Ken Curtis was the quarterback of his Bent County High School football team and played clarinet in the school band.
27 Facts About Ken Curtis
2.
Ken Curtis attended Colorado College to study medicine, but left after a short time to pursue his musical career.
3.
Ken Curtis was a singer before moving into acting, and combined both careers once he entered films.
4.
Ken Curtis then joined Shep Fields and His New Music, an all-reeds band that dispensed with a brass section.
5.
Ken Curtis met his first wife, Lorraine Page, who was under contract at Universal Studios, and they were married in 1943.
6.
For much of 1948, Ken Curtis was a featured singer and host of the long-running country music radio program WWVA Jamboree.
7.
Ken Curtis joined the Sons of the Pioneers as a lead singer from 1949 to 1952.
8.
Ken Curtis starred in a series of musical Westerns with the Hoosier Hot Shots, playing singing cowboy romantic leads.
9.
Ken Curtis teamed with Ford and John Wayne in Rio Grande.
10.
Ken Curtis was a singer in the movie's fictional band The Regimental Singers that actually consisted of the Sons of the Pioneers; Curtis is not listed as a member of the principal cast.
11.
Ken Curtis joined Ford, along with Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell, and Jack Lemmon, in the comedy Navy classic Mister Roberts.
12.
Ken Curtis produced two extremely low-budget monster films in 1959, The Killer Shrews and The Giant Gila Monster.
13.
Ken Curtis guest-starred as circus performer Tim Durant on an episode of Perry Mason, "The Case of the Clumsy Clown", which originally aired on November 5,1960.
14.
Ken Curtis played the role of James Buckley and Pennell was his young disciple Theodore McKeever.
15.
In 1964, Ken Curtis appeared as muleskinner Graydon in the episode "Graydon's Charge" of the syndicated Western television series, Death Valley Days, guest-starring Denver Pyle and Cathy Lewis.
16.
Ken Curtis remains best known for his role as Festus Haggen, the scruffy, cantankerous, and illiterate deputy in Gunsmoke.
17.
Ken Curtis joined the Gunsmoke cast in 1967, superseding the previous deputy, Thaddeus "Thad" Greenwood, played by Roger Ewing.
18.
Ken Curtis observed many times that Jack came to Las Animas, where he would often end up drunk and in Ken Curtis' father's jail.
19.
Festus' character was known, in part, for the nasally, twangy, rural accent which Ken Curtis developed for the role, but which did not reflect Ken Curtis' actual voice.
20.
Besides engaging in the usual personal appearances most television stars undertake to promote their program, Ken Curtis traveled around the country performing at Western-themed stage shows at fairs, rodeos, and other venues when Gunsmoke was not in production, and even for some years after the show was cancelled.
21.
Ken Curtis campaigned for Ronald Reagan in 1976, during the future President's attempt to secure the Republican nomination from incumbent Gerald Ford.
22.
In two episodes of Gunsmoke, Carroll O'Connor was a guest-star; years later, Ken Curtis guest-starred as a retired police detective on O'Connor's NBC program In the Heat of the Night.
23.
Ken Curtis voiced Nutsy the vulture in Disney's 1973 animated film Robin Hood.
24.
Ken Curtis' last acting role was as the aging cattle rancher "Seaborn Tay" in the television production Conagher, by western author Louis L'Amour.
25.
Ken Curtis was a Republican and supported Barry Goldwater in the 1964 United States presidential election.
26.
Ken Curtis died on April 28,1991, in his sleep of a heart attack in Fresno, California.
27.
Ken Curtis was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in the Colorado flatlands.