Carson’s Death Builds Investor’s Hope of Selling Childhood Home
Jim Pruett was driving through this modest town in the spring of 2003 when he happened to notice the billboard. “H-e-e-e-r-e’s Norfolk,” it declared. “Proud Home Town of Johnny Carson.”
He decided on the spot to buy the entertainer’s boyhood home, certain it would be his best investment ever.
As it turned out, it may well have been his worst.
Pruett, a computer technician from South Dakota, had been searching for a celebrity home he could buy on the cheap, then sell on EBay. He considered a bid for the boyhood house of former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), but the family did not want to sell. Next, he called the mother of NFL kicker Adam Vinatieri -- gritting his teeth because he despised the New England Patriots. She wasn’t interested either.
Then Pruett drove through Norfolk and found the white Craftsman house with the rickety steps at 306 S. 13th St.
The Carson family moved here in 1933, when Johnny was 8. This was the house where Johnny read “Hoffmann’s Book of Magic” -- the inspiration for his career under the lights. This was where he practiced for his first professional act: “The Great Carsoni,” performing card tricks for the Rotary Club. This was where Carson listened to Jack Benny, where he wrote his humor column for the high school paper, where he carved his name into the attic rafters.
Pruett, certain he had stumbled on the best-kept real estate secret in the Midwest, offered the owners $150,000 -- about twice the going rate for similar houses in the area.
“To them, it was just a house,” he said. “In my world, I thought it was a gold mine. I still do. How could it not be?”
Pruett has been trying to sell Carson’s boyhood home ever since he bought it. He first put it on EBay, with a minimum bid of $150,000. Then he offered it to the city of Norfolk. He tried listing it with a local real estate company. He even put a big sign in the yard announcing the Carson connection. Finally, in frustration, he rented it out.
Carson’s death Sunday gave Pruett hope: Maybe the many tributes would unleash such fondness for all things Johnny that he would at last be able to unload the house on 13th Street.
“I don’t want to capitalize on his death, by any stretch of the imagination,” Pruett said Tuesday. “But you get a story that’s hot, and you run with it.”
He has listed the home on EBay again, touting “a once in a lifetime opportunity to own a piece of history from television’s greatest icon.” But he’s knocked the starting bid down to $93,500. Still, his listing exudes confidence: The property, he assures potential bidders, “is sure to become one of the most beloved landmarks in America.”
Folks in this town aren’t so certain. They revere Carson as a star and a friend. Though he left town after high school to join the Navy, he came back to Norfolk often and donated millions to local causes, funding a cancer care center, a theater, a community college learning lab and more. But they find it hard to believe that a white frame house in a town of 24,000 -- isolated on the plains of Nebraska -- will become a national landmark.
Bob Galitz, who lives around the corner from the Carson home, does a fair imitation of Ed McMahon when he contemplates whether Pruett and his business partner, Rick Runge, will recoup their investment.
“Noooooooo way,” he says. “They’ll never get the money back.”
His wife, Ruthie, chuckles aloud at the thought of anyone spending anything close to $100,000 for a 1,500-square-foot house with one tiny bathroom, a narrow corridor of a kitchen and little closet space. “It’s an old grandma-and-grandpa house,” she said.
Pruett says there’s a market for celebrity homes, but his favorite example -- the childhood house of rapper Eminem -- is more a cautionary tale than inspiration.
A pair of investors bought the cramped tract home in Warren, Mich., from Eminem’s uncle and tried several times to auction it on EBay. The bids raced up to $10 million, but they weren’t from serious buyers. Two years later, the house is still unsold.
“It’s a very small market,” said one of the investors, attorney Sebastian Lucido. “Most people aren’t going to pay a premium just to say they live in [a celebrity’s] house.”
Of course, someone could buy the Carson house with an eye toward turning it into a tourist draw.
But Norfolk already has the Johnny Carson Gallery at the Elkhorn Valley Museum & Research Center -- a room filled with photos and mementos including Carson’s Emmys, an early script and a sports coat he wore on “The Tonight Show.” “I just don’t feel that having the house as an attraction would add that much to what we have,” Mayor Gordon Adams said.
Tourists Jim and Sue Vanderboom agree. They loved Carson’s show so much that they drove two hours out of their way Tuesday to visit the museum here. But even as she clutched a pair of headphones so she could listen to the video of old “Tonight Show” clips, Sue Vanderboom said she’d have little interest in visiting the Carson home.
“I saw it on television the other day, and I was like, ‘eh,’ ” she said, shrugging her dismissal. “It looks like a pretty ordinary house.”
Real estate agent Robin Jones, who is working with Pruett, is hoping it’s much more than that. At her Coldwell Banker office, Jones flipped through several pages of e-mails responding to the EBay posting.
From a man in Florida: “I will pay your asking price. Call me. Joe.”
From a bidder who identified himself as Eric: “Very interested. Have liquid cash options available for immediate purchase.”
The website had recorded more than 3,500 other hits on Tuesday. “It’s been nuts,” Jones said.
Pointing out the hardwood floors and crown molding during a tour of the 85-year-old house, Jones said she expected that the nostalgia now flooding Carson’s fans would drive up the bidding as the week wore on. She only wishes she knew how much.
“I can’t begin to put a value on what his name is worth,” she said as she walked through the living room that was young Johnny’s first stage. “Maybe in the big cities, you’d know how to value it because there are a lot of famous people there. But we’re just little Midwest Nebraska. I really don’t know.”
Jones ducked out to the dining room to take a cellphone call from a local TV station.
Mary Ann Kresnik, who is renting the house from Pruett, smiled wearily.
“It would be nice if they waited a while” before trying to capitalize on Carson’s death, she said. “But that’s just the kind of person I am: sentimental.”
