The details bring life to obituaries

I look forward each day to reading The Tribune’s obituary section. Some people may avoid it because they assume obituaries are about death. But obituaries usually tell us more about people’s lives than their deaths.

Sure, obituaries tell us that somebody died, and when and where and usually at what age. Rarely do they tell us what caused the person’s death. But that takes only a few lines. The rest of the obituary is usually devoted to telling us about the person’s life. It’s actually a brief biography.

Sometimes, obituaries aren’t so brief, especially if they’re about better-known persons. I read one of those longer biographies in last Friday’s Tribune. It was about Marion Knott, the last surviving child of Walter and Cordelia Knott. The Knotts founded Knott’s Berry Farm, the Los Angeles area’s second most famous amusement park.

But that obituary failed to mention that the Knotts had an earlier berry farm right here in the North County. It was near Shandon. I learned that many years ago from the late Don McMillan of Shandon. He was a rancher, newspaper columnist and amateur historian.

He told me the Knotts arrived in Shandon in 1917 with two children (their two younger children were not yet born). The Knotts came from Barstow, where Knott had been building adobe houses. They leased 7½ acres about a mile west of Shandon along the Estrella River on the former Sacramento Ranch.

Knott then grew vegetables and boysenberries for the people who lived and worked on the widespread ranch. He produced more than the ranch people needed, so he sold the surplus in Paso Robles along with candy that his wife made.

They did well. They bought a Model T Ford and accumulated about $3,000. In 1921, they left Shandon and headed for Southern California. There, they bought 10 acres in Buena Park and eventually acquired some neighboring property.

Soon, they were selling berries and pies from a roadside stand. That grew into a chicken-dinner restaurant, which in time attracted long lines of customers waiting to get in. So in 1940, Knott started to create a ghost town to entertain the waiting restaurant customers. The rest is history — or obituary.

The Knotts had four children — one son and three daughters. The children sold Knott’s Berry Farm in 1997. Marion, who died Nov. 13, was the last of them.

As for the boysenberries along the Estrella River in Shandon: They grew into a wide, dense thicket. People would lay wide boards on the thicket and crawl out on them to pick the berries.

This story was originally published November 30, 2014 at 6:44 PM with the headline "The details bring life to obituaries."