Mayberry Gets Harder to Find All the Time

 

Betty Lynn, who played Barney Fife’s girlfriend Thelma Lou on “The Andy Griffith Show,” has moved from West Hollywood to Mount Airy, N.C., the town upon which fictional Mayberry was based.

What does this have to do with sports? Nothing. But I’ve got nothing much to say about former Iowa football players Cedric Everson and Abe Satterfield and their sexual assault charges. If it’s true, it’s purely rotten. If it’s not true, it’s rotten for the accused.

In years past, I would have been leaping for the first available soapbox to scream about something rotten in the state of Hawkdom. But it just wears you out after a while.

All those arrests in the last couple years, so many players who left the program prematurely because of legal nonsense. But this, if true, is far worse than anything than any Hawkeye football player has done in a long, long time.

Maybe the worst offense will be the last. Maybe, in time, some semblance of innocence will return to the program so many of you love. As the Beach Boys sang a long time ago in supposedly more-innocent times, wouldn’t it be nice?

Thelma Lou moved to Mount Airy because her Hollywood home of 57 years got broken into twice last year. But the Hawkeyes can’t escape to a Mayberry. Heck, we used to think Iowa City was a Mayberry compared to a lot of places.

Here’s a link to the Thelma Lou story:

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=19723578&BRD=1817&PAG=461&dept_id=222087&rfi=6