I am "a builder!" From childhood, I always have been and I guess I will always be "a builder." I am not exactly sure where it came from! It may be the fact that I grew up in a small house with seven children and was always looking for a place to escape from the chaos or it is something hereditary in my genes. It certainly could be either!
When I was a child, I started simply. I remember being attracted to a strange patch of very tall weeds that looked a lot like a patch of bamboo growing in the field behind our house. I hollowed out the center of that patch leaving a small hidden door as an entrance. I didn't move into it, but I remember it as a private place to go hide from the world! For a while it was my quiet escape from all the chaos of a big family in a small house. When the weather changed and the tall weeds began to die, I was forced to give it up.
In the woods behind our neighbor's house was a goldmine of building opportunities. Our neighbor was old and could no walk back into her woods to check on things, so I had free reign for several years. I first secured a hide-out under a rock ledge overlooking a small creek. (We called it a "branch.") I remember dreaming about how I would make a home of it. I found rocks to build a fire pit for cooking. I dragged tree branches up to "wall it in" for security. When it was done, I dammed up the creek with rocks to make a "swimming pool." Starting even then, I learned from future projects that it was more fun building these places than it was actually using them when they were finished. When finished, I tended to move on to the next building project.
Next, came "Fort Apache," built from the wooden rails of an old broken down rail fence along the edge of the woods. It had small rooms on each corner connected by a protective fence enclosing the whole fort with a main entrance!
After that, I talked a couple of friends into helping me dig a cave under a tree behind a neighbor's house with one shovel between us! We spent most of our time talking about how big it was going to be with each of us having our own room. The more we talked, the bigger the cave came to be in our imaginations. We chose the under-the-tree location so that we could dig in the shade and not get too hot doing it! After digging about a foot deep and hitting tree roots, we decided to abandoned the project "for a while." We never got back to it!
I had a few more small projects until my father sold his sawmill and started a building material business when all this creativity was interrupted with work, work and more work especially after school, weekends and during the summer. When I reached age 14 and graduated from grade school, I left for the seminary. In seminary, I did help with a small building project, under a rock ledge, in the woods behind the seminary, but my memory is very foggy because they never gave us much time to do much on our own.
Twelve years of seminary never gave me much time to engage in "building projects" until after I was ordained. I used my imagination to find summer jobs away from home like working at a pickle factory and at a hospital in Louisville, as a house painter outside Chicago and as a bar tender, a hotel desk clerk and a campground preacher for the United Church of Christ in Crater Lake National Park in Oregon.
After ordination, I was assigned to the home missions of our diocese. This gave me more opportunities to go back to my favorite pass-time - building projects. I renovated an abandoned camp on Lake Cumberland that a previous pastor had built - Camp Cracker Neck.
During those years I got the idea that I would "flip houses" till I retired so that I could build up enough funds to have my own retirement home. I started with opening a "Christmas Club Account" at the bank which produced $500 a year. Instead of spending it each year for five years, I saved up $2,500.00 to make a down payment on my first house which costs $7,500.00. I remember borrowing $5,000.00 and being worried to death about how I would pay that off. My salary in the first few years was $90.00 a month with $60.00 a month in Mass stipends. I worked to renovate it and paid off the debt over the next ten years until I was assigned to move to the center of the diocese. I sold that house for $18,000.00 and gave part of the profits to the mission church as a gift to build a picnic shelter at the church for group gatherings.
I took most of the profit to build a second house on a lake outside Bardstown. I was assigned to Louisville soon after that house was built. I sold that house and bought the first of three houses on Eastern Parkway. Each time I renovated the houses I had bought, I sold them and made a profit on each one.
In Louisville, my biggest project had to be when I was a major player in the $22,000,000.00 renovation and restoration of the Cathedral of the Assumption and its complex from 1983-1997.
Next, I completely renovated a huge old 1850's house in Meade County as a "retreat house" that I had hoped to rent. Then the sexual abuse scandal hit and I was scared to rent it out so I sold it.
Then I started working at St. Meinrad Seminary as a staff member and doing priest retreats around the world. While at St. Meinrad, I built a coffee shop called Jack's in the Commons.
A little later, I built a teaching kitchen for seminary students and my newly designed post-ordination priest programs.
For that program, I raised the funds, help design and remodeled a complete floor of Bede Hall into overnight rooms for a senior priest the program that I had established. The rooms were especially sensitive to the needs of senior priests and offered deluxe accommodations for a seminary program at least!
Next, I had a "Prayer Garden" built next to the Shrine of Monte Casino on a hill near St. Meinrad Monastery in honor of my mother.
Because I was traveling a lot, and not wanting property that required yard work and the possibility of vandalism, I bought my present condo on Eastern Parkway, my fourth residence on that street. Looking to the future, I bought it because it had two floors - a main floor and a "mother-in-law" suite downstairs. It has two decks, two kitchens, three bathrooms, three bedrooms and two living rooms. After saving and flipping houses for over 50 years, I was able to realize my old dream of paying cash for my condo and bought and in-home health care policy so that I could someday, in my retirement, live on one floor and my care-taker could live on the other, without having to be in each other's space.
When I did retire, I started building projects in the Caribbean missions, mostly in the 32 island country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, but also in Barbados and Trinidad, with the help of a group of generous donors. On the main island, I remodeled a complete Pastoral Centre with its multiple guest rooms and offices, built a new chapel, air-conditioned a huge meeting room, remodeled the bishop's quarters, built new kitchens upstairs and down and secured new furniture and decorations throughout.
I remodeled a retreat house on another island, renovated parts of churches on a couple of other islands and helped with the needs of the orphanage on the main island, not to mention two cars, two vans, a outboard motor for island hopping, securing much of the equipment for a new hospital, school supplies and toys for children. I even sent a large group of teenagers to Portugal for "World Youth Day" and taught formation classes for deacons, priests and seminarians. After twelve trips down there, I finally had to quit when the island volcano erupted and COVID struck.
After that, I remodeled my old closed grade school down in Meade County, Kentucky, into a new St. Theresa Family Life Center and Museum and the old parish rectory into a new St. Theresa Guest House for overnight guest presenters and for private retreats.
In the last few years, I have partnered with Father John Judie in his missionary work in Kenya and Tanzania. So far, with the help of several generous donors, I have built a new 500-seat church in Kenya, a new house for a single mother of two children, helped pay off the debt of several seminarians and have almost completed a half-finished grade school in Tanzania.
I said at the beginning of this post that this drive to build might just be "something in the Knott genes that I have inherited." From my friend and distant genealogist relative in Maryland, Frank Knott, from which we Knotts migrated to Kentucky in the early 19th century, I have learned that both of us come from a long list of "builders" going way back to England.
I would like to end this blog with one bit of proof of this hunch that I experienced in Newfoundland, Canada, when I was leading a priest retreat up there. One day I was standing at the hotel guest counter when I looked out to see a truck leaving the parking lot. The sign on the doors said "Knott Construction Company." When I asked if there were members of the Knott family living in the area, the woman said, "Lots of them! I heard that they came from England on a boat headed to Maryland in the United States back in the late 18th or early 19th century, but some of them were so sea-sick that they got off the boat and refused to go any further!" I really wanted to stop that truck before it left, but I was too late. I wanted to tell them that my father started a construction company that my youngest brother now owns, called Knott's Supply, that my grand father and great grandfather were builders and that I too am a descendant from a long line of "Knott builders" as well! Yes, it's an obsession - a handed-down obsession I call a "Knott thing!"
