<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div><span></span></div><div><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div><span></span></div><div>I grew up as a kid in Van Nuys, California watching the <i>Andy Griffith Show</i> with my dad.</div><div><br></div><div>One of my favorite sound-bites from the Andy Griffith Show . . . Sheriff Andy on carrying guns:</div><div><a href="http://www.tomandrodna.com/Soundbites/On_Carrying_Guns.mp3">http://www.tomandrodna.com/Soundbites/On_Carrying_Guns.mp3</a></div><div><br></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div>Courtesy of The New York Times at:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/04/arts/television/andy-griffith-actor-dies-at-86.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/04/arts/television/andy-griffith-actor-dies-at-86.html</a></div><div><br></div><div>------------------------------------</div><div><h1 itemprop="headline" id="story-heading" class="story-heading" style="margin: 0px 0px 10px; font-style: italic; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; line-height: 2.375rem; font-size: 2.125rem; font-family: nyt-cheltenham, georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif;">Andy Griffith, TV’s Lawman and Moral Compass, Dies at 86</h1></div><div><img src="cid:2A0182D4-BD53-4573-8C60-BF7B60B7ABAF" alt="image1.jpeg" id="2A0182D4-BD53-4573-8C60-BF7B60B7ABAF"></div><div><a href="http://www.tomandrodna.com/Photos/Sheriff_Andy_Taylor.jpg">http://www.tomandrodna.com/Photos/Sheriff_Andy_Taylor.jpg</a></div><div><br></div><div><a title="Times articles about Andy Griffith." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/g/andy_griffith/index.html" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Andy Griffith</a><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">, an actor whose folksy Southern manner charmed audiences for more than 50 years on Broadway, in movies, on albums and especially on television — most notably as the small-town sheriff on the long-running situation comedy that bore his name — died on Tuesday at his home on Roanoke Island in North Carolina. He was 86.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">His death was confirmed by the Dare County sheriff, Doug Doughtie.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Mr. Griffith was already a star — on Broadway in “No Time for Sergeants” and in Hollywood in Elia Kazan’s film “A Face in the Crowd” — when “</span><a title="Show synopsis." href="http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=andygriffith" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The Andy Griffith Show</a><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">“ made its debut in the fall of 1960. And he delighted a later generation of television viewers in the 1980s and ’90s in the title role of the courtroom drama “</span><a title="Show synopsis." href="http://www.tv.com/shows/matlock/" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Matlock</a><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But his fame was never as great as it was in the 1960s, when he starred for eight years as Andy Taylor, the sagacious sheriff of the make-believe town of Mayberry, N.C. Every week he rode herd on a collection of eccentrics, among them his high-strung deputy, Barney Fife, and the simple-minded gas station attendant Gomer Pyle. Meanwhile, as a widower, Andy raised a young son, Opie, and often went fishing with him. “The Andy Griffith Show,” seen Monday nights on CBS, was No. 4 in the Nielsen ratings its first year and never fell below the Top 10. It was No. 1 in 1968, its last season. After the run ended with Episode No. 249, the show lived on in spinoff series, endless reruns and even Sunday school classes organized around its rustic moral lessons.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The show imagined a reassuring world of fishin’ holes, ice cream socials and rock-hard family values during a decade that grew progressively tumultuous. Its vision of rural simplicity (captured in its memorable theme song,</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><a title="The whistling song, called "The Fishin’ Hole." " href="http://www.televisiontunes.com/Andy_Griffith_Show.html" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">whistled over the opening credits</a><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">) was part of a TV trend that began with “The Real McCoys” on ABC in 1957 and later included “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Petticoat Junction,” “Green Acres” and “Hee Haw.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But by the late 1960s, the younger viewers networks prized were spurning corn pone, and Mr. Griffith had decided to leave after the 1966-67 season to make movies. CBS made a lucrative offer for him to do one more season, and “The Andy Griffith Show” became the No. 1 series in the 1967-68 season. But Mr. Griffith had decided to move on, and so had the times. “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” with its one-liners about drugs and Vietnam, and “The Mod Squad,” about an integrated trio of undercover officers, were grabbing a new audience.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But the characters in “The Andy Griffith Show” — Barney (Don Knotts), Gomer (Jim Nabors), Opie (Ron Howard, who went on to fame as a movie director), Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier) and the rest, including Gomer’s cousin Goober Pyle (</span><a title="George Lindsey Times obituary." href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/07/arts/television/george-lindsey-tvs-goober-pyle-dies-at-83.html" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">George Lindsey</a><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">, who died in May) — have remained tantalizingly real to their fans, who continue to watch reruns on cable TV and online.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Andy Griffith was more complex than Andy Taylor, although the show was based on his hometown, Mount Airy, N.C. Before he fetched up in Mayberry, he was known for bringing authenticity to dark roles, beginning with the lead in “A Face in the Crowd,” in 1957, the story of a rough-hewn television personality who, in the clutches of his city-slicker handlers, becomes something of a megalomaniac.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">From the 1970s to the 1990s, Mr. Griffith starred in no fewer than six movies with the words “murder” or “kill” in their titles. In 1983, in “Murder in Coweta County,” he played a chillingly wicked man who remains stone cold even as he is strapped into the electric chair.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Sheriff Taylor aside, Mr. Griffith was no happy rustic; he enjoyed life in Hollywood and knew his way around a wine list. His career was tightly controlled by a personal manager, Richard O. Linke.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">“If there is ever a question about something, I will do what he wants me to do,” Mr. Griffith told The New York Times Magazine in 1970. “Had it not been for him, I would have gone down the toilet.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Far from the gregarious Andy Taylor, Mr. Griffith was a loner and a worrier. He once hit a door in anger, and for two episodes of “The Andy Griffith Show” he had a bandaged hand (explained on the show as an injury Andy received while apprehending criminals).</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But the show’s 35 million viewers would have been reassured to learn that even at the peak of his popularity, Mr. Griffith drove a Ford station wagon and bought his suits off the rack. He said his favorite honor was having a stretch of a North Carolina highway named after him in 2002. (That was before President George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005.)</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">He was also gratified to find his character ranked No. 8 on TV Guide’s list of the “50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time” in 2004. (Bill Cosby’s Dr. Cliff Huxtable was No. 1.) But one honor denied him was an Emmy Award: he was nominated only once, for his role in the TV movie “Murder in Texas.” “The Andy Griffith Show” itself, though nominated three times, also never won an Emmy, but Mr. Knotts did — five times — for his performance as Deputy Fife, and so did Ms. Bavier, once, as Andy’s aunt.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Andy Samuel Griffith was born in Mount Airy on June 1, 1926, the only child of Carl Lee Griffith and the former Geneva Nann Nunn. His father was a foreman at a furniture factory. Mr. Griffith described his childhood as happy, but said he never forgot the pain he felt when someone called him “white trash.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">After seeing the trombonist Jack Teagarden in the 1941 film “Birth of the Blues,” he bought a trombone from Sears, Roebuck & Company, then wheedled lessons out of a local pastor, who later recommended him to the University of North Carolina, where he won a music degree and married Barbara Edwards.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">He moved on to singing, and for a while hoped to be an opera singer. He tried teaching music and phonetics in a high school but left after three frustrating years. “First day, I’d tell the class all I knew,” he told The Saturday Evening Post in 1964, “and there was nothin’ left to say for the rest o’ the semester.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In spare moments Mr. Griffith and his wife put together an act in which he posed as a country preacher and told jokes (one was about putting frogs in the baptismal water) while she danced. They played local civic clubs.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In 1953, performing for an insurance convention, Mr. Griffith, in his bumpkin preacher persona, told a comic first-person tale about attending a college football game and trying to figure out what was going on. Some 500 discs of the monologue were pressed under the title “What It Was, Was Football,” and it became a hit on local radio. Mr. Linke, then with Capitol Records, scurried to North Carolina to acquire the rights and sign Mr. Griffith.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Mr. Linke was soon guiding him onto television and nightclub stages. But Mr. Griffith’s big break came on Broadway, in 1955, when he was cast in “No Time for Sergeants” as a mountain yokel drafted into the Air Force — a role he had played on television, on “The United States Steel Hour.” The play was a hit, running for almost two years, and he reprised the role for the 1958 film version.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">His first movie role, in “A Face in the Crowd,” was far more complicated. The character, Larry Rhodes, known as Lonesome, is a vagrant who is discovered playing the guitar in an Arkansas jail and then groomed to become a beloved television star, only to be undone by his dark side. Mr. Griffith told The New York Times Magazine that he was so consumed by the stormy character that it affected his marriage.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “You play an egomaniac and paranoid all day and it’s hard to turn it off at bedtime. We went through a nightmare.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In 1959, Mr. Griffith returned to Broadway in the musical comedy “Destry Rides Again,” in a role that had been played in films by Tom Mix, James Stewart, Joel McCrea and Audie Murphy. Though reviews were mixed, Newsday declared, “There isn’t a more likable personality around than Andy Griffith.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The pilot of “The Andy Griffith Show,” in February 1960, was actually an episode of “The Danny Thomas Show” in which Mr. Thomas, as Danny Williams, is arrested by a sheriff for running through a stop sign while driving through Mayberry.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Danny baits the sheriff, calling him “hayseed” and “Clem.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">“The name ain’t Clem, it’s Andy, Sheriff Andy Taylor!” he responds.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Sheldon Leonard, producer of Mr. Thomas’s show, had decided to build a sitcom around Mr. Griffith after seeing him in “Destry.” Mr. Griffith negotiated for 50 percent ownership, which gave him a large say in the show’s development.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Critical to the show’s success was the casting of Mr. Knotts as the inept but lovable Barney Fife. So was the simple but appealing formula: characters would confront a problem, then resolve it by exercising honesty or some other virtue.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">When Mr. Knotts left the show in 1965, a year after Mr. Nabors, Mr. Griffith became “nervous” about its future, he said. But though some critics and viewers said the show in its later years lacked the sparkle it had once possessed, its ratings never tottered.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Still, after the 1967-68 season, Mr. Griffith had had enough and left the show. But he did produce a kind of sequel series for the following season, “Mayberry R.F.D.,” with Ken Berry starring as a widowed farmer alongside many of the regular characters from “Andy Griffith.” It ran three seasons.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Mr. Griffith’s acting career stalled afterward, despite a five-year deal with Universal Pictures. He said he was not offered roles he wanted to play. Returning to television in 1970, he starred in two short-lived shows, “The Headmaster” and “The New Andy Griffith Show.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Then came a raft of made-for-TV movies. One, “Diary of a Perfect Murder,” served as the pilot for a new series, “Matlock,” in which Mr. Griffith played a rumpled but cagey defense lawyer. The show’s run, from 1986 to 1995, exceeded that of “The Andy Griffith Show.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Mr. Griffith continued to play occasional movie and television parts, including that of an 80-something widower who rediscovers romance, and sex, in a nursing home in “Play the Game.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">He never lost his singing voice. In 1996 he recorded a gospel album, “</span><a title="The album at rhapsody.com." href="http://www.rhapsody.com/album/Alb.189998" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I Love to Tell the Story: 25 Timeless Hymns</a><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">,” which won a Grammy.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In 2010 he showed a political side when he extolled President Obama’s health care legislation in a television commercial for it. Republican politicians and conservative talk show hosts leapt on him, and Jon Stewart </span><a title="Video from "The Daily Show" from September 2010." href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-september-14-2010/mayberry-wtf" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">made boisterous fun</a><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">of the brouhaha on “The Daily Show.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Mr. Griffith’s marriage to Barbara Edwards, in 1949, ended in divorce in 1972. An eight-year marriage to the Greek actress Solica Cassuto ended in divorce in 1981. In 1983, he married Cindi Knight, who survives him, as does a daughter from his first marriage, Dixie Griffith. A son from his first marriage, Andy Jr., known as Sam, died in 1996.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">To viewers, Mr. Griffith’s portrayal of the sheriff seemed so effortless, they presumed he was just playing himself. He wasn’t, he insisted; he was always acting. But he took that misimpression as a compliment to his artistry.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">“You’re supposed to believe in the character,” he said. “You’re not supposed to think, ‘Gee, Andy’s acting up a storm.’ “</span></div><div><div class="ad ad-placeholder nocontent robots-nocontent" style="float: right; clear: right; margin: 0px 0px 40px 7px;"><div class="accessibility-ad-header visually-hidden" style="position: absolute; width: 1px; height: 1px; margin: -1px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; clip: rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px); overflow: hidden;"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Advertisement</span></p></div><a class="visually-hidden skip-to-text-link" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/04/arts/television/andy-griffith-actor-dies-at-86.html#story-continues-3" style="position: absolute; width: 1px; height: 1px; margin: -1px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; clip: rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px); overflow: hidden; text-decoration: none;"><font color="#000000"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Continue reading the main story</span></font><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">From the 1970s to the 1990s, Mr. Griffith starred in no fewer than six movies with the words “murder” or “kill” in their titles. In 1983, in “Murder in Coweta County,” he played a chillingly wicked man who remains stone cold even as he is strapped into the electric cha</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><iframe frameborder="0" class="ad-frame frame-for-article" style="border-style: none; width: 300px; height: 250px;"></iframe></span></a></div></div><div>------------------------------------</div><div><br></div><div>"The Fishing Hole" by Andy Griffith </div><div><a href="http://www.TomandRodna.com/Songs/The_Fishing_Hole.mp3">http://www.TomandRodna.com/Songs/The_Fishing_Hole.mp3</a></div><div><br></div><div>Rest well, Sheriff Andy.<br><br><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"Moscow Cares"</span></div><div><a href="http://www.moscowcares.com/" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><font color="#000000">http://www.MoscowCares.com</font></a></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span></div><div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Tom Hansen</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Moscow, Idaho</span></div></div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>