I enjoy reading biographies. Quite often I can learn about the struggles and challenges people overcome to follow their dreams, and these stories can be inspiring.
Take the story of a scrawny, under-sized pre-teen in Morgantown, West Virginia. He was one of four sons growing up in the Great Depression. His job was plucking chickens, but he dreamed of becoming an entertainer. He was always too nervous to try to perform by himself. He eventually purchased a dummy which he named “Danny” and worked up a ventriloquist act (admittedly stolen from Edgar Bergen) and headed to New York to seek his fortune. After flunking out twice on the amateur hour circuit, the young man returned to Morgantown. He attended West Virginia University as a speech major, intent on becoming a teacher. He was given a second opportunity to hone his entertaining skills while in Special Services during World War II. He continued pursuing ventriloquism until the fateful night that he threw his dummy into the ocean to get laughs. And laughs he got from both GI and civilian audiences. Never completely conquering his stage fright, he incorporated his nervousness into his act, impersonating such tremulous creatures as a novice TV weatherman and a tongue-tied sportscaster. In New York after the war, he secured work on a local children’s show before spending several years on a daytime soap opera.
In 1955, he was cast in two small roles in the Broadway play No Time for Sergeants, which starred another teacher-turned-actor named Andy Griffith, who would become his lifelong friend and coworker. From 1955 through 1960, he was a regular on The Steve Allen Show, provoking uncontrollable bursts of laughter as the bug-eyed, quivering “man on the street.” He made his screen debut in the 1958 film version of No Time for Sergeants, recreating his stage role of
the squeaky-voiced coordination therapist. In 1960, he was cast as uptight, self-important, overzealous, magnificently inept deputy Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show. This was the role that made him a star.
You may have guessed by now that man was Don Knotts, who went on to star in films such as The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, The Shakiest Gun in the West, and The Incredible Mr. Limpet. His story inspires me because it is a reminder that God can use us just the way we are, quirks and all, if we just have a little faith to follow our dreams.
In Christ,
Kurt