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Knight. When he had finished, the pen, the checkbook, and the smile on the prospect's face had vanished. Goodie left emptyhanded.
Most Californians, however, are far from disenchanted with Goodie Knight.
His autographed portrait beams from thousands of desks, mantelpieces, and the walls of meeting halls all over the state ("Our little billboards," smiles Kleinberger, who distributes them by the truck-load). Knight's name has become, in the most literal sense, a household word: Los Angeles teenagers, when they say farewell at night, say "governor," not "good night." Running for the governorship last year, he demonstrated his political prowess with a landslide (551,151 votes) victory over Democrat Richard Graves.
The Silver Fount. He has been fascinated by politics as long as he can remember. At the age of ten, he was attending political speeches. Once, he cut school and bribed a janitor with $2.50 to let him into an all-female meeting in Pasadena, where William Jennings Bryan was pouring out his oratorical silver. Before he cast his first vote. Goodie had heard Bryan a dozen times—as well as Woodrow Wilson, Hiram Johnson, William Howard Taft, Champ Clark and Theodore Roosevelt. Much of Goodie's political technique derives from his hooky-playing days with the great spellbinders. Says he: "Public speaking meant something in those days. Those men had to speak without microphones to huge crowds.
They had to have something to say, and know what they were talking about. It was a system that eliminated phonies.
Hell, with the radio, any idiot can make a speech if he can read. It has hurt the country, too. We don't know our candidates like we used to." Ten Carloads of Horses. Knight's parents both came of solid, pioneer, Mormon stock. His maternal grandfather, Judge John Milner, was a British lawyer who went to Provo, Utah for his health, became Brigham Young's secretary, a Mormon, and a fount of culture and learning.
When Lillie, the judge's golden-haired daughter, caught the eye of Jess Knight, a local farm lad, Judge Milner influenced Jess to get a law degree after he got Lillie's hand. Jess and Lillie obediently went off to the University of Michigan.
Goodwin Jess,* their second child, was born in a tiny house in Provo in 1896. Father Knight was restless and bored with the law, and when Goodie was still a small boy, the family moved on to Los Angeles, taking along ten carloads of mountain horses to sell in California as a grubstake.
In California Father Jess Knight made a comfortable living as a street and grading contractor who built miles of Los Angeles County's roads. During World War I, he lost his business and nearly $250,000 in a disastrous municipal-bond investment, but later recouped and became a successful mining speculator.
Goodie's boyhood was spent in substantial middle-class ease. His father indulged Goodie and his older sister Dolly, but Lil Knight, an ambitious, talented woman (she was variously a concert singer and a suffragette), preached total abstinence to her children and made free with the peachtree switch she kept in the kitchen.