griffith's deputy, and everything after

After the war Knotts went back to West Virginia University, graduated in 1948 with a degree in education, and married a fellow student, Kathryn "Kay" Metz, that same year.^[5] Steady comedy work in Morgantown wasn't going to happen, so he and Kay went to New York with almost nothing.^[5] Contacts got him onto Arthur Godfrey's shows, then into the role of Windy Wales on the radio serial Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders, where he became the most popular character on the program.^[5] Broadway found him next, alongside a fellow rising performer named Andy Griffith in No Time for Sergeants.^[6] Three years in Steve Allen's television ensemble, playing off cast mates like Tom Poston and Louis Nye, sharpened the fidgety, high-strung character that would make him famous.^[6]

Then Griffith brought him to Mayberry. Deputy Barney Fife, 1960 to 1965: five Emmy nominations, five wins.^[6] The films followed: The Incredible Mr. Limpet, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, The Reluctant Astronaut, The Shakiest Gun in the West, The Love God?, How to Frame a Figg, later The Apple Dumpling Gang.^[6] He closed out prime time as the landlord Ralph Furley on Three's Company, 1979 to 1984.^[6] I don't know if the nervous energy that used to fight him for control of a wooden partner is the same energy that won him five Emmys running a jail cell in Mayberry. Nobody's ever proven that one. But it's fun to wonder.

The partners, before and after

Deputy Barney Fife

The role that replaced Danny for good. Five Emmy nominations on The Andy Griffith Show, five wins, and the nervous energy America never got tired of watching.

Photo: The Perplexed Historian, via Find A Grave

The Steve Allen years

Three years in Allen's ensemble, alongside cast mates like Tom Poston, built the fidgety persona that Andy Griffith would later hand a badge.

Photo: Travalanche (Trav S.D.)

The Universal comedies

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken was the biggest of the string of Universal pictures that carried Knotts through the late 1960s, the nervous-man persona built into feature length.

Photo: Travalanche (Trav S.D.)

Ralph Furley

His last great TV role, the landlord on Three's Company, played opposite Suzanne Somers from 1979 to 1984, closing out a career that started with a sock on his hand.

Photo: Travalanche (Trav S.D.)

One of ours, whether he liked it or not

Don Knotts spent the back half of his life as the most famous man in America who used to be a ventriloquist, and he mostly let people forget the "used to be" part. The trade didn't forget him. Cybervent circulated video of Knotts himself talking about his ventriloquism days, first-hand confirmation of a story that otherwise lives only in tribute pages and a friend's memory.^[10] Ventriloquist Central built him a full entry in their tribute to twentieth-century performers.^[2] Trav S.D. wrote up his comic artistry at length, dummy included, treating the ventriloquism years as the origin of everything that came after, not a footnote to it.^[6] That's how this family works. You can leave the art behind. You can drown your own partner in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and never look back. We will still claim you. Every comedian who ever built a career on nervous energy and a room paying close attention owes something to a kid practicing with a sock in West Virginia.

Don Knotts died February 24, 2006, in Los Angeles, at eighty-one.^[11] He's buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park, under a marker that says nothing about ventriloquism at all.^[12] That's fine by me. We remember the part he tried to leave in the ocean anyway.

A sock on one hand and a chicken-plucking job to pay for the upgrade, that is dedication no Emmy committee ever thinks to ask about. Danny didn't get a vote when Don pitched him overboard, but I'd wager Barney Fife owes him royalties.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy