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Thanks for posting this. How sad. Don Knotts (lol, I saw a poster refer the other evening to "Don Knox") was a one-of-a-kind.

I'll bet there are cave-dwellers somewhere in the far reaches of the planet Earth who know who Barney Fife is! He lives on.

I get my nightly dose of Barn and Ange in the wee hours, but miss it in times like these - the Olympics pre-empting.

"Nip it ... nip it in the bud" - was what my dad said about my first serious boyfriend relationship at 15. BF would go around imitating Barney saying it.

"Nita ... jua-ah-ah-neeta ... ask thy soul if we should part ..." (singing it over the phone until Andy comes in from rounds - then "all business" to Juanita at the diner).

Ha ha, Barney as the bride in Ernest T's wedding to the Darling girl ... so funny!

And when he dressed up again as a woman, a la the Greater Tuna guys, to catch yet another thief ... and as he walked out onto the street in his get-up and wig, Opie just walks by and says "Hi, Barn" and keeps walking.

I do remember him on Steve Allen, too, as the nervous man on the street, along with the others. "Who, me? Nervous?" And Gordon Hathaway's "Hi ho, Steverino!"

The Mayberry Reunion movie was on not long ago and whoever said it's best to leave classics alone was right! While I was *glad* that Andy and Helen had married and were old-timers now, and that Barney and Thelma Lou were still together, and that Opie was having a baby - (grandpa Opie now) - it did sort of give me a jolt to "realize" that the Mayberry of old really doesn't exist anymore - as if it ever did, except on a TV show!

In the reruns I watch every night, they have been in one of the B/W seasons when Barney wasn't there. I missed how or why he left - he's only come back once - and Andy went to see him once in Mount Pilot at his detective job. It is definitely not as good with Barney gone.

Ooh, for a while they had that double-talking guy that used to be a partner in Burns & Schreiber. "Huh? Yeah. Huh? Yeah. Huh? Yeah. Enough already!" That was in the later color episodes, though. He was terrible.

I love seeing who some of the guest actors are. One of Andy's paramours was Ruta Lee and then he also had a date with Annie Oakley - Gail ... last name is escaping me. She out-shot him at the skeet tourney, after he kind of said some disparaging things about women and guns. Andy did have his "male chauvinist pig" side - but he also knew it in that episode and apologized.

(Which made it easier much later, in a color season, to have Aunt Bee get her pilot's license!)

Oh, so many memories - but Barney lives on, and so does Don!