Up In My Memories

 This one is just for fans of really old movies, or The Andy Griffith Show, or really sweet secrets.

I think that covers most of us.

Let's work backwards. Episode 9 of season 4 of the Andy Griffith Show aired on December 2, 1963 -  some 10 days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was entitled "Up In Barney's Room," and was the episode where we got to see Deputy Barney Fife's living arrangements with Mrs Mendelbright, who rented him a room in her boarding house. The plot goes that Mrs Mendelbright kicked Barney out of the house for cooking chili in his room, but the real reason was that she had fallen under the spell of the old charmer J. Pat O'Malley, who was only trying to rip her off. She wanted Barney gone so she could move Oscar Fields (O'Malley) in. Big surprise: everything worked out in the end.

Bigger surprise: Enid Markey, who played Mrs M, was one of the original stars of silent movies, having played Jane in the first two Tarzan movies fifty years earlier. She also performed in vaudeville and in stage productions, and after being injured making a movie, she decided she really wanted to learn to act by appearing on Broadway shows. She was to do 29 shows on the Great White Way all together, beginning in 1919 with a play called...."Up In Mabel's Room."

The writers of that Griffith episode, James Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum, wanted to salute one of the grand ladies of American theatre, so they swapped in Barney's name and wrote a nice tribute that way.

Life is full of little treats like this!

Here's Enid Markey as Mrs Mendelbright and Don Knotts as Barney Fife, as the landlady catches the deputy using a 75-watt bulb, against her rule requiring bulbs no brighter than 40 watts. She also accused him of being afraid of the dark.