Andy Taylor and Barney Fife were close friends in the fictional world of Mayberry. It turns out that the actors who portrayed them were close friends as well.

According to Don Knotts, “Andy was a good boss and one of the reasons the show had such good rapport. Andy was simply a good guy.”

Knotts attended the weekly script meetings at the insistence of Griffith.  Andy reserved a chair next to him for Don and would tell any would-be interloper, “You have to get up. That’s Don’s chair.” Even after he left the show Don’s chair was never used again.

Later, Griffith had the chair bronzed and sent to Knotts as a gift.  Don said of the gift, “It was so heavy you could hardly pick the thing up.”

The mutual respect and good rapport among the cast and crew established by Andy Griffith was often mentioned as the foundation that made it possible to maintain the quality of the show throughout its run.

The late Jack Dodson, who played Howard Sprague, tells a story of something interesting he found when he was first cast on The Andy Griffith Show.

He says that the first time he was on the back lot, which was known as the Forty Acres, he went wandering around. “I had nothing to do for a couple of hours,” he said, “and I turned a corner and thought, ‘God, that building looks familiar.’ So I went inside and I saw all these burlap packs with shovels and cooking pots made out of rubber, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute. This is the train station form Gone with the Wind. It had never been used since then because there were still props left inside. Shovels, rifles with rubber bayonets on the end, and even the dummies they used for the bodies.”

Fascinating!