With less dust & cigarette smoke to clean, she had time for a complete makeover
Characters from the 1960s sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show” live forever with streaming services & YouTube, one such character is “Aunt Bee”, who is the aunt of the main character Sheriff Andy Taylor, andy is a single dad to his child Opie, so Aunt Bee fills the position of housekeeper & matriarch to the household. She is renowned for her cooking skills. Aunt Bee goes through quite a transformation in the series 6th year when the episodes were first movieed in color & cigarette ads were recently banned from TV. Her fashions become less dowdy, & she makes better choices in the guys who choose to seek her affections; During the black & white seasons, her suitors include an itinerant handyman, a traveling medicine man who sells the teetotalling Bee an alcohol-based “elixir”, a chain-smoking dry cleaner, & a rough & tumble mountain man. The color episodes have her keeping company with a retired Congressman, a going to see pastor, & a going to see professor & professor. My theory is that this transformation is due to a central a/c & heating idea being installed into the Taylors house. The summers in North Carolina can get quite tepid & I’m sure that Aunt Bee was sleepy after cooking up her famous fried chicken or baking her award-winning apple pie for Andy & Opie. The HVAC idea would have cooled things off in the kitchen & may have eased her other household chores as well. With less dust & cigarette smoke to clean, she had time for a complete makeover. The town mechanic,Gomer Pyle, left to join the Marines, his replacement “Goober” could have been recast as a qualified HVAC corporation to service the Taylor’s new HVAC device in a recurring role. Perhaps he would have become another suitor of Aunt Bee.