RIP: Matlock

RIP: Matlock

Whenever I think of Andy, I remember three obscure things:

1. My dad thought No Time For Sergeants was the funniest film he had ever seen.

It was sort of the same premise as Gomer Pyle, M.C., except in the Air Force. A country boy turns out to be a lot smarter than he seems. At the time Andy was unknown except for the other versions of No Time For Sergeants which he had done on Broadway and on The US Steel Hour, an early TV anthology series. I was nine when my dad took me to see the movie, and I haven't seen it since, so my memories of it are vague except that my dad laughed out loud throughout.

Two years later, Andy first played Sheriff Andy Taylor. Only you real old-timers remember that Sheriff Taylor first appeared on Make Room For Daddy as a cagey southern lawman who pulled over Danny Thomas for going through a stop sign. That appearance led to his own show which ran ... well, it never stopped running, did it?

2. I remember Andy coming on Johnny Carson and talking about how he had starred in a college production of H.M.S. Pinafore at UNC Chapel Hill.

Egged on by the host, he then proceeded to sing a few bars: "That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!" It was pretty awful. His voice was just barely OK, but the really strange part was that he sang Gilbert and Sullivan in his usual down-home drawl, showing that the queen's navee was ruled by a southern bumpkin. I was laughing my ass off because I thought he was kidding around, but I was wrong. He really was in that production. Note that he was one of the stars, meaning presumably he was one of the most British-sounding guys they could come up with, and one of the best singers! Oh, to go back in time and savor the exquisite awfulness of that show!

3. After college and before he finally hit it big, Andy was a high school teacher.

He taught English. (Would you have guessed that?) They must have some odd requirements for obtaining a teaching certification in North Carolina, because Andy had been a music major in college. (That also was not easy to guess.) I guess the only requirement for teaching English was an ability to speak some version of it.