Putting Some Jam on the Bread

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Andy (Andy Griffith): They fired the gun, and the shot was so loud it was heard clear around the world.

Barney (Don Knotts): Oh, get out.

Andy: It's a fact. That's the way this country started. You read the book.

Barney: What book?

Opie (Ron Howard): Yeah, what book? Where'd you get that story, Pa?

Andy: Oh, your history book.

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Coming from a family of teachers as I did (and having done some teaching myself), I always appreciated the episode of the Andy Griffith Show that first aired on this night in 1963, "Andy Discovers America."

I enjoyed it for the same reason I enjoy any segment of a TV program or a movie that demonstrates the great creativity that is required to be a successful teacher.

Most teachers don't measure success the way people in other professions do. For them success is measured by how many students absorb the knowledge they have to give, not by how much money they make.

For example, I always enjoy an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati in which disc jockey Venus Flytrap, whose background was always a little murky and who was said to have been a teacher at one time in his life, offered to talk to the son of the radio station's cleaning woman. This young man, who was making a lot of money with a street gang, was thinking of quitting school, and Venus had to convince him that education was worthwhile.

Venus concluded the young man felt that school had conquered him and that he craved the feeling he got from conquest outside the classroom. Venus' challenge was to make the young man believe he could master education. They made a deal — if Venus could convince him in two minutes that he could conquer school instead of believing it had conquered him, he wouldn't quit. Venus proceeded to explain the atom to the young man in terms he could understand, and he stayed in school.

Andy's challenge in "Andy Discovers America" wasn't exactly like Venus', but it required the same kind of outside–the–box creativity.

Opie (Ron Howard) and his buddies were rebelling against their new teacher, Old Lady Crump, and her history assignments, and Andy commiserated with them, but there was a misunderstanding. Opie and the boys thought he was giving them permission to not study history, and that led to a classroom confrontation in which Miss Crump (the first of many appearances on the show by Aneta Corsaut) doubled the boys' homework.

In retaliation they pledged not to do it.

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She and Andy met for the first time when Miss Crump came to the sheriff's office to complain that his comments, however misunderstood, had set her back. When she took the job, she had found her new students to be woefully behind where they should be, and she had attempted to bring them up to speed by applying a little extra pressure. Her efforts had been showing some positive movement when this had come up.

Not long after, the boys told Andy that it appeared Miss Crump would be leaving, perhaps before the next week began.

Andy realized what he had done, and it was clear he was looking for a solution to the problem. Then it came to him. He told the boys he was glad they wouldn't have to learn "all that dull stuff about Indians and redcoats and cannons and guns and muskets and stuff."

That didn't sound like history to the boys. It sounded like adventure stories.

And Andy got the hook in them when he mentioned the gun that fired a shot heard around the world.

He got the boys back on track, to Miss Crump's great surprise when she convened what she believed would be her last class day. After the class had said the Pledge of Allegiance, she asked the boys if they ever heard those words or knew how the country began — and she was pleasantly shocked when the boys knew what to say.

And she made a return trip to the sheriff's office to express her gratitude — and to find out what he had told the boys.

Andy confessed that he didn't know what to tell them, and he didn't think what he said would hold up under scrutiny in court. He said he just told them a story and put "a little extra jam on the bread."

That, it seems to me, is the essence of great teaching — putting a little extra jam on the bread.

Those who are great teachers, like those who are great at anything, can make it look effortless. But appearances can be deceptive.

It reminds me of a story about Johnny Carson, who believed so strongly that the audience deserved fresh material each and every day that he arranged for guest hosts to take over his late–night program when he went on vacation rather than run previous programs. Few, if any, late–night hosts have had the courage to do that.

On one such occasion, Carson arranged for a new guest host to fill in for him when he was out for a day or two. During his absence, he watched the program. The new guest host had not prepared adequately, thinking it would be a breeze, and he bombed.

Afterward, Carson called the guest host and gently observed, "It ain't as easy as it looks, is it, kid?"

Teaching definitely isn't as easy as it looks, but I always thought Andy would have been a great teacher. Jam can make even stale bread taste good.

Life Isn't a Movie

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"There are certain rules about a war, and Rule No. 1 is young men die. Rule No. 2 is doctors can't change Rule No. 1."

Henry (McLean Stevenson)

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In its early years, MASH was primarily — but not exclusively — slapstick comedy.

By the time it ended its run in 1983, MASH enjoyed a reputation as a unique sitcom that routinely — and successfully — blended humor and drama — but even though those early episodes leaned heavily toward comedy, viewers got some glimpses of the future in the series' first season (1972–73).

One such glimpse occurred 45 years ago tonight when the episode "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet" first aired. For the first time — but not the last — viewers would see a patient at the 4077th die.

This patient was one of Hawkeye's friends.

Even before MASH introduced a heavy dose of drama to its episodes, the theme of the show was senseless death, and episodes like "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet" wove several related stories together to drive home that point.

While the episode maintained the series' satirical slant, it had a more somber tone than most of the episodes in that first season.

The story was primarily about Hawkeye's childhood friend Tommy (James Callahan), a writer by training and a former war correspondent who was writing a book about war from a soldier's perspective and dropped by the 4077th. The title of his book was to be "You Never Hear the Bullet," which was a rejection of all the scenes in war movies in which a soldier was fatally shot, and everyone heard the bullet. In reality, Tommy said, you don't hear the bullet.

Tommy was at the 4077th for a breather before resuming his work, and his reunion with Hawkeye (Alan Alda) told the viewers the friendship had existed for a long time. According to Hawkeye, it went back to grade school.

Earlier in the episode Frank (Larry Linville) had injured his back while with Hot Lips (Loretta Swit). Frank insisted that Henry (McLean Stevenson) should nominate him for a Purple Heart.

Frank, of course, did not mention the real circumstances surrounding his injury.

"According to your accident report," Henry said to Frank, "you tripped in the mud on the way to the shower."

When Frank confirmed that, Henry asked, "Is that the way you want it announced at the award ceremony? Tripped in the mud on the way to the shower?"

Hot Lips brought attention to a technicality. "This injury was sustained at a front–line unit," she said. "Technically that makes it battle connected."

"On that basis," Hawkeye said, "we'll be handing out medals for social diseases."

And then, after Tommy had come and gone, Ron Howard (in one of his TV appearances between his runs as Opie on the Andy Griffith Show and Richie on Happy Days) played a very young Marine whose appendix had burst and had been brought to the 4077th for treatment.

Initially, Hawkeye was willing to stay quiet when he learned that the young Marine was actually 15 years old and had used a fake ID to enlist — all to impress a girl.

Tommy unexpectedly returned to the 4077th with a mortal wound and died on the operating table, where he confessed that he heard the bullet. Hawkeye, all set to operate on his friend, told him he would change the title to "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet."

But he didn't live that long.

A grieving Hawkeye decided to spill the beans on Howard's character — motivated by the loss of his friend to prolong the boy's life.

Howard's character, in the defiance that is characteristic of youth, swore never to forgive Hawkeye for what he had done.

"Let's hope it's a long and healthy hate," Hawkeye replied.

Seldom have I been as impressed by TV writing.

Taking It Easy

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Mr. Tucker (Robert Emhardt): You people are living in another world!

Andy (Andy Griffith): Easy, Mr. Tucker.

Mr. Tucker: This is the 20th century. Don't you realize that? The whole world is living in a desperate space age. Men are orbiting the Earth. International television has been developed. And here, a whole town is standing still because two old women's feet fall asleep!

Barney (Don Knotts): I wonder what causes that.

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It is reasonable to believe that people have the same priorities, whether they live in cities or small towns.

After all, deep down we all want the same things, right? Sure, we're all individuals, and we differ from each other in rather small ways, but, as President Kennedy said in 1963, "In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal."

You could add that we all have the same basic needs — food, clothing and shelter — that must be provided.

It was probably a cliche 55 years ago to speak about the fast pace of the modern world.

How long have people been saying there is too much to be done and not enough time to do it? As long as I can remember — and almost certainly well before that. Heck, the cavemen probably complained that they didn't have enough time to hunt for game to feed their families and invent the wheel.

Yet as basic as those priorities were, individual cavemen almost just as surely had their own priorities. Then as now I'm sure there were those who had no dependents and, with only themselves to support, could devote more time to invention.

Such distinctions are not confined to city and country, but sometimes it helps to narrow it down to that.

The episode of the Andy Griffith Show that premiered on this night in 1963, "Man in a Hurry," was about a big–city businessman, Mr. Tucker (Robert Emhardt), whose car broke down outside of Mayberry on a Sunday. He needed to be in Charlotte the next day so he walked to town in search of someone who could fix his car.

He soon discovered what anyone who ever spent much time in a small country town could have told him — it is almost impossible to get anything done in such a place on a Sunday. Or at least it was. Times have changed, and even small towns don't observe a day of rest anymore.

But Mayberry was always a casual town.

In Mayberry Wally's filling station was open — but just barely. Gomer (the recently deceased Jim Nabors) was there, but he only put gas in cars. Wally handled engine repairs, but he didn't make repairs on Sundays.

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In a desperate attempt to do something, Mr. Tucker stole the truck at Wally's filling station but was apprehended shortly thereafter.

Andy let it slide because he understood Mr. Tucker's predicament, but he urged the businessman to come home with him, have something to eat and wait until the next day to get something done. Mr. Tucker grudgingly agreed to go back to Andy's house, but he insisted he wasn't hungry and continued to try to summon help by phone.

Unfortunately for Mr. Tucker the local phone lines were tied up on Sunday afternoons by two elderly sisters who lived in different towns and found it difficult to get around. So they were allowed to talk for hours on Sunday. (While this sort of thing is unheard–of today, my guess is this was in the days of party lines, which were pretty common in country towns at one time. For that matter they were also in use in many college dormitories.)

Their conversation was hilarious. Mr. Tucker wanted to get a call out to someone — anyone — in the outside world, but the old ladies kept going off on tangents.

First, they spoke at length about feet falling asleep. Then, when Mr. Tucker tried to interrupt and identified himself as Mr. Tucker from Charlotte, the ladies began speaking of a Charlotte Tucker they had known. Apparently, she married a fellow who fell down a lot.

Country folks and city folks just don't see things the same.

But somewhere buried deep inside Mr. Tucker was some country sensibility, maybe some leftover from his childhood. When he stepped out on Andy's porch and found Andy and Barney (Don Knotts) singing "The Church in the Wildwood," they tapped into that hidden sensibility, and he sang softly along with them.

It was a nice change of pace for Emhardt, a character actor who was frequently cast in villainous roles. Sometimes he played corrupt businessmen. The audience never found out if he was a corrupt businessman in this episode, but we got a glimpse — incomplete though it was — into his character's background in that scene on Andy's front porch.

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Obviously somewhere in Mr. Tucker's past was a little brown church in the vale — and a more relaxed way of life — and the memory of it had a calming effect on him.

He got worked up again when Gomer showed up and announced that Wally had come to the station after all and they had towed Mr. Tucker's car in. Gomer assured Mr. Tucker they would fix it that day.

And they did.

But somewhere that deep–inside sensibility that got tapped earlier made Mr. Tucker realize that the slower pace of country life wasn't such a bad thing, either — that stopping and smelling the roses was a good thing to do from time to time. He decided he would do precisely that and opted to spend the night in Mayberry.

He would get to sleep in Opie's room. That meant Opie (Ron Howard) would sleep on the ironing board. Mr. Tucker thought that sounded awful, but Opie disagreed. He called it "adventure sleepin'."

Folks see things differently in the country than they do in the city.

That's still a pretty valuable thing to know.

Having Faith in Somebody

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Opie (Ron Howard): I told Mr. McBeevee I'd be right back.

Andy (Andy Griffith): Who?

Opie: Mr. McBeevee. You don't know him. He's new around here. I just met him this mornin'.

Andy: Oh.

Barney (Don Knotts): Oh, a newcomer in town, eh? Where's he live at?

Opie: I met him in the woods.

Barney: What's he doin' in the woods?

Opie: Well, mostly he walks around up in the treetops.

Barney: He walks in the tree ... Mm hmm. I suppose he's invisible, too.

Opie: No. Mr. McBeevee's easy to see, especially his hat. He wears a great, big, shiny silver hat.

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Not everyone likes the episode of the Andy Griffith Show that first aired on this night in 1962, but I have always liked it because it so beautifully summarizes the father–son relationship between Andy (Andy Griffith) and Opie (Ron Howard).

The episode was called "Mr. McBeevee," which was the name of a telephone lineman (Karl Swenson) Opie had befriended in the woods.

The story began with Opie and Andy playing a game that parents undoubtedly have played with their children since time began — the game of pretend, of make–believe.

Opie had an imaginary horse he had named Blackie, and Andy was playing along with the game one morning. When Barney (Don Knotts) showed up, Andy and Opie spoke so convincingly of Blackie that Barney never doubted that Blackie was real, running out in the yard to see Opie's new horse.

Then Andy advised Barney that Blackie was "on the invisible side."

Barney was a little put off, believing himself to have been the victim of a practical joke, but he got over it — until later when Opie came to the courthouse telling of a new friend he'd made, one who walked in the treetops and wore a "great, big, shiny silver hat."

Andy and Barney believed Mr. McBeevee was make–believe, too — until Opie came home with a hatchet that definitely was not imaginary. He claimed Mr. McBeevee had given it to him.

That was something Andy couldn't understand so he instructed Opie to take the hatchet back where he found it and leave it there.

Turned out Mr. McBeevee was real — and Opie described him in the only way an 8–year–old boy could, but Andy and Barney couldn't comprehend. It was a classic failure to communicate.

Anyway, Mr. McBeevee took the hatchet back, acknowledging that Opie's father probably had been right to insist that he return it, but he wanted to give Opie something for doing some odd jobs for him so he gave him a quarter. (That may not sound like much in 2017, but it was a small fortune in 1962, at least in a boy's eyes.)

In the meantime Barney told Andy that he did believe Mr. McBeevee was real. Opie had already provided information that would be difficult for a child to make up, and Barney was going to get a more complete description using a technique of the law enforcement officer's trade — an eyewitness description.

At first it went well, but then Opie spoke of how Mr. McBeevee "jingles ... like he has rings on his fingers and bells on his toes." Barney pressed him on that point, and Opie conceded that Mr. McBeevee didn't really have rings on his fingers and bells on his toes. The jingling came from the "12 extra hands" that hung from his belt.

That was how Mr. McBeevee had described the tools he used in his work, but Andy and Barney had no way of knowing that. Opie's description of Mr. McBeevee was a source of endless amusement for Andy.

Then Opie showed them the quarter Mr. McBeevee had given him, and things changed. Andy couldn't believe the person Opie had described had given him a quarter. Opie suggested that they go to the woods and talk to Mr. McBeevee, and Andy agreed to do that. So they went to the woods.

Unfortunately for Opie, Mr. McBeevee had gone to get a colleague to help him with a task so he wasn't where Opie expected him to be, and Andy believed Opie had gotten into the habit of "stretching the truth a little out of shape."

When they returned to their home, Andy sent Opie up to his room and followed him there later, intending to punish him for lying.

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Their conversation, in my opinion, was one of the great scenes in sitcom history.

Andy told Opie that he could avoid punishment if he admitted that Mr. McBeevee was imaginary. But Opie couldn't say that. Mr. McBeevee was real. "Don't you believe me, Paw?" he implored his father.

Andy sighed. "I believe you," he said and went downstairs, where he told Barney and Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier) that he hadn't punished Opie.

When Andy told them that he had told Opie that he believed him, Barney protested that what Opie had told him was impossible.

"Well," Andy replied, "a whole lot of times I've asked him to believe things that, to his mind, must have seemed just as impossible. ... I guess it's a time like this when you're asked to believe something that just don't seem possible, that's the moment that decides whether you got faith in somebody or not."

Barney wanted to know if Andy believed in Mr. McBeevee.

"No," he insisted, "but I do believe in Opie."

Later, of course, Andy's faith in his son was justified when he met Mr. McBeevee in the flesh.

I have said many times that I thought Andy Taylor was the best father on TV, better than any who came before or who have come along since. This episode proved it.

Playing Deputy

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Outside of Andy (Andy Griffith) and Barney (Don Knotts) — and perhaps Opie (Ron Howard) — it is hard to imagine anyone in the fictional town of Mayberry with a more intimate knowledge of the jail on the Andy Griffith Show than Otis the town drunk (Hal Smith), who was allowed to effect his own incarceration and release whenever he had too much to drink — which was just about all the time.

That knowledge came in handy in the episode that first aired on this night in 1962, "Deputy Otis."

I have written here before that Andy Griffith's character was the kind of father that everyone would like to have. I could expand that, though, to simply this. He was the kind of everything — father, son, friend, mentor — that everyone would like to have.

He was the kind of law enforcement officer we need at a time when the public's relationship with the police is so poor. Andy Taylor had compassion for the people of his community. When one had a problem, he tried to help in any way he could.

In another episode, Barney observed that a sheriff "is more than just a sheriff" in a small town. "He's a friend. And the people in this town ain't got a better friend than Andy Taylor."

On this night in 1962, Otis was the one with the problem — and Andy was there for him.

During his many stays in the jail, Otis had written several letters to his brother and sister–in–law using courthouse stationery. It was never established whether Otis' brother and sister–in–law jumped to the conclusion on their own or Otis encouraged it with his letters — probably a little of both — but they apparently had the idea that Otis worked for the sheriff.

Now they were on their way to Mayberry for a visit.

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When Andy found out about everything, Otis readily confessed that "I know I done wrong, but I figgered what's the harm? I didn't know they were coming here."

Then viewers got a rare insight into Otis' character, what made him tick. Turned out that his brother Ralph had always been held up as an example to him. "Why can't you be more like Ralph?" his parents asked him.

"I've always been the black sheep in my family," Otis told Andy, "and it just felt good changing colors."

Andy decided to help Otis out by making him a temporary deputy while his brother and sister–in–law were in town — a noble gesture although Ralph apparently didn't believe Otis was a deputy. When he went off, supposedly for a walk, after lunch, Otis assumed Ralph was going around trying to find out if Otis really was a deputy.

In fact, though, Ralph was getting drunk — because, like Otis, he was his hometown's town drunk.

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And back home, he was allowed to lock himself up in the county jail just as Otis was permitted to do. So he did as he did at home, prompting Otis to tell Ralph how ashamed he was of his brother. And a chastened Ralph pledged to "be respectable — just like you."

Andy and Barney watched in astonishment as this scene played out before them, then Andy said to Barney, "You never know how these things might work out."

That's what made Andy such a great everything. He never hesitated to give someone the benefit of the doubt.

Barney's Sour Notes

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"Aunt Bee, Barney's been singin' again. I don't know how he does it, but he's got a knack of hittin' a note just enough off to make your skin crawl."

Andy (Andy Griffith)

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The Andy Griffith Show is one of those shows from which I find it hard to select my absolute favorite episode. I can usually narrow it down from a set of similar episodes, such as episodes that focus on Andy's father–son relationship with Opie (Ron Howard), but picking my very favorite episode is pretty darn tough. In fact, it is virtually impossible.

However, the episode that first aired on this night in 1962, "Barney and the Choir," is a strong contender. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to acknowledge that just about any episode that focuses on Barney (Don Knotts) is a contender for my favorite Andy Griffith episode.

But the episodes that dealt with his performances with the Mayberry choir are special favorites.

There was one time when Barney was slated to solo for the choir, but he wasn't very good, and the choir director was quick to replace him with Gomer Pyle (Jim Nabors). That was kind of bewildering. I mean, that episode came along after "Barney and the Choir" aired. I've never really been sure how Barney was in a position to do a solo for the choir in that episode when, in "Barney and the Choir," Barney's very status in the choir was in doubt.

Perhaps he got in the choir director's good graces and remained in the choir — but the choir director knew by then that Barney couldn't sing so why would he make Barney a soloist for a second time? By this time in the Andy Griffith Show timeline Barney's inability to sing may have been the worst kept secret in Mayberry — and considering how quickly gossip spread in that town, that was saying something.

In fact, I can assure you of something. Having grown up in a small town, I can tell you that almost nothing remains a secret for very long in a small town.

Well, anyway ...

I suppose prior knowledge of Barney's lack of talent was regarded as a mere technicality — if it was considered at all — when the second episode was written. I mean, every TV show has its inconsistencies, right?

Anyway, back to "Barney and the Choir."

The choir director actually did choose Barney to be the soloist in this episode — but he was misled by Barney, who spoke about his voice teacher and the fact that he was a tenor, which was what the choir director needed, but he never actually auditioned for the director.

At the first choir practice, though, the choir director found out that Barney couldn't sing. He tried to work around it, but it just couldn't be done. So Andy (Andy Griffith) agreed to tell Barney that he was out of the choir. Thelma Lou (Betty Lynn) brought Barney over to Andy's house for dinner, and Andy was going to tell him when Barney suggested they get a little practice in.

Reluctantly, Andy, Thelma Lou and Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier) trudged over to the piano. Opie was with them — and may have been the only one in town besides Barney who didn't know that Barney couldn't sing. As they began to sing, Barney hit a sour note, and Opie remarked, "Somebody sounds terrible."

The singing continued, and Opie exclaimed, "It's Barney!" In one of my all–time favorite moments on the show, Andy gently put his hand over Opie's mouth.

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One of the things I always admired about Andy was the fact that he sincerely cared about the people of Mayberry, particularly those in his inner circle, and he always tried to spare them embarrassment or pain if he could. He wasn't above telling a white lie or two if he thought doing so would permit him to achieve that goal.

In this case, as the group was trying to sing, he got an idea he thought might get him off the hook with Barney. A way for both to save face, you might say.

He suggested that Barney's throat was swollen and inflamed. Barney protested that he didn't feel sick, but Aunt Bee and Thelma Lou picked up on what Andy was trying to do and went along with what he was saying — that Barney needed to take to bed to nip whatever ailment he had in the bud.

Obviously, this would mean that he couldn't perform in the upcoming concert, but he wouldn't want to expose everyone to his germs, would he?

Well ...

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They talked Barney into leaving and going straight to bed, but he double crossed them, demanding that Thelma Lou take him to see the doctor — who confirmed that Barney wasn't sick. So that plan failed.

But Andy had another brainstorm. He told Barney the choir was going to try something different. Barney would still be the soloist, but he would recite his parts instead of sing them. That didn't work, either.

But Andy had one more trick up his sleeve.

He told Barney he would be singing into a special soloist's microphone. Extremely sensitive. Consequently, he would have to sing very low. If he sang at a normal tone of voice, he would "bust every eardrum in the auditorium."

Andy convinced Barney, even though he thought he was barely making a sound, but Andy assured him it would reverberate in the auditorium the following night.

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Barney's microphone, though, was dead. Another singer would be singing into a live microphone backstage.

It worked just as Andy hoped it would. Barney believed his solo had been superb, and the concert was saved from Barney's hilarious off–key singing.

Taking Responsibility

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I often hear it said that the members of today's generation — known informally as Millennials — are a generation of narcissists. It is equally fashionable to attribute that to poor parenting.

That isn't true in every case, of course. Not all of the Millennials are self–absorbed, and not all of their parents failed in their duty to raise responsible members of society. But it is true in many cases. Those parents would have done well to study the episodes of the Andy Griffith Show whenever issues came up.

I have long thought that Andy Griffith was TV's best father. The episodes of the Andy Griffith Show that focused on the challenges he faced as a single parent were some of the best ever made — and should be required viewing for every parent with or without a partner.

Andy was a smart man, and his wisdom benefited older folks as well as his boy Opie (Ron Howard).

For example — the episode that first aired on this night in 1962, "Bailey's Bad Boy," guest–starring Bill Bixby, who went on to starring roles in My Favorite Martian, The Courtship of Eddie's Father and The Incredible Hulk.

Bixby was 27 when he made this episode, playing the spoiled 19–year–old son of an apparently wealthy man. Bixby's character sideswiped a farmer and got hauled in to the Mayberry jail by Andy (Andy Griffith) and Barney (Don Knotts).

The young man was a snob who looked down upon country folks like the ones in Mayberry — he saw them as rubes and hayseeds — and his time there was loaded with all kinds of encounters with small–town types, like the time that town drunk Otis (Hal Smith) came in and started raising hell because Bixby was in his cell.

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Otis wouldn't be a politically correct character now, but he was always good for some comic relief back in the day — and that is essentially what Otis provided in this episode, diverting attention — but only momentarily — from the serious issue at hand.

If the term affluenza had been in vogue in 1962, Bixby's character could have been its poster child. He clearly had been deprived of parental involvement in his childhood — and he was just as clearly influenced by what he observed in Andy and Opie's relationship.

It wasn't so much the things Andy said as it was the things he did to keep Opie going in the right direction that impressed Bixby. When Opie confessed that he had broken a window, Andy told him he wouldn't receive an allowance until the window had been replaced. (That struck a chord for me because I, too, broke a window when I was a child, and my father didn't give me my allowance until it had been replaced.)

"Why don't you bail the little fellow out?" Bixby asked Andy, observing that it was "just a window."

Andy replied that if he did that, Opie would come to him every time he had a problem, expecting Andy to fix it for him. He wanted Opie to be a responsible adult, to "stand on his own two legs." (Maybe that is what my father wanted as well.)

The wealthy and privileged have their own ways of doing things — and that frequently involves the use of their fortunes as substitutes for direct personal involvement. And so it was that before long Bixby's father sent his attorney to Mayberry to "bail out" Bixby. But Andy wouldn't release him. He said he would hold Bixby until the judge could be there for the trial.

So the attorney tried a different technique, bringing in the farmer who had been involved in the original offense. He had been bribed to change his story and say the accident had been his fault.

That was enough for Andy. He gave in and was about to release Bixby.

But Bixby objected. That wasn't what happened, he said. The exasperated attorney said he didn't know what he would tell Bixby's father.

Andy, who had figured out everything, answered for Bixby. "Why don't you tell Mr. Bailey the boy busted a winder," Andy said in his slow Southern drawl, "and wants to stand on his own two legs?"

It wasn't the best episode of the Andy Griffith Show, but it was a pretty good example of the positive influence Andy could be. Television — and young people — could use more examples like that today.

In a Pickle in Mayberry

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"What's small potatoes to some folks can be mighty important to others."

Andy (Andy Griffith)

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In the TV town of Mayberry, which was modeled after Andy Griffith's North Carolina hometown, it was generally accepted by all that Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier) was a remarkable cook.

Now, I grew up in a small Southern town, and I can tell you one thing with absolutely no fear of contradiction. When folks in a small Southern town agree that someone is a great cook, you can take it to the bank.

Southerners take food very seriously. It is around food that everything else in our lives revolves.

But as audiences discovered in the episode of the Andy Griffith Show that aired on this night in 1961 — "The Pickle Story" — Aunt Bee did have an Achilles' heel.

Her pickles were awful. Barney (Don Knotts) called them "kerosene cucumbers."

Things got started when Aunt Bee brought lunch to the courthouse one day and told Andy and Barney that she had a surprise for them. The surprise was that she had been making pickles — not one of her tasty pies or delicious Southern entrees. She had made eight quarts of pickles, and she had brought pickles for Andy and Barney that day.

Barney tried to get out of eating his pickle by telling Aunt Bee that he had had a big breakfast. "I hate to eat it when I'm so full up like this," he told her. "I'll just wait and smoke — er, eat — it later."

She didn't know they didn't like her pickles. I guess she thought everyone liked everything she made. That's the problem with being good at something. People expect you to be good at it all the time.

And I suppose if you are told repeatedly that you are good at something, you become inclined to believe that everything you do in that area is good. You may reach a point where you simply do not comprehend the idea that you are not good at something. Perhaps that was how it was with Aunt Bee.

Aunt Bee's reputation as a cook was established in the very first episode and reinforced throughout the series so the viewers knew she was a great cook, but she did have a couple of weak spots. She couldn't make pickles or marmalade (but her marmalade is a topic for another time).

When Andy and Barney learned she had been putting up pickles, they decided that, since they were duty–bound to consume the pickles, they would swap them with store pickles and dispose of the homemade pickles. That way they could eat them, and Aunt Bee would be pleased (and none the wiser).

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But things didn't go quite as smoothly as that.

When Aunt Bee tried one of the pickles, she decided she was going to enter the pickle contest at the county fair after all. Previously she had decided not to enter; it was, after all, a competition that had been won for 11 straight years by her friend Clara (Hope Summers), but now Aunt Bee was convinced that she had hit upon the right recipe.

At first, Andy and Barney treated the possibility of Aunt Bee winning the competition with professionally made pickles as a joke, but then Clara paid a visit to the courthouse with some of her homemade pickles and got into a conversation with Andy, revealing how much it meant to her to know that she had a talent for something.

And fair–minded Andy realized that he and Barney had been wrong about the competition. It wouldn't be a joke if Aunt Bee won the blue ribbon with pickles she hadn't made — at the expense of someone who played by the rules and deserved to win.

So he decided that the best thing to do would be for Andy, Barney and Opie (Ron Howard) to eat up all the pickles, forcing Aunt Bee to make another batch of her kerosene cucumbers to enter at the fair.

And that's what they did.

When Aunt Bee observed that all the pickles were gone and she didn't have any to enter in the contest — after telling everyone that she would enter — Andy said, in an offhand way, "I guess there's nothing else to do except make another batch."

"I suppose not," Aunt Bee replied.

That was all Andy needed to light a spark under Aunt Bee, and she went scurrying off to get the things she would need for her pickling.

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The new batch was just as bad as the others. And Aunt Bee lost — but she did so with her own pickles.

She lost to Clara, who had a 12th blue ribbon to add to her treasured scrapbook.

And Andy and Barney had 16 quarts of kerosene cucumbers that they would have to consume.

"There's only one thing to do," Andy told Barney. "It's what we should have done in the first place. Learn to love 'em."

And the episode concluded with the two munching joylessly on Aunt Bee's pickles.

The Legends in a Mind

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"Imagine if you suddenly learned that the people, the places, the moments most important to you were not gone, not dead, but worse, had never been. What kind of hell would that be?"

Dr. Rosen (Christopher Plummer)

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As is so often the case with biographical movies, "A Beautiful Mind," which premiered 15 years ago today, was not a literal telling of the life — and mind — of John Forbes Nash Jr., who was played by Russell Crowe. Director Ron Howard and others who were behind the production readily conceded that point. Those who criticized it for being inaccurate in its portrayal of the Nobel Laureate in Economics needn't have bothered.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend the movie as source material for someone writing a term paper on schizophrenia. I haven't read the book upon which it was based so I don't know how accurate it might be — but books are almost always better (and, in the case of biographies, more accurate) than the movies that are inspired by them, anyway.

But I would recommend it for several other reasons.

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you must be aware of my fondness for history and biography. And I do prefer that movie biographies not embellish the facts — but I realize that is almost impossible, even though I have long believed that if a life's story is compelling enough to be written about, it is compelling enough to be presented on its own merits without having to add to it in print or on the screen.

So I cut biopics some slack on the accuracy part if — and this is an important distinction for me — such discrepancies do not make significant differences to the story. I know that, as far as most filmmakers are concerned, these revisions are judged by their dramatic effect. I like to be entertained as much as the next guy, but the dramatic element really isn't important to me.

And, from what I know of the life of John Forbes Nash Jr., his schizophrenic episodes did involve the delusion that he was working on top secret assignments from the U.S. government. That's not the kind of detail I mean.

Let's say, for example, that the person being portrayed was, in real life, a lefthander — but the actor/actress doing the portrayal is right–handed. Unless the fact that the person was left–handed in life is a crucial point in that person's story — Babe Ruth, for example, was left–handed — I won't quibble over such a small detail. Well, not much, anyway.

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But suppose the detail in question has more significance than that. Suppose it locates a character in a place and time that had no meaning for that character's life — and presents that detail as being critical in the character's timeline. Suppose the character is portrayed as having played a decisive role in an event when, in fact, that character played no role in it at all.

That is the kind of thing to which I object.

I don't think "A Beautiful Mind" was guilty of that — although, ironically I suppose, "A Beautiful Mind" was the story of a man who believed he had played roles in events in which he really had played no role at all. The events themselves may have occurred only in that beautiful mind, which clearly was brilliant but also disturbed.

It was no surprise, really, when "A Beautiful Mind" won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. I thought Crowe deserved Best Actor (Denzel Washington won for "Training Day"), and Jennifer Connelly received Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Forbes' wife (I thought she should have been nominated for Best Actress). The movie also won Best Adapted Screenplay.

Christopher Plummer, who played the doctor who diagnosed Forbes' schizophrenia, was not nominated at all. Nor was Ed Harris, who played one of Forbes' hallucinations.

Oversights. Severe oversights.

A Taste of Money

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Karma, they say, is a bitch.

On this day in 1961, the city council of the fictional TV village of Mayberry held a meeting in the episode "Mayberry Goes Bankrupt" of the Andy Griffith Show.

Mayberry, as everyone should know, was a very small town, so small that its entire city council could meet in the mayor's office.

And it did. I suppose that is where the council always met. Viewers wouldn't know that because the city council meetings were seldom seen on the Andy Griffith Show. Having been a reporter and having covered my share of city council meetings, I can understand why. No one in his/her right mind would deliberately watch a city council meeting on TV. With rare exceptions, small–town city councils tend to discuss things like stoplights and sidewalks and zoning ordinances. The agenda is distributed a day or two before the meeting, and usually the only people who attend are those who are directly affected by something. Once their matter has been addressed, they leave.

You would think that such a modest group wouldn't get too carried away with itself. But in the episode that aired 55 years ago tonight, Mayberry's city council did.

When the show began, Andy was protesting a decision the council had just made to evict an elderly citizen (Frank, played by Andy Clyde) because he was behind on his property taxes. I always suspected that the real reason why the council was in such a hurry to evict him was because the councilmen had concluded informally that the house was an eyesore. When the old man was evicted, they could tear the house down and start over again.

As sheriff, it was Andy's job to serve the eviction notice.

"This is one part of sheriffin' I can do without," Andy said as he left the meeting.

The councilmen were right, though. The house was a mess with all kinds of clutter in the yard and chickens running loose, and the house itself was old and run down. The screens on the windows were torn, and the house needed a paint job. The old one was peeling in many places. Some of the boards needed to be replaced, too.

Andy felt bad about having to serve the notice. But Frank told him that he was glad Andy had been the one to do it. "It made it easier," he told Andy.

That evening, as Andy and Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier) and Opie (Ron Howard) sat on the porch and Andy played his guitar, they spoke about Frank and what a shame it was that he was being evicted.

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Opie wanted to know what the word evicted meant. Andy tried to explain that Frank was losing his home because he was behind on his taxes.

Opie said that because Andy was serving the eviction notice, it seemed only fair that Andy should provide Frank with a place to stay. Andy and Aunt Bee tried to object, but they could never get around Opie's logic. It was decided that Frank would be invited to stay with them.

And he must have accepted because the next thing the viewers saw was Frank arriving at the house with Andy with his belongings in tow.

One of his belongings was his strongbox, in which he kept his "valuables" — like a medallion from the 1906 World's Fair and a slotted spoon with the Milwaukee skyline carved in it.

And a $100 bond issued by the town of Mayberry in 1861.

The bond had no expiration date. It only said it was redeemable at 8½% interest compounded annually.

After a conversation with the folks at the bank, Andy called a special meeting of the city council. At first the mayor and the councilmen insisted they were too busy to deal with Frank again, but they soon learned that they would have no choice. Frank's bond was worth nearly $350,000.

As the councilmen oohed and ahhed over a document that was a century old and worth more than a quarter of a million dollars, Frank remarked, "I'll take it in cash."

The fly in the ointment, though, was that Mayberry didn't have the money to pay Frank. Andy was recruited to offer Frank a settlement. He agreed to try, then, as he was leaving, he observed, "Just a few days ago we was ready to give Frank the boot. Now, for all we know, he may be giving the town 24 hours to get out."

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Andy came up with a compromise that seemed to please everyone. The members of the council fixed up Frank's house — gave it a fresh paint job, did some repairs to the exterior, made it a showplace (Andy's word) that was sure to attract out–of–towners. And the banker worked out financial arrangements with Frank to get his taxes up to date. All this would be a settlement in lieu of paying off the bond.

Yep, everything seemed to be going just fine — until the councilmen realized the bond was bought when Mayberry was part of the Confederacy — which meant it had been bought with Confederate money — which meant it could only be paid back in Confederate money — and, since the Confederacy no longer existed, that meant the bond was worthless.

Once again, the councilmen were ready to evict Frank from his home — until Andy urged them to consider it a good deed for a citizen in need and let it go at that.

That was pretty good reasoning — and by agreeing to it, the council members might have spared themselves another visit from karma instead of a couple in a convertible who mistakenly thought they were in some place called Elm City.

Confronting What Frightens You

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"A sandwich sure tastes better with milk."

Opie (Ron Howard)

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There were episodes in the second season of the Andy Griffith Show in which I feel the program's writers lost their way.

And that is truly a shame because the episode that began that season on this night in 1961, "Opie and the Bully," was a great example of one of the eternal virtues of the show — Andy's relationship with his young son Opie (Ron Howard) and his parental efforts to teach the boy right from wrong.

I have never been a father, but it has always seemed to me that Andy's character knew instinctively what to say or do — even though he would undoubtedly be the first to say that he didn't have all the answers. (Of all the fathers on TV, I have always thought Griffith's character was the best.)

In fact, there was one episode late in the series when Andy was trying to resolve an issue with a teenage Opie. Andy was taking the wrong approach and everyone seemed to realize it but Andy — who eventually conceded the fact when someone from outside the family circle demonstrated the right way to handle the matter.

I suppose it isn't at all uncommon for parents to be unsure of their parenting skills when their children hit their teens. But on this night in 1961, Opie was still in elementary school, and he faced a situation nearly every kid faces at some point.

For one reason or another, every kid has to learn to stand up for himself or herself — and that formed the basis of one of the Andy Griffith Show's episodes that I must watch whenever it is on.

In this episode Opie found himself at the mercy of a bully who wouldn't let him pass on his way to school unless Opie handed over the nickel (nickels were worth a lot more 55 years ago than they are now) he had been given to buy milk at lunch. If Opie didn't pay, the bully threatened him with "a knuckle sandwich."

So Opie thought he had hit on the solution. He would get nickels from both Aunt Bee and Andy. He'd give one to the bully and still have one for milk.

But Andy became suspicious when Opie did that and asked him about that night. Opie insisted that he wanted the second nickel as a spare in case he lost the other one.

Andy let it slide — until he was talking with Barney about it the next day — and Barney told Andy that Opie had been in the jail earlier asking Barney if he had a nickel he wasn't using.

Barney offered to give Opie some fighting lessons, but Andy rejected the idea. Opie didn't need fighting lessons, he told Barney. Andy didn't want his son to be the kind of boy who went around looking for fights, but he didn't want Opie to back down from one when he was in the right. Andy had to figure out a way to impress that on Opie.

And it came to him when they were fishing one day. Opie wanted to know how Andy came across such a good fishing spot, and Andy made up a story featuring himself at Opie's age. In Andy's story, he had been chased off by the town bully, "Hodie Snitch," and he told Opie how he had stood up for what rightfully belonged to him.

The story should be seen in its entirety, but essentially Andy's point was that tough talk is just talk, and Opie was inspired to stand up to the bully who had been extorting money from him.

Opie repeatedly sought reassurance from his father, asking him to confirm things he had said in his story. Andy had claimed that he laughed when Hodie hit him, that he didn't even feel it. Opie was reassured, and he resolved to confront his tormentor.

Opie asked Andy to keep some spare clothes for him at the courthouse — in case something happened that got his clothes torn and messy. Andy agreed, knowing what Opie was planning to do. Later at the courthouse, Andy and Barney speculated about where Opie was and whether he had had his confrontation with the bully. Andy was having the kind of doubts that all parents must have at some time.

"Did you ever do anything," Andy asked Barney, "that you wondered if you was doing the right thing?"

Opie faced his fear — and got a black eye for his trouble. But for him it was a badge of honor.

And an important lesson had been learned.

Neither Purely History Nor Purely Mystery

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"Nobody hates history. They hate their own histories."

Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks)

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I kind of had an unfair advantage over many people who saw "The Da Vinci Code" after it premiered on this day in 2006.

Less than two months earlier, I was laid up for a couple of weeks after shoulder surgery. That's kind of a long story, and I really only mention it because, during my convalescence, I read Dan Brown's "preposterous" (in Roger Ebert's words) novel on which the movie was based.

The novel was published three years earlier, which is probably when most people read it — it was outsold only by the latest in the Harry Potter series — but I didn't read it then. I was busy with other things. Then, when I found myself with time on my hands in early 2006, I read a secondhand paperback copy of that novel.

That worked in my favor when the movie came out, though, because the plot was fresh in my mind. The people I knew who read it when the book was a best–seller in hardback had forgotten some of the finer points of the story, and I am sure they weren't alone.

(I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that it was considerably more challenging for moviegoers to follow the plot if they hadn't read the book. I mean, you at least had to be aware of about 2,000 years' worth of religious rumor and innuendo — as well as history. Lawrence Toppman of The Charlotte [N.C.] Observer wrote that "unlike most Hollywood blockbusters, this one assumes audience members will be smart." I worked for newspapers long enough to know that was probably a mistake.)

But I was fortunate to have the father I had. Dad was a religion professor when I was growing up so I got a lot of exposure to things about which most of my friends knew little, if anything — at least when it came to religion. Dad was a great resource for me when I was reading Brown's novel.

But he was a good resource in another way. Dad has always been an avid fan of mystery novels. As such, he was invaluable in helping me to differentiate between elements of genuine religious and historical significance and elements of good mystery writing. In such a novel, they are bound to overlap; without his help, it would have been easy for me to confuse the two.

On top of that, I saw the movie with Dad. We saw it on Father's Day that year — about a month after its premiere. We figured the crowds wouldn't be as great after a month. Boy, were we wrong. Around the time we saw it, "The Da Vinci Code" became the second film of 2006 to exceed $200 million in the United States.

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It was still packing 'em in.

Ron Howard's movies always pack 'em in, though, and they are almost always good so that was understandable. What's more he had two–time Oscar winner Tom Hanks in the leading role and two–time Oscar nominee Ian McKellen in a supporting role. French actress Audrey Tatou, who was largely unfamiliar to American movie audiences at the time, co–starred with Hanks. How could Howard go wrong?

Well, apparently, he did.

The response to the movie was, at best, mixed. I think most people recognized the controversial nature of the subject matter — as well as the fact that considerable resistance could be expected from the Roman Catholic Church. More than a dozen countries censored the film — if they didn't ban it outright.

So there were some headwinds facing the movie when it made its debut. But that didn't seem to dampen audience enthusiasm. As mentioned earlier, it was the second–highest grossing film that year. Anyone looking for evidence that critical endorsements' have little effect on consumer behavior need look no further than "The Da Vinci Code."

Still, the critics could be harsh, and Howard said he found their responses "frustrating."

And I guess they were.

But that is to be expected, I suppose, when a movie challenges people's religious beliefs, and that is precisely what "The Da Vinci Code" did. How could anyone think otherwise? Hanks' character was a professor of religious iconography and symbology involved in a quest for the Holy Grail.

What was not expected — at least, by me — was the negative reaction to Howard. After all, who didn't like Opie? Or, depending on your age, Richie Cunningham? Getting rough with Ron Howard is like getting rough with the Easter bunny.

Ebert wrote that the movie was "preposterously entertaining." That was probably a good way to put it.

I agreed with his assertion that the book on which the movie was based was "preposterous" — and with that stuff about the movie being preposterously entertaining.

If you haven't read the book or seen the movie, I encourage you to do so.

Just remember that it is neither purely history nor purely mystery. Perhaps a little of both.

What Friends Are For

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"It's like they say, 'Once burnt, lesson learnt. One mistake, better cake. Once bit, best forget.'"

Barney (Don Knotts)

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Andy Taylor (Andy Griffith) enjoyed teasing people, but he always seemed to stop before he crossed the line from teasing to humiliating.

That was probably one of the qualities of his character that appealed to me the most. We have probably all known people who kept picking at others long after they should have stopped. If one has been on the receiving end of such abuse, it is hard to forget — or forgive. For that matter, it can be pretty hard to forget or forgive if one has merely witnessed such abuse.

So when you see someone like Andy Taylor who knows where the line is and refuses to cross it, you tend to appreciate his decency — especially if the person who has been teased made an honest mistake in a sincere attempt to carry out a task. It doesn't seem right to me to pile on such a person. Andy Taylor seemed to know that, too.

And that was what was at the heart of the episode of the Andy Griffith Show that premiered on this night in 1961 — "Andy Saves Barney's Morale."

Andy was off to spend the day in a nearby community testifying in court, and Barney (Don Knotts) was left in charge. Andy was only gone for eight hours, but when he returned to Mayberry, he found the village to be strangely quiet, virtually deserted. Andy was pleased — until he went inside the courthouse and found half the town incarcerated in the jail's two cells. Among those in the jail were Andy's Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier) and his son Opie (Ron Howard). The mayor of Mayberry had been jailed as well.

In his zeal to show Andy how much he could depend on his deputy, Barney had gone overboard and made all of his arrests based on very flimsy legal logic. But he hadn't been authorized to fill in as justice of the peace in Andy's absence so he hadn't been able to process them. That had to wait until Andy returned.

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Now, Barney often went overboard. That was one of the running jokes of the series. And this episode provided plenty of material.

Technically speaking Barney's arrests were justified — but extreme. He arrested Aunt Bee for unlawful assembly and inciting a riot because she had gathered with other ladies in front of the courthouse, where, as Andy observed, the ladies of the community had been gathering to chat for years. When Barney tried to disperse them, Aunt Bee resisted and one of her friends raised her umbrella at Barney.

See, going strictly by the book, Barney was right. But any rational observer knew that the situation was not what the charges implied.

Neither was it justified when Barney charged an elderly man who could hardly speak above a whisper with disturbing the peace for allegedly shouting at his adversary in checkers.

The same logic was at work when Barney charged the mayor with vagrancy and loitering.

And, as a result, Barney was in for more than his fair share of ribbing from the folks in the town. He took it good–naturedly for awhile, but then it crossed that line, and he became noticeably despondent and told Andy he was going to quit the force.

Andy didn't tease him about any of it. He did, however, come up with a brilliant way to put the issue to rest.

He laughed along with the townspeople when they made their jokes, then casually dropped the bombshell on them that he was going to be getting a new deputy. After all, he pointed out, he couldn't have a deputy on the force who was the butt of so many jokes. Such a deputy, he said, has lost the confidence of the people.

That really made an impression on the folks in the town, who all gravitated back to the jail and incarcerated themselves, just as Otis the town drunk had been doing for years, and scolded Andy for not realizing how serious their "crimes" had been.

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Otis, by the way, had been one of the people Barney arrested earlier — and he had been charged with a perfectly plausible crime, considering Otis' history — being under the influence of alcohol.

But, as with all the others, Barney had been carried away. The fact was that, when Barney asked Otis to walk a straight line, Otis said, "What line?" not because he was drunk but because he didn't have his glasses with him.

But you didn't need glasses to see the wisdom of Andy's tactic.

A Trip to the Moon on Gossamer Wings

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"If they could get a washing machine to fly, my Jimmy could land it."

Mrs. Lovell (Jean Speegle Howard)

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The day that I saw "Apollo 13" (which premiered on this day in 1995) at a movie theater is crystal clear in my memory. Not much else from that time is vivid in my memory — except for the fact that my mother died in a flash flood two months earlier. I spent that summer with my father. He had been injured in the flood and needed someone's assistance every day.

That summer is a blur to me now. I guess it was the routine nature of most days. I didn't take Dad to physical therapy every day, but I took him often enough that it took on a routine quality. Cooking his meals were daily events for me. I did the laundry and the housework — not every day but most days. Cutting the grass was once a week. A very routine quality.

But I remember the day I saw Ron Howard's "Apollo 13." Some friends of my parents called us up and asked if we wanted to go see it. We jumped at the offer.

There are always a few movie directors whose work I want to see — regardless of the topic. Ron Howard is one of them. And there are a handful of actors whose work I always want to see — regardless of the topic. Tom Hanks is one of them. A movie directed by Howard and starring Hanks was made to order.

I wasn't much on the space theme when I was a child — and I was a child during the space race. I got caught up in it when most people did, like when Apollo 11 went to the moon, but I really didn't pay much attention to it a lot of the time. I don't know why. It seemed to be a pretty big thing with most of the kids I knew.

But I do remember Apollo 13 and how the world seemed to hold its breath during the effort to bring that crippled spacecraft back to earth.

Ron Howard reminds me of Steven Spielberg in so many ways. They both love technology that gives them new options for special effects, and they love using that technology to get the kind of response from their audiences that they desire. Camera angles are important, but those computer–enhanced special effects are hard to beat — and almost impossible to resist if you're making a movie about America's space program.

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Even the actual footage of blastoffs couldn't provide the kind of angles viewers could see in "Apollo 13." After watching that movie, I, for one, had a much greater appreciation for the risks those astronauts took, strapping themselves into the nose of a rocket that went hurtling into the sky at hundreds of miles an hour and out into the unknown realm of space.

There were no guarantees of anyone's safety — yet the only astronaut fatalities in the first 25 years or so of NASA space travel were the three fire–related deaths on the ground in 1967.

That event provided one of the best moments in the movie, in my opinion. Hanks' character got moved up from backup crew to primary crew when the assignments were changed for medical reasons, and Apollo 13 was scheduled to lift off slightly more than three years after those other astronauts died in the fire.

Hanks' son in the movie — Jim Lovell's real son was only about 4 when Apollo 13 made its aborted moon flight — expressed his concerns about his father going into space (even though Lovell had been on a Gemini mission the year before the boy was born), and Hanks tried to explain to him about the lessons that had been learned from that fire and the improvements that had been made to spaceships because of it.

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Hanks explained to his son that a problem during the fire had been the hatch — the "door," he told his son. The astronauts were unable to open it when the fire broke out. NASA, he explained, had fixed that problem. "It's not a problem anymore," he assured his son.

Later in the movie, when the astronaut's wife (Kathleen Quinlan) told the boy that "something broke on your daddy's spaceship," the boy asked in a hushed tone, "Was it the door?"

Most of the time, Hollywood can't resist adding drama to a story that really doesn't need it, and "Apollo 13" didn't need it.

"Ron Howard's film of this mission is directed with a single–mindedness and attention to detail that makes it riveting," film critic Roger Ebert wrote. "He doesn't make the mistake of adding cornball little subplots to popularize the material; he knows he has a great story, and he tells it in a docudrama that feels like it was filmed on location in outer space."

As astonishing as the re–creation of the event in space was, it was hard pressed at times to match the scenes from earth. That is one of the things I remember from that time — how the newscasts focused on the astronauts' families and how they were coping with the situation. At the time, I felt torn between wanting to know everything I could possibly know — and wishing people would respect the families' privacy.

The nice thing about a movie, though, is that somewhere deep down you realize that the families' privacy really isn't being invaded, that these are actors. But the dramatization of Hanks' on–screen family watching the news coverage of Apollo 13's attempt to re–enter earth's atmosphere was as intense as if the viewer was watching the real thing.

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I'll grant you, it's hard to draw a distinction sometimes.

Howard's movie would have been incomplete if it focused only on what the astronauts — Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton — were facing. Much of the drama occurred on the ground — and not just on the home front. NASA's technicians, including Gary Sinise (whose character would have been on board if not for apparently needless worries that he might be sick with the German measles during the flight), performed heroically under pressure to come up with an ingenious device made from things on board the ship that would resolve problems with a damaged oxygen tank.

Television news did report that at the time, but my memory is that, when the astronauts were safely back on earth, the spotlight fell entirely on them. That probably suited the ground crew just fine. It was, after all, a team effort.

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Ed Harris played Gene Kranz, the captain of the team. In the movie, he was credited with saying, "Failure is not an option," although I have heard that Kranz did not actually say it, that it was created by screen writers.

That doesn't take anything away from what NASA achieved 45 years ago, and it took nothing from Ebert's admiration.

"The space program was a really extraordinary thing, something to be proud of," he wrote, "and those who went into space were not just 'heroes,' which is a cliché, but brave and resourceful."

Little Reporters Have Big Ears

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I've always had a soft spot in my heart for the episode of the Andy Griffith Show that first aired 50 years ago tonight, "Opie's Newspaper."

I'm sure that the fact that journalism has played such a significant role in my life has a lot to do with it. But there is more to it than that. It was a matter of — for me, at least — art imitating life. Or maybe, since the episode aired long before I was first hired by a newspaper, it was a case of art foretelling life.

Anyway ...

Opie did something that I did for awhile when I was a boy. He tried to put out his own newspaper. Some kids have lemonade stands to make pocket change; Opie and I put out our own newspapers, and he learned the same lesson I did. It isn't easy to put out a newspaper — even for adults who have all sorts of advantages that children do not have.

Of course, Barney (Don Knotts) always had the answers — or thought he did. Opie (Ron Howard) was having trouble selling his newspaper, which was almost exclusively dedicated to the goings on in his grade school. Barney thought he wasn't getting the right copy ("Copy — that's newspaper talk," he told Opie), and he advised Opie to widen his scope.

But, while Barney and Andy were trying to be helpful, the message that Opie got was that their paper had to be more like the local newspaper so he and his pal Howie went through the latest copy of the Mayberry newspaper looking for inspiration, and they found it in a gossip column, "Mayberry After Midnight."

And they agreed that they needed to do the same thing that was done in "Mayberry After Midnight" so they went about eavesdropping on conversations around town.

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They overheard Barney saying that the young wife of an older man was a "blonde out of a bottle."

They overheard Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier) criticizing the food that was served at a luncheon and describing it as "wallpaper paste."

And they overheard Andy describing the local minister's sermons as "dry as dust."

And they put it in the paper, which Andy and Barney and Aunt Bee discovered to their chagrin. See, Opie and Howie were giving away the first edition of their new newspaper as a get–acquainted special, and they had distributed copies all over town. They had put them in mailboxes and under windshield wipers. In some cases, they hand–delivered them to people.

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Andy, Barney and Aunt Bee fanned out over Mayberry seeking to retrieve the copies of the paper — and each one ran into the person of whom he/she had spoken so poorly, which was a bit of a lesson in itself. Be careful what you say. You never know who might be listening.

Of course, as Andy pointed out, just because somebody said something does not mean it should be printed up and circulated. It isn't surprising that Opie and Howie failed to grasp the concept. Sadly, there are a lot of adults who struggle with the same issue.

Andy was trying to explain to Opie and Howie why they shouldn't print stories like that. "You don't circulate stories that are mean and unkind about people," he said. "There are too many other stories to put in. Nice stories."

"But, Pa," Opie protested. "When we put in the nice kind of stories, nobody wanted to buy the paper." There is the conundrum.

It's been many years since I worked for a newspaper, but I have had that discussion so many times that I know every angle by heart. People who aren't in the news business always criticize newspapers and news broadcasts for focusing on the negative. But that's what readers want. Nobody wants to read about who sold the most Girl Scout cookies — except maybe the Girl Scout and her family.

The truth is, newspapers can't afford to be crusaders all the time. They have to give the readers what they want part of the time — or else they would go out of business. Quite often, that means providing the tawdry and sensational at the expense of things that may be more uplifting.

It's a complex thing, really. The nature of news is to be negative — wars, natural disasters, economic collapses — and human nature often veers to the negative. Many people — not all but many — are greedy and selfish. It isn't news when people are civilized with each other because that is what is expected. It is news when they are uncivilized with each other.

Or, as we are frequently told in journalism school, it isn't news if a dog bites a man. But it is news if a man bites a dog.

There was a valuable lesson in the episode, which was articulated best by Aunt Bee. When she, Andy and Barney concluded they had retrieved all the copies of the paper, and Andy said he hoped Opie and Howie had learned from the experience, she observed that perhaps the adults could learn something from it, too.

"We're responsible for all this loose talk going around town," she said. "If we want the boys to behave better, we'd better set them a better example."

That's good advice, and it would have been quite effective — if Opie hadn't mentioned that he and Howie had had so much material that they had printed up the next week's edition in advance. He assured them that all those copies had been taken to the dump so no one would ever read them.

Except for Aunt Bee, Andy and Barney who went to the dump on a late–night expedition to find the papers and read what other gossip the boys had picked up.