Marion Knott dead, guided Knott's Berry Farm's growth

LOS ANGELES -- Marion Knott, a sharecropper's daughter on a little Orange County spread that offered berries by the basket but decades later grew into one of Southern California's signature tourist attractions, has died. She was 92.

Knott, who was raised on and later guided the development of Knott's Berry Farm, died Nov. 13 at her Newport Beach home. The last surviving child of berry farmers Walter and Cordelia Knott had been in failing health, her son Darrel Anderson said.

"She represents the end of an era, the last of her generation," Anderson said Wednesday. "She was born on the farm, lived through the Depression, sold rhubarb on the roadside, and then came into what I think of as the golden years of California and the U.S."

Tall and elegant, Knott picked berries as a child and helped out at the tea room her mother started in their home. When Cordelia Knott started offering 65-cent dinners of fried chicken, biscuits, mashed potatoes and rhubarb in 1934, Marion and her two sisters served hungry customers on their mother's wedding china.

"We were really grateful for every 10-cent tip that was left for us," she said in 1978.

Knott, who also went by her married name of Montapert, later became known as a philanthropist. In 2007, she donated $8 million for a film and TV studio at Chapman University, where she served on the board of trustees. She also funded the Marion Knott Nursing Education Center at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach.

But Knott spent her career on what she, her sisters and brother kept calling "the farm," although it had morphed into a huge amusement park that drew 4 million visitors a year for boysenberry pie, a nostalgic stroll through the Old West and a few stomach-churning minutes on roller coasters like Montezooma's Revenge, where thrill-seekers went from zero to 55 mph in five seconds.

The transformation wasn't exactly something envisioned by patriarch Walter Knott, but it seemed to spring from a sense of showmanship that he and his daughter shared. Walter Knott conceived of the farm's Ghost Town, a collection of old Western buildings moved from abandoned town sites, and Marion Knott added to it with Fiesta Village, a complex of adobe buildings and flower stalls with strolling mariachis.

She later supervised the design and construction of park features, including areas devoted to the Roaring 20s and, in Camp Snoopy, the characters of "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. "She had a canny sense of what people were looking for," said Jay Jennings, author of a Knott's Berry Farm history.

She was born April 22, 1922, on the Buena Park, California, farm where her parents had moved two years earlier. She didn't assume a leadership position until 1967, when she successfully urged her family to adopt more efficient financial practices.

In 1968, the Knotts started charging admission to most of their attractions. "We had to put up the gate," she said, "because we were losing it to the hippies." Over the years, Marion Knott assumed control over development at the farm while her siblings were responsible for personnel, maintenance and other business functions.