I wanted to relay my own little link to Mayberry, which happened over 40 years ago. When I was about 4 years old my family relocated from Flint Michigan to Culver City California. For about 5 years my family lived in a small house on Hubbard Street (either 9025 or 9052, I can't remember exactly). I attended elementary school just a few blocks away on Irving Place. To get to school my brother and I had to walk a few blocks around a bunch of rundown warehouse-type buildings which, we found out later, was only a few hundred yards from 40 Acres, where many old TV shows, including TAGS were filmed. One day, on our way to school, we saw a kid not much older than ourselves running up the street in the direction of the school. He looked rather familiar, so my brother, Kurt, and I naturally assumed he was in our school. But then the kid dodged behind some scraggly bushes at what the neighborhood kids called The Widow's House (it was really just a small abandoned house on Van Buren Place). Just then a red-haired kid raced around the corner followed by a man probably in his late twenties. The red-haired boy seemed familiar, too. The first boy jumped out at them as if to scare them, and he and the red-haired boy started laughing. The older guy didn't laugh, though. In fact, he didn't seem too happy at all. He started ushering them back down Van Buren, away from the school and right past my brother and me. It was then that we recognized the red-haired boy as Ronny Howard. He had apparently wandered beyond 40 Acres (Mayberry set) to play "hide and seek" with the other boy. The other kid may have been "Arnold," but we were never sure. The older guy was probably sent to reign in the young actors. When we got to school a few minutes later and excitedly told some of the other kids about actually seeing "Opie Taylor", we were disappointed to learn that many of the kids had seen him at one time or another. It seems Ron Howard liked to go "exploring" in the surrounding neighborhood whenever he could. That night we found out that our parents knew of the studio backlot just blocks from our house, and they forbid us from ever going "snooping" there. We never saw Ron Howard, or any other celebrities from 40 Acres after that, and my family moved to New York about a year later. For a short while I lived within shouting distance of Mayberry....yet I never actually saw it. _______________________________________________ WBMUTBB mailing list WBMUTBB@wbmutbb.com http://www.mayberry.com/tagsrwc/wbmutbb/
