Local star humbly follows his Saviors lead

Johnny Jett stands in front of the original bell that once announced church services at the Goddard Methodist Church in his hometown community. Photo by Lee Hawkins.

While his fans know him as one of the team on the hit television series, Barnwood Builders, his hometown folks know him as Johnny Jett, the talented artist from rural Fleming County.

Decades before he became a highly recognizable TV star, Johnny could be found swimming and fishing in the creek that runs beneath the Goddard White Bridge or scouting out log cabins with his best friend Sherman Thompson.

Born April 28, 1949, to Gene and the late Leotta Hawkins Jett, Johnny grew up roaming the hillsides in the eastern section of Fleming County and attended school at Goddard and Flemingsburg.

“When I was in the fourth and fifth grade I went to a three-room school in Goddard and at recess time we would slip off to swim in the creek. All the boys carried some string and a hook in their pockets so we could fish during recess too,” Johnny said. “We weren’t supposed to leave the school grounds so sometimes we would get in trouble if our principal Mr. Myron Barnett caught us in the creek. Many days were spent playing baseball and sometimes we would cross Sandlick creek and walk through the culvert and come out on the other side of the road so we could go to Mr. Yazell’s store. I remember Mrs. Helen Barnett taught the kids in the first, second and third grades in the back part of the school and Mrs. Lois Moore was my teacher, and taught grades four, five and six. In addition to being our principal, Mr. Barnett also taught the seventh and eighth grades and he was a preacher too,” Johnny said.

When I got out of high school my brother Billy was in Vietnam and he told my dad not to let me join the Army, he told him to make me go to college instead. So, daddy sent me to Morehead for a semester. I flunked everything except for art and literature. I had classes where I had no idea what they were even talking about. Doug Adams was my art teacher, he would take a red pencil and mark on my drawing, too much detail! Years later, I went to an art show that Mr. Adams put on and I wished I had of had a red pencil so I could have written on his work TOO MUCH DETAIL,” Johnny laughed.

With his sight set on becoming a draftsman, Johnny attended vocational classes at Maysville Community College then went to work for the Cincinnati Milling Company.

“I worked at the Milling Company for a little over a year. They brought me one project that I had to change a curve on and that’s the only thing I done for the entire year I was there. I sat at my big drafting table with paper and pencils and I sketched and colored and just honed my drawing skills. Then I got drafted into the Army in 1969. I had six weeks basic training in Fort Dix New Jersey. After basic training, they sent me to work on an engineering project so once again I found myself at a drafting table and I never drew nothing except for what I wanted to draw. So, I honed my art skills there for two years. In high school, Mrs. Francis Dorsey was my art teacher, she taught me perspective and the color wheel.

After I got out of the service I started working with my dad at the water company. I had always helped dad from the time I was just a little boy. He had a service company and worked on people’s refrigerators, stoves and furnaces, he could fix anything. I followed daddy around and carried his tools. I was his gopher,” Johnny laughed. “Then I got drafted again and went to Vietnam in 1971. I didn’t have to shoot at anybody, but got shot at a lot just moving from place to place in the back of a dump truck.”

With his first tour of duty behind him Johnny returned to his home town.

“When I got out of the Army daddy was working as an inspector for the new water system that was coming into Fleming County. During that time my brother Billy, who was a carpenter, was taking a few cabins down, and I wanted a log cabin for myself. I had seen one I wanted, but a man named Pod Conn and his sister were living in it. After his sister died, he went to a nursing home. Andrew Fitch owned the cabin and he contacted my brother that the elderly man had gone to the nursing home. Mr. Fitch told me if I would tear the house down and live in it, that he would just give it to me. So, me and my brother tore it down, loaded it and moved it to our farm, just like we do on the show,” Johnny said.

Through the years Johnny kept up with his drawing and practiced a natural talent that he said he inherited from his grandmother Jett and would often be asked to show his work to different individuals in the art world.

“My brother had a friend in Morehead that was an artist, his name was Cliff Johnson, who was becoming famous in New York City. Billy had told him about me, and how I could draw and he wanted to meet me. I took some of my drawings, and he liked them and he asked me to come back the next week. So, me and Billy went back. He had a nice wooden artist case full of brushes, paint and canvases. He asked me to do some painting then bring my work over to him and he would critique it. I painted an elderly man sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of a log cabin. When he looked at the drawing he said, “you put too much detail in your work, you need to leave something for the imagination,” I didn’t listen to him though,” Johnny grinned.

Johnny still has the painting of the man in the rocker.

It was years down the road before Johnny Jett became known internationally as the forklift operator on Barnwood Builders, but he said he feels like the road that led him to such an opportunity was paved at just the right intervals.

“I truly believe that the good Lord has always had a plan to use my life experiences to help others. While I was in Vietnam I became an addict because of idle time being depressed because I was there. I was there 11 months and what work I did could have been done in two weeks. The big thing in Vietnam was marijuana and heroin, the engineering company I was in, would get a job to remodel old dilapidated hotels. We would get a tractor trailer load of two-by fours and plywood but would have to wait 30 days for the nails to arrive. Thirty- days sitting in Vietnam, doing nothing, that’s a lot of idle time. We would go out on the streets and there would be Vietnamese people everywhere peddling drugs, even little kids. My whole company became drug addicts. When I got back home to Fleming County in 1971, I was able to get off the drugs because they were not as easy to get, but things sure have changed since then. If I get a chance I will talk to anyone about being a slave to drugs. I understand addiction and the kind of person you become. God didn’t make me an addict, but he will use things like that and turn it around to get something good from it. I’ve been invited to speak at Bell Grove Lodge Drug Addiction Program in Fleming County and I feel very humbled about that,” Johnny said.

Everyone in my unit had become addicted to either marijuana or heroine. I feel like God has lead me down the path of being on a television show to open doors that will allow me to help those who are still struggling with addiction,” Johnny said.

The road that has taken a Fleming County native from the foothills of Kentucky to a famous bone yard in West Virginia started to become paved after Mark Bowe made a wrong turn in Rowan County.

“Before the TV show was even a thought, me and Sherman Thompson had worked for Mark Bowe for about 10 years at Antique Cabins and Barns in the late 1990s. None of us ever had a clue we would be on TV,” Johnny said.

“We started out tearing down cabins and fixing them up. We took them to the what the TV people called the bone yard. Me and Sherman started scouting cabins for Mark around 1998. I met Mark Bowe while I was painting a political sign on my back porch, but Sherman and I had already started scouting cabins. After Billy passed away in 1995, I went to Cave Run to finish building the cabin he had been working on. I needed some help and I knew what a great carpenter Sherman was so I hired him to help me. We finished the cabin. I was still working at the water company at that time, but me and Sherman had such a good time working on that cabin, I told my dad, I’m done with the water company. I’m going into the cabin business. After I quit the water company I bought some cabins and me and Sherman started taking them down and stacked them up on dad’s lot. Mark Bowe was dating a girl at Morehead University and he would come down to visit her and scout cabins. He was just getting into the cabin business but I had been in it for a couple years already, Mark ended up finding me and he bought a couple of the cabins I had. He asked if I had any more and I asked well how many do you want, and he said I’d like to have a 100 of them by the end of the summer. Sherman and I had already scouted all over Kentucky so we knew where there were lots of cabins. Ernie Weaver hauled the cabins to Marks lot. Sherman asked Mark if he could put us to work full time, and he told us to be at the lot on Monday morning to work something out. One day a film maker from New York and his wife were headed to a ski resort that was about 100 miles past the bone yard and he saw the cabins and came back. His name was Rick Kaplan, and was one of the main guys at Silent Crow Productions. He talked to us at the lot and later told Mark he would like to make a short film of what we were doing. So, he made a pilot show, and called it, Down Home. Rick presented that first episode to different networks, no one wanted it because there wasn’t any cussin’, fussin’ and fightin’. One of the networks said if he could get us to fuss and fight they would take the show. Mark came back and told us what they wanted and I said, no we ain’t having no part of that.

Four or five years later, Rick Kaplan’s friend was an executive producer on the DIY Network and asked if Rick had anything new. Rick showed him that first episode, he liked it and we signed up for nine episodes. After the production company saw how high the ratings were for Barnwood Builders, they wanted 13 more episodes,” Johnny explained.

On Friday, July 14, 2017, the cast of Barnwood Builders finished filming the last show for the fifth season and have a signed contract for at least 26 more episodes.

No matter what the future holds for Fleming County’s most beloved television star, Johnny Jett said, “I will follow my Savior where ever he leads me.”