From chicken plant to Congress

It's a long way from the chicken plant at East Lake to the halls of Congress, but that's exactly the journey Kerry Knott's incredible career has carried him.

Kerry, a Guntersville native who moved back here just a few years ago, retired about two weeks ago as chief of staff of Congressman Robert Aderholt's office in Washington. He said he will likely do some type of part-time work in the future, but so far, he has been catching up on overdue yard work at his home in River Pointe. 

His career has had him working with the movers and shakers in the political and Christian worlds ever since graduating from Auburn University in 1982. He grew up in Guntersville, the son of Juanita Knott and the late Bill Knott. 

His father had started Guntersville Fab with the Bices and the Wolfords and Kerry's very first job was at that plant. But for the next two summers, he worked at the chicken plant at East Lake. It was Gold Kist then and is Pilgrims today. 

"It paid about 30 cents more an hour than anything else that was around," Kerry said. His first job was stacking boxes of chicken in the freezer. 

"You'd start out in a coat, but you were working so much you'd be down to a T-shirt in just a few minutes," he said. 

He liked the job because it started early and he got off early. His afternoons were free for playing golf at Val-Monte or water skiing on the lake. His very first brush with celebrity happened at Gold Kist. One of his co-workers one summer was Lanis Morrison, from the popular band WARM. 

"The band had broken up and he needed a job," Kerry said. "Lanis has gone on to better things now. But he was in a different local band that summer and I'd go see him play sometimes." 

The job at the chicken plant was a good experience for Kerry because it gave him a lesson in being able to talk to all types of people. The Hispanic influx had not happened in the 1970s and many of the guys working at the plant were ex-cons. 

Kerry graduated from Auburn with a degree in marketing and what he wanted to do was get a job as a product manager for a large company. But he graduated in 1982. There was a recession on and it wasn't a good time for finding a job. 

"I had offers for some relatively low level sales jobs," he said. But none of those offers really called to him. 

He had attended a summer program during college at Georgetown and had made a lot of contacts. A couple of strokes of luck or maybe fate led him to seek a job in Washington, D.C. 

"I'd gone on a job interview in Atlanta and I wrecked my car, a Datsun 210," he said. "I plowed into the back of another car. The other car wasn't hurt but the front end of my Datsun was smashed. The insurance company paid me $900 to get it fixed. But my uncle Mac McCord knew someone who would fix it for $400." 

Kerry's mother suggested he use the extra $500 to go to D.C. and see what might happen. 

He slept on the couch of a friend from the Georgetown program and knocked on a bunch of doors, but nothing really opened up for him. Near the end of the trip, his host asked him to play on a softball team she was on. They needed a few players. 

"We were down by 3, the bases were loaded and I was up to bat," Kerry said. "I picked what looked like a kind of slow-moving kid in right field and I hit it over his head. It was a grand slam and we won the game." 

The coach asked Kerry to join the team and he explained that he'd like to, but he didn't have a job and he was about to have to go back home. 

The coach asked "Are you a Republican?" Kerry said he was. 

"I've got someone for you to call," the coach said. That "someone" was Morton Blackwell, director of the Leadership Institute in the Reagan White House. Morton invited Kerry to go tubing with a group he was leading on the Shenandoah River. 

"My political experience up to that point had consisted of putting out yard signs for Ray Bice's mayoral campaign (Ray lost to Bob Hembree Sr.) and making some phone calls during Reagan's 1980 campaign," Kerry said. "I might have spent 10 hours on the phone calls." 

Blackwell told Kerry they had an opening for a field representative in New Mexico. And he asked how quickly Kerry could get there. Kerry told him he'd drive home and catch a plane by Wednesday and he was hired. 

"I didn't even know what it paid, which turned out to be not a lot," Kerry said. 

The right to work law was a big issue at the time and Kerry worked on that issue. Ultimately, it would lead to him coming back to Alabama to work on the right to work law in this state when Gov. George Wallace threatened to dismantle it. 

"There were few Republicans in Alabama then," Kerry said. "But we had a good many conservative Democrats, people like Hinton Mitchem." 

An election got thrown out during that era over legislative district lines, he said. The Alabama Democratic Party decided it wouldn't have a primary, it would just name its nominees, and they planned to throw out incumbents they didn't like. As you might expect, it did not go over well. 

Kerry worked in the campaign for conservative Democrats, Republicans and even independents. 

"It was a bloodbath for the Democrats when all was said and done," he said. 

His work had not gone unnoticed by other Republicans, especially his old friends from the Georgetown program he'd attended. One of them thought he'd be a good fit as a campaign manager for a professor from Texas who was about to mount a campaign for Congress. You've probably heard of him. His name was Dick Armey. 

"He was speaking to the Alabama Tire & Retreaders Association at a meeting in Gulf Shores and it was set up for me to go and meet him," Kerry said. 

Kerry wasn't sure how well an academic would do speaking to a blue collar group like that. But he did an amazing job. 

Kerry then had lunch with Armey and Armey's wife Susan. 

"He told me two things at that lunch I'll never forget," Kerry said. "He said 'I don't have any money and I don't know anyone who does.'" 

But Kerry hired on as campaign manager anyway. 

"I would get paid from time-to-time, like when the rent was due," Kerry said. "We were running against a guy who spent a million dollars of his own money. We raised $360,000. We beat him by 1,700 votes." 

It was part of the so-called "Republican Revolution" in Congress. 

"Dick took me to Washington with him as his chief of staff," Kerry said. Kerry was 24 years old. "I guess he thought if I could run a campaign, I could run his office. I stayed in that role 17 years." 

Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House and Armey became the Majority Leader. It was a good, good time for Kerry. 

"There was a sense of genuinely wanting to accomplish some things," he said. "We had the Contract with America. We had the balanced budget act. Much of what we did was bi-partisan." 

He said 1992 to 1997 were years when he particularly felt they did a lot of good things. 

"We had some Democrats switching parties," Kerry said. "That was when Richard Shelby switched." 

Kerry left Congress to take a position with Microsoft of all companies. And he ended up working pretty closely with Bill Gates on a number of issues. 

Microsoft was concerned about antitrust legislation and Gates had testified before Congress and been ripped to shreds on the issue. He'd vowed never to go back to the Hill. 

"I didn't know that he'd vowed never to go back," Kerry said. And thus Kerry recommended something of a goodwill tour where Gates would go to Congress, visit with a number of Congressmen and that sort of thing. 

His first interaction with Gates was a conference call where he pitched the idea. Kerry could hear Gates fuming and stomping around the room as he talked. But Gates relented, made the tour Kerry had recommended and it was a success that took some of the antitrust heat off Microsoft. 

Kerry continued with Microsoft for 4-1/2 years. He felt Bill Gates always listened to his advice after that initial call and tour. 

"It was a lot of fun," he said. It also occurred to him somewhere along the way that his political work was really a form of product management, the career he'd originally wanted as an Auburn business student. 

He left Microsoft to start a D.C. office for Comcast. 

"They'd acquired AT&T Broadband and they were growing quickly," Kerry said. They were worried about some of the same antitrust issues Microsoft had dealt with. 

"Fiber was coming on," he said. "They bought Hulu and tried to buy Disney in a hostile takeover. It was a fun job. I got to meet the CEOs and presidents of a lot of companies. I remember around 2005 or 2006 going to a rodeo event with Comcast. There were two musical entertainers, John Fogarty, who was great, and a young girl of about 16 no one had heard of at the time named Taylor Swift. I remember looking down and seeing Taylor Swift and both members of her band watching the rodeo. I wish I'd have gone down and spoken to her now." 

From Microsoft, Kerry went to work for a Christian group you might not have heard of, the C.S. Lewis Institute. Kerry is deeply religious and the work was right up his alley. 

"They'd developed a great program of discipleship but they had not marketed it well," Kerry said. "I made a 5-year commitment to help them grow the institute. It's in 17 or 18 cities now and it continues to grow. They have a terrific program to help you disciple your children and your grandchildren." 

Kerry traveled abroad with the program and remembers some particularly powerful meetings in the Philippines. 

After his time with the C.S. Lewis Institute was up, the entire Knott family had a really interesting experience. 

"We've always opened our home to international students who are coming through," he said. "It's called couch surfing and we've met some really interesting friends through it." 

One student had just done Semester At Sea and told the Knotts that adults could participate in the program to as "lifelong learners." 

"They'd not done a great job of marketing the program, so the prices were low," Kerry said. "I wasn't working and we were home schooling the kids. So Michelle and I and our three children did Semester at Sea from January through April. We crossed the Pacific Ocean and ended up in England. We visited 11 countries in Asia, Africa and Europe." 

He said the atmosphere on the ship was "like the most liberal Northeastern liberal arts college you could imagine." But the Knotts are pretty easy going and they can fit in about anywhere. They continued homeschooling their children on the ship and making new friends. And they got to share their faith. 

"A Bible study started on the ship," Kerry said. "It grew into a Sunday morning worship service and 200 people were attending." 

When he returned from Semester at Sea, he became Presidential candidate John Kasich's policy advisor in the 2016 election. 

"If you remember the election, the Republican candidates were all just beating up on one another," Kerry said. "They were all trying to be the last man standing when Trump stumbled. But Trump never stumbled." 

Kasich and Ted Cruz were the last Republicans in the race before Trump got the nomination. 

After the campaign, Kerry became involved in an international ministry in Europe and the near East, the International Christian Community or ICC-Eurasia, that was looking to expand. He sits on the board. He and Michelle continue to work with the group to this day and recently spent some time in the Czech Republic with it. 

Kerry got a call from Congressman Robert Aderholt in 2019 asking him if he'd like to return to the Hill as chief of staff. He had known Robert since he was first elected. Kerry initially said no, but he would put together a list of names the Congressman might like to consider. 

But Congressman Aderholt kept after him and, 20 years after he'd left the Hill, Kerry returned. He worked as his chief of staff until his recent retirement. The Covid pandemic hit right after he took the position. It changed the Congressional schedule so that Congressmen and their staffs were spending more time in their districts and less time in Washington. 

That was perfect for Kerry. He and his family had been mulling a return to Guntersville – son Charlie wanted to go to high school here – and they moved here in 2020 during the pandemic. The new schedule allowed Kerry to spend more time in his hometown than he'd spent in years and he loved it. 

"Charlie got to play on the basketball and soccer teams," Kerry said. "The school he was at in Virginia was so big, he would have never been considered for the teams." 

Michelle has found meaningful work as the EL or English Learner teacher at Cherokee Elementary School. She organized a successful neighbors banquet for EL students and their families last fall that drew a large crowd and she continues to pursue new, innovative programming to make EL learners and their families feel at home here. 

Charlie and his sister Sydney are now students at Auburn. The Knotts' youngest Austin is a senior at Guntersville High and will go to Auburn next year. 

Ironically, it was the Republicans retaking control of the House that cemented Kerry's decision to retire. 

"They went back to the old Congressional schedule," he said. That meant Kerry would need to be in Washington 4 or 5 days a week just about every week. So he decided to retire. 

He will be 63 in July. He seems quite content to have stepped away from the job he loved and quite certain another exciting adventure will soon come along.