Month: February 2025

The best of the best: Top 10 episodes of the Andy Griffith Show

Andy Griffith and Don Knotts from an episode of The Andy Griffith Show

If I look at my friend Ed and say “how do you do Mrs. Wiley?” he will know exactly what I am saying. In fact, he might reply with something like “I would recognize that accent anywhere. It’s definitely Back Bay Boston.”

Ed and I are true geezers, which means each of us has crossed over the retirement bridge and can indulge in pasttimes as we choose.

And one of those is watching the Andy Griffith Show, which means we rewatch episodes from 60-plus years ago that are so familiar that we can easily quote favorite lines. In fact, we toss lines back and forth from episodes that we haven’t actually seen in years.

If all you know of great comedy shows in history are The Office or Seinfeld, let me tell you about the Andy Griffith Show. It debuted in 1960 and carved a huge niche in popular culture across its eight seasons on CBS. The first five seasons were broadcast in black and white and include all my favorite episodes.

Here’s a quick synopsis of the show. Andy Taylor was a widowed father of a young boy, as well as the sheriff of Mayberry, a small town in rural North Carolina. He was surrounded by a community of zany, eccentric characters, not the least of which was Deputy Barney Fife, played by Don Knotts.

Barney created a lot of havoc and most of the memorable moments from the Andy Griffith Show. If you know, you know.

After Ed and I swapped some favorite lines a few weeks ago, I began to wonder what did I consider my favorite episodes of the show. So, I sat down, drew up this list and found clips from each on Youtube.

Told you I was retired.

Anyway, I decided I wanted to share with you my favorite 10 episodes, or in some cases, specific scenes from the Andy Griffith Show. There are scores of other episodes that would qualify for this list, but these are my personal favs.  I previously wrote about an episode of the show that isn’t included in this list.  You might have a different take.

Click on the short clips below, and enjoy.

CITIZEN’S ARREST

I went back and forth with this, but Citizen’s Arrest ranks No. 1 in my book. Gomer, played so well by Jim Nabors, calls out Barney in downtown Mayberry for making an illegal U-turn in the cop car.

Key line:
“You hear that folks? There are two sets of laws; one for the police, and one for the ordinary citizens.”

CHECKPOINT CHICKIE

This episode might be considered 1A for me. Barney somehow gets ahold of a vintage WWII era motorcycle and turns into the cop we all hate to run into when we’re driving through small town America.

Key line: “I let you do 40 today, you’ll do 45 tomorrow; I let you do 45 tomorrow, you’ll do 50 the day after that; I let you do 50 the day after that you’ll do 55 the day after that …”

PREAMBLE TO THE CONSTITUTION

This is a special bonus clip because it’s actually just the conclusion of an episode in 1963, but one of the most memorable scenes from the entire run of the show. Deputy Fife ‘perfectly’ recalls the preamble to Andy.

Key line: “There are things in that book that I still remember to this day. Once you learn something it never leaves you.  It’s amazing how that stuff stays with you.”

HOW DO YOU DO MRS. WILEY?

This is such a great episode. Andy tries to knock some rough edges off of mountain man Ernest T. Bass so he can mix with high society at a Mayberry social event. If it could go wrong, it did go wrong.

Key line: “I recognize that accent. Definitely Back Bay Boston.”

ESCAPED CONVICTS CAPTURE FLOYD AND BARNEY

A trio of female escaped convicts happen upon Floyd and Barney in the hills outside of town and take them hostage in a cabin. Then the fun begins, until Barney tangos one of the convicts into the waiting handcuffs of Sheriff Taylor.

Key line: “Let’s you and me dance. You kidding? No, I’m not. What made you change your mind? You’re beginning to get to me.”

NIP IT IN THE BUD

Andy deputizes a trio of townfolk to help with security at a big Mayberry event that evening. Barney then proceeds to bark orders at the men as if he’s a drill sergeant shaping up raw recruits.

Key line: “The minute it looks like there’s going to be trouble, we’ve got to nip it! Nip it in the bud!”

BARNEY AND THE CHOIR

Barney joins the community choir as it’s rehearsing for a big performance and sings way off key. His singing is so bad, the choir director wants to kick him out of the choir until Andy devises an incredibly funny solution.

Key line: “Oh, it’s no use, Andy. Can you tell a bird to just go chirp, chirp, chirp? No, Andy, I’m like a bird! I was born to sing!”

AUNT BEE’S KEROSENE PICKLES

Aunt Bee makes up a batch of pickles that taste like kerosene, but Andy and Barney pretend to like them because they won’t want to hurt her feelings. They sub her pickles out with store bought pickles on the sly. Then she decides to enter them in the County Fair pickle contest.

Key line: “I don’t know how I can face the future when I know there’s eight quarts of these pickles in it!”

MAN IN A HURRY

A big city businessman’s car breaks down in Mayberry, and he’s frustrated by the slow pace of the townspeople as he impatiently waits for the car to be repaired.

Key line: “For the love of Mike, do it! Do it! Go take a nap, go to Thelma Lou’s and watch TV.”

THE FUN GIRLS

I could not make this list without including the Fun Girls. They appeared in two episodes and brought chaos and levity to Mayberry — and blew up Andy and Barney’s relationships with their girlfriends, Helen and Thelma Lou.

Key lines: “Hello, Doll. Oh, Bernie!”

So, if you are a fan of the Andy Griffith Show like me and Ed, feel free to share your favorite episode or moment from the show in the comments to this post.

SPONSORED CONTENT: My friend Ed Godfrey gave this book, “Andy & Don,” to me as a birthday gift a couple years ago. I started reading and could not put it down. It’s that good, mainly because it reveals some behind the camera info on both Andy Griffith and Don Knotts, as well as other stars of Andy Griffith Show. For instance, Andy was quite the lady’s man, while Frances Bavier was not a fan of her role as Aunt Bee, nor of the show in general. Check it out on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4mb7RbA

A Golden memory on Super Bowl Sunday

A screenshot of The Gold Sheet taken from a Chicago Sun Times article.

Here’s a memory that goes back to the 1980s when I worked in the downtown OKC newsroom of The Daily Oklahoman.

Every Thursday afternoon during football season, I would walk about three blocks down to Taylor’s Newsstand from the paper’s Broadway & 6th Street headquarters.

You might remember Taylor’s Newsstand. It was located in the Century Center mall attached to the Sheraton Hotel. Taylor’s offered an awesome variety of magazines and newspapers from around the country. I fact, I bought a lot of Sunday papers from Denver, Kansas City and Dallas at Taylor’s over the years.

But that’s not what drew me to the newsstand on Thursdays in the fall. It was a publication that Taylor’s sold called The Gold Sheet.

Man, I loved to get my hands on The Gold Sheet each week.

If you are unfamiliar with it, The Gold Sheet was a football handicapping publication. A tout sheet. Still is, in digital form.

It was printed on heavy gold paper that unfolded into a large single sheet that contained predictions and analysis on every Division 1 and NFL football game for the coming weekend.

I’m pretty sure that my friend ‘David’ introduced me to The Gold Sheet, and I became a loyal reader.

I wasn’t much of a gambler, but coworkers at the newspaper in that mid-1980s era connected me to a bookie here in town who would would take my tiny wagers of $10 or $20.

So, The Gold Sheet became a big part of my weekly rhythm throughout the 1980s, when I was still single and willing to wager a few dollars on football.

Yes, I know it’s shocking that gambling on football (and other sports) occurred in OKC. But it did in the ’80s, and I’m certain you wouldn’t have to work too hard to find a bookie today who would take your wagering action.

A Bold Prediction: Oklahoma will have legal, online sports wagering within the next 5 years.

As for The Gold Sheet itself, it contained a prediction on the outcome of every game along with a couple of sentences that backed up each pick. It made for great reading, if nothing else.

Maybe because today is Super Bowl Sunday– by far the No. 1 day annually for sports wagering (sorry Final Four, Kentucky Derby et al) — I stumbled across a reference online this morning to The Gold Sheet.

And that got me to wondering what became of my favorite handicapping publication.

So, I did a little online research and discovered a Chicago Sun Times article from 2022 that revealed that it is now part of an online handicapping website called WagerTalk Media.

The article also outlined the history of The Gold Sheet, which was launched in Los Angeles by the late Mort Olshan in 1956. It remained a physical publication until the end of the 2019 football season, when it morphed into a digital publication.

A wave of nostalgia washed over me when I discovered the Chicago Sun Times article, which included a picture of The Gold Sheet from back in the day.

My weekly wagering days are long gone. But The Gold Sheet remains a fond memory of that time in my life.

BONUS CONTENT: Steve Lackmeyer, my friend and former colleague at The Oklahoman, wrote about the demise of Taylor’s Newsstand when it finally closed for good in 2009. Turns out The Gold Sheet outlasted the newsstand where I first discovered the publication.

34 years later, article stirs memories of Arkansas’ stunning exit from SWC

Fort Smith Etc. magazine cover from 1991

Almost 34 years ago, a friend and former coworker at the Southwest Times Record in Fort Smith, Ark., hit me up with a request.

Patti had left the paper to become editor of a new local magazine called Fort Smith Etc. She asked me to write an article on the University of Arkansas’ stunning move from the now late Southwest Conference to the the rival Southeast Conference.

Arkansas announced in August 1990 that it was switching conferences, and actually made the move the following year.

The unexpected conference divorce set off shockwaves among major conferences and ushered in what has become an era of constant realignment. By 1995, the SWC was no more, with most members welcomed into the Big Eight, now known as the Big 12.

Anyway, I wrote a pretty snarky — for me — 800-word piece for the magazine that listed all the things the Razorbacks would not miss from the SWC. It was published in the Nov./Dec. 1991 edition of Fort Smith Etc. magazine.

So, why am I writing about this now when I hadn’t given the article a thought for the last 30 years or so?

Turns out a high school friend of mine and Fort Smith native I’ll call ‘Will’ discovered he had digitized copy of the article on his personal computer. Will, who also had written for the magazine, emailed it to me. Thanks, Will!

After reading what I wrote more than three decades ago, I’m still proud of how it turned out and the fact that it is still relevant today in this era of conference reshuffling.

There are a couple of references to now departed venues like Barnhill and Reunion arenas (and  misplaced campus locations for the universities of Alabama and Mississippi), but it’s not too dated, I think.

With all that said, I’m reprinting the article here in BlogOKC. Hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane.

Signed, sealed & delivered to the SEC

Mac Davis, the curly-haired crooner with the West Texas drawl, probably said it best for University of Arkansas fans when he sang something like “Happiness is the state of Texas in my rear view mirror.”

That was the theme when 10,000 or so Hog-callers began their final caravan across the Red River and out of the Lone State after the Southwest Conference basketball tournament last March. The Razorbacks had bid adieu to their SWC step-brothers with an astounding thrashing of the Texas Longhorns for the tournament championship, and along with the Razorback women’s team, hauled away every basketball prize the league had to offer.

When it was over, they called the Hogs in Dallas one final time, took the “Barnhill South” sign down from in front of Reunion Arena and began the pilgrimage back to the Ozarks. The last one out should have stopped and burned the bridge that spanned the Red River.

Without a glance in the rear view mirror, Razorback basketball fans got out the map and charted Knoxville and Birmingham and Jackson and all the Southeast Conference stops in between. The SEC, a conference that already featured teams in seven states, threw open the doors to Arkansas with a great big “Welcome.”

In Texas, the resentment of any Arkansas’ SWC success ran deep in such holes-in-the-prairie as Waco and Lubbock. The Razorbacks own a legacy of SWC success that can’t be exorcised from the conference record book. You can look it up.

Nevertheless, despite 76 years of SWC membership (Arkansas was a charter member), Arkansas forever remained an outsider who annually crashed a party that should have been a Texas-only affair.

Well, it is now. The SWC is reduced to eight Texas schools, any six of whom would be welcomed this very minute into the Trans-America Conference or the American South.

If there were any tears, they were those shed by Dallas merchants, who may have been the only people inTexas who realized from where the success of the SWC basketball tournament came.

Arkansas now has been signed, sealed and delivered to the Southeast Conference and there should be no nostalgic or sympathetic thoughts for the conference left behind in Texas.

Unsure? I offer ten reasons never to never look back at the SWC:

1. Average attendance at SouthwestConference basketball games in 1990-91 was 3,963. The SEC averaged 11,585.

2. Mississippi, with an average of 3,949, was the Southeast Conference’s poorest draw in basketball in 1990-’91. Texas Tech (2,465), TCU (3,868), SMU (2,938), Rice (2,873) and Houston (3,387) all had lower attendance averages.

3. Average attendance at Southwest Conference football games in 1990 was 39,382. The SEC averaged 63,870.

4. Southwest Conference teams were forced to play a limited football schedule for two seasons because one conference member, SMU, was given the “death penalty” by the NCAA; no SEC school has ever drawn the “death penalty.”

5. The Cotton Bowl is played in an open-air stadium, often in some of the most brutal weather Texas has to offer on New Year’s Day; the Sugar Bowl, played in the New Orleans SuperDome, is never threatened by the weather.

6. Southeast Conference football games are broadcast nationally over the Turner Broadcasting System cable network. SWC games are broadcast throughout Texas on something known as the “Raycom Sports Network.”

7. Arkansas will never have to face Southwest Conference officials when playing a Southeastern Conference game.

8. Texas A&M, a school full of traditions, features an all-male corps of cheerleaders.

9. There is no horror movie titled “The Tennessee Chainsaw Massacre”

10. Few natives from any Southeastern Conference state answer to the name of “Tex.”