IVAN'S DAY: MANSIONS OF STORY

In "The Church Bell" episode of 'Mayberry RFD', we got a location shot that was more than an echo. Luckily Ivan was there to catch it: There is then a cut to the exterior of this imposing mansion…and the second I spotted this, I thought: “I have seen this place before.” So I grabbed a disc from The Andy Griffith Show: The Complete Final Season and cued it up to “Barney Hosts a Summit Meeting,” the episode where Barney Fife (Don Knotts) returns to Mayberry and enlists Andy’s help in trying to convince a rich old fart to lend his house to a delegation of visiting U.S. and Russian dignitaries. As you can plainly see, it’s the same damn house. So…what precisely is the deal here? I suppose it’s possible that there could be two houses in the tonier section of town that look the same—when my family and I still lived in Teays Valley, WV our house was an exact copy of our next-door neighbors’, apparently the work of an architect who didn’t have much imagination. (It really creeped me out, too.) My next thought was that the current occupant of the Mayberry manse bought the house from the former owner…though I’d like to think he foreclosed on the guy and kicked him to the curb (the previous guy also had quite a bit of loot, so it was like watching a wrestling match between rich people),

MILLIE: Lucius Fremont? The man who lives in the big white house?

Okay, so I guess he did kick the previous owner out into the street. Dude is cold-blooded, Jack…

It seems to me that Lucius Fremont came to the Mayberry area as a young man, seeking his fortune, and instead found love. But as we found out in "The Church Bell", Mr. Fremont lost out on that one true love. So instead he must have returned to his original goal, with a slight twist - to make a fortune but then use it against anybody who stood in his way.

This might have included Mr. McCabe, the character played by Paul Fix in that summit meeting episode of 'The Andy Griffith Show'. What if he was the man who stole Fremont's one true love away from him? And since McCabe was the guy who owned that house, wouldn't Lucius Fremont then do all that he could to at least take that away from him? Now I said that I believed that Lucius Fremont wasn't native to the area. I think he may have come from Ohio. And when he moved away from the state, Lucius Fremont left behind the only family he had left - his brother and his brother's wife and their young son...

Anthony Fremont.

And if so, even though we don't see any proof of it in the episode, maybe Lucius Fremont never got over the loss of his family when Peakesville, Ohio, disappeared off the map in Toobworld.....

Yeah, I know. I'm a bad man. I'm a real bad man for thinking that.....