Magill: A fan recalls Griffith's G-Day appearance

One of my favorite TV shows, the "Andy Griffith Show," originated in 1960 and is still going strong. I watch it almost every day or night, or both.

Its main characters are Griffith as Sheriff Andy Taylor of the little North Carolina fictional town of Mayberry, Don Knotts as Deputy Barney Fife and Ronny Howard as Taylor's only child, Opie Taylor.

Griffith will be 85 on June 1. He was born in Mount Airy, N.C., in 1926, the only child of Geneva and Carl Lee Griffith, a carpenter.

As a student at Mount Airy High School, Griffith participated in the school's drama program and learned to play the trombone and sing.

At the University of North Carolina, he first studied to be a Moravian preacher, but changed his major to music and graduated with a bachelor of music degree in 1949.

After graduation, he taught English for a few years at Goldsboro High School in Goldsboro, N.C.

His early acting career included serving as a monologist, delivering long stories such as "What it Was, Was Football," which is told from the point of view of a rural backwoodsman trying to figure out what was going on in a football game. It was released as a single in 1953, and I heard it on the radio and decided to invite Griffith to Athens for the Georgia G-Day spring football game held on March 6, 1954.

Former Georgia track star "Monk" Arnold, a star jumper and hurdler on Georgia's 1936 SEC championship team, was in charge of an organization in Atlanta that contracted