Cordelia’s fried chicken – trailblazer for America’s first amusement park

(Part II of The birth of Knott’s Berry Farm from the Great Depression)

Well-known chefs like Paul Bocuse in Lyon, France keep their vegetable gardens close to their restaurants to have fresh handpicked vegetables for salads or casserole dishes. This is also a practice of “The Inn at Little Washington” in Virginia, attracting a long line of VIP customers from the US capital city of Washington, who make reservations months ahead. This is the same with the big Knott’s Berry Farm at Buena Park, California that eventually converted the Tea Room into the Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant upon the persistent demand of customers.

The delicious smell of Cordelia’s fried chicken

Walter Knott walked along the lines of customers standing outside the Berry Farm Tea Room, awaiting their turn. One customer said to him, “What is that smell? It smells so delicious!” Walter answered, “That’s my wife, Cordelia, frying chicken for our dinner.” The customer asked, “Is that on the menu in the Tea Room?” Walter had to explain that Cordelia was only willing to cook for the Tea Room for the time being, in order to make ends meet. The customers expressed their disappointment.

“What are we going to do? The hungry customers keep lining up, and lots of them are asking when we’re going to start serving your chicken dinners!” Cordelia was restless as these questions dogged her. So one day, she took a big step and asked Walter to bring her some nice, fat three and a half pound chickens to fry up. Pulling out their wedding china and linen napkins, Cordelia had the girls set up the dining table to serve eight people that very first time in 1934. For 65 cents each, the diners were served her fried chicken with cherry rhubarb in sauce dishes, green salad with French dressing, mashed potatoes with gravy, boiled cabbage with bits of ham, and hot biscuits served with jam. Berry pie slices were served for dessert, along with vanilla ice cream or sherbet.

By the end of summer that year, Cordelia and her helpers were serving an average of 85 chicken dinners a day. The Knott family worked hard in trying to keep up with the demand of the long lines of people waiting to eat. Russell ran outside to catch the chickens, which Walter killed and cleaned. Cordelia then fried the chickens, Virginia and Toni served them and little Marion took the dishes away.

It was understood and expected that the Knott children would pitch in and help out, but Cordelia was practical enough to know what would keep them willing to work. She thought, “We’ll pay them each something so they feel like real workers.”

Strictness and kindness of Mrs. Knott

A young mother named Vannie was hired to work as waitress. She noticed how business-like and demanding Mrs. Knott was in the kitchen, and so she tried to do her best everyday. She wore her hairnet and stockings to work, and put on her apron as soon as she clocked in. She followed instructions carefully because she wanted to please Mrs. Knott and not frustrate her. She saw how, sometimes, those who forgot to do what they had been told, had to be warned in front of the other waitresses and workers. She saw how their faces turned red with embarrassment.

Another side of Cordelia was giving things to the employees to take home to their children. If there was chicken left over, Cordelia sent it home with the waitresses or other kitchen workers for their families. She also went to jail to bail out waitresses, took clothes to people whose houses had burned, gave away groceries to the poor, but she always told Vannie not to let others know about it. Cordelia gave without expecting to get anything in return. She didn’t want honors or awards either.

Besides being humble, it seemed to Vannie that Mrs. Knott was also very careful about saving money. Cordelia and Walter lived simply, and didn’t even have central heating in their house. Both of them got up at about 4 a.m. to work in the kitchen. Cordelia would cut up and fry chicken or use a rolling pin to roll out pie dough. Walter would make and stir the milk gravy for the chicken and dumplings. By working together, they already had a half-day’s work done by 8 o’clock in the morning, when the paid workers arrived. Soon, the kitchen was crowded and steamy with the hustle and bustle of preparing the hearty chicken dinners and side dishes that were served up everyday except for Monday and Tuesday, when the Tea Room was closed.

Teamwork of Cordy’s cooking and Walter’s agri and food technology

Around 1930, George Darrow from the US Department of Agriculture consulted Walter. Being now well known for his berry vine expertise, Walter was asked to help revive the dying berry vines of Rudolph Boysen, who had successfully crossed a loganberry, blackberry and red raspberry and grown an enormous berry, but had failed to propagate it.

Walter carefully nursed the six scraggly vines over a period of two years and when successful, he named them boysenberries in honor of Rudolph Boysen. Ads for boysenberries were everywhere! Magazines, newspapers, farm and nursery journals – all showed pictures of the giant boysenberry and told about its great flavor. The ads also featured Cordelia’s own boysenberry recipe for pies and other dishes. This was the berry that made the Knott’s Berry Farm famous. It was a real blessing for them and many other farmers during those lean Depression Years.

Walter even figured out how to quick-freeze fruits and vegetables, and he wrote about his methods and findings. Perfected three decades later, the method could freeze 70,000 pounds of berries during summer, which were used for making berry pies the whole year. Walter was always willing to share what he had learned from his plant experiments. To be more efficient, Walter invested in an orange juice machine in 1960 that could juice a crate of oranges in less than two minutes.

The great expansion

Busy with his fields of berries and rhubarb, Walter left the concerns of the Tea Room to Cordelia and their children. But when he noticed the lines of people that waited all the way up Grand Avenue as far as the eye could see, he knew that it was time to expand the Tea Room once again.

In 1937, his field crew built the biggest expansion yet, and the Tea Room opened for year-round service on May 1. They now had a separate kitchen, dining rooms, and a parking lot. They could seat 325 people, and on a typical day they served more than 500 chicken dinners. But on Thanksgiving Day that year, the line of people ended far north all the way to what is now Orangethorpe Avenue, for more than three blocks long. That day, the Tea Room served 1,774 dinners, 355 pies and 8,890 biscuits! (One day in 1960, the restaurant served 8,735 dinners – all made from scratch!)

Oldest daughter Virginia, by now in her mid-twenties, set up a small gift business at the north side of the Tea Room. She sold souvenirs, greeting cards, and handmade items. Today, a large house containing the souvenir shop sells barrels of Cordy’s famous fudge candies, colonial costumes, calico rag dolls, boysenberry jams, marmalades and raspberry shortbreads.

Bringing back the ‘Little House On The Prairie’ as an amusement park

At the age of 50, Walter and Cordelia had worked hard for 30 years, managing to survive the Great Depression without getting any help from the government or even depending on banks for a loan. It was now time to reflect on the past and look toward the future.

Walter’s mind had drifted back to the stories his grandmother, Rosamond Dougherty, had told him and his younger brother, Elgin. They were about pioneers who pushed themselves and their way to a better life. During their move out west to the new frontier, they ran into all kinds of adventures with Indians, strangers and rattlesnakes. Walter was inspired by the TV series “Little House on the Prairie,” based on the books of Laurel Ingalls Wilder.

He wanted to pay tribute to all the forefathers who had taken this journey through the Old West. To recreate it, Walter thought of an old hotel he had seen in Arizona. He talked to Cordelia about it but being practical, she said, “Maybe then, the folks that are waiting in such long lines at our Chicken Dinner Restaurant will have something to keep them occupied.” Walter agreed, and so he arranged for the Gold Trails Hotel to be moved to Knott’s Berry Farm from that old Arizona ghost town. The original building had been built back in 1868, the same year his grandparents had traveled overland to settle in California.

Definitely a gold mine– no match for Disneyland

Movie actors were hired to create a living history show. They had ladies and gentlemen who depicted the people of the era, wearing detailed costumes of the mid-1800. There were frontier men, Indians, wagon masters, express riders, and people dressed up just like the pioneers. The Wild West was a very popular theme in books and movies in the mid-1900s. Roy Rogers and Gene Autry were top box office movie stars for several years.

In 1952, Walter, a train enthusiast, was offered the engines, cars and equipment from the Denver and Rio Grande Railway in Colorado, which had gone out of business. It was the first time an amusement park anywhere in the world had a real operating train. A live TV broadcast by a local celebrity Bill Welch on Channel 5, highlighted Knott’s Berry Farm for the first time over the airwaves.

In the summer of 1955, Walter and Cordelia attended the opening ceremonies of Disneyland and were very concerned whether this new amusement park would take their business away. But when they returned to Knott’s, the parking was totally full. They felt very grateful. Once again, they gave thanks to God for their success. That same year, they arranged for a church that was being torn down in the neighboring town of Downey to be moved and reconstructed near Ghost Town. Once the First Baptist Church of Downey, it became the “Church of Reflections” at the Knott’s Berry farm.

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