Other shows listed in Curtsied credits include In the Heat of the Night, The Yellow Rose, Rawhide and Wagon Train. The family lived below the jail because the jail took up the entire second floor and his mother, Nellie Sneed Gates, cooked for the prisoners. Video Editing In Android Programmatically, He also 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. His mustache face is the illustration for the Dirty Half-Dozen article. He was featured in all three of the only films produced by Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney's C. V. Whitney Pictures: The Searchers (1956); The Missouri Traveler (1958) with Brandon deWilde and Lee Marvin; and The Young Land (1959) with Patrick Wayne and Dennis Hopper. (1955) in an episode called "Us Haggens," in which he arrived in Dodge City to avenge the death of his twin brother, the fact that Festus had a twin was never again mentioned on the show. Ken Curtis Family, Childhood, Life Achievements, Facts, Wiki and Bio of 2017. Columbia Pictures signed Curtis to a contract in 1945. When Curtis was eight, he and his brother Julius were placed in an orphanage for a month because their parents could not afford to feed them. His Broadway credits include Around the Corner (1936) and Jayhawker (1934). He was born James King Aurness in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This television show helped generate interest in sport parachuting. Reportedly, Curtis based the character off a local drunk in his town, adapting that country twang to film. In Rio Grande (1950) he was a guitar-playing lead-singing tenor with the "Regimental Singers". Ken Curtis joined the Sons of the Pioneers as lead singer from 1949 to 1952. Curtis final film, Conger, vented on TNT in 1991, the same time as the songster and actors death. By virtue of his second marriage, Curtis was a son-in-law of film director John Ford. Considering the kind of scruffy, backwoods, uneducated, Deep-South hillbilly types he played, many people would be surprised to hear that Ken Curtis wasn't actually born in the south but in the small town of Las Animas, Colorado, the son of the town sheriff. series Gunsmoke (1955). Festus ],