THE HAT SQUAD MEMORIAL - REMEMBERING ANETA CORSAUT

Today would have been Aneta Corsaut’s 85th birthday.  I had a big crush on her as a teenager, while watching her as Helen Crump on ‘The Andy Griffith Show’ and I can trace that to those big beautiful eyes of hers.

To memorialize her, I’d like to present this theory of relateeveety which connects three of her TV characters…..

From Wikipedia:
Helen Crump is a fictional dramatic character on the American television program ‘The Andy Griffith Show’ (1960-1968). Helen made her debut in the third-season episode "Andy Discovers America" (1963). Helen was a schoolteacher and became main character Sheriff Andy Taylor's girlfriend. Helen also appeared in TAGS spinoff, 'Mayberry R.F.D.' (1968 – 1971), and in the TAGS reunion telemovie, "Return to Mayberry" (1986). Helen was portrayed by Aneta Corsaut.

Helen Crump hails from Kansas and attended college in Kansas City. She majored in journalism. Helen takes up residence in Mayberry and is employed as an elementary schoolteacher. Her uncle, Edward, and her young niece, Cynthia, visit her in Mayberry. Unlike other Mayberry women, Helen has no special skills in the kitchen. She enjoys picnicking, and, in one episode, directs the high school's senior play. An independent, self-sufficient, professional single woman, Helen is a wise and thoughtful character, occasionally displaying a quick temper, who serves as the voice of reason on the show.  

Helen wrote a book entitled “Amusing Tales of Tiny Tots”, which was published by a Richmond Virginia, firm.  (The book was republished decades later by Whitestone Press in New York City.)

Helen has a niece named Cynthia who hails from Wheeling, West Virginia.  Cynthia was better at a lot of activities which Opie thought were his forte and Opie wasn't happy about it. 

Cynthia is the daughter of Helen’s sister.  Both of the women resembled each other very closely, to a remarkable degree of similarity, but I don’t think they were identical twins.  (Tele-genetics are very strong, much more likely to recombine exactly than in the Real World.)

Helen and her sister were the daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Sam Crump from Jericho in Fillmore County, Kansas.

After they graduated from college, both of the Crump girls left Kansas and traveled East in pursuit of their careers.  Helen became a grade school teacher in Mayberry while her sister became a nurse and worked in a hospital in Wheeling, West Virginia.  They were both attracted to that general region because of childhood visits to West Virginia with the family to visit Mother Crump’s sister who married Edward Smallwood.  They had a daughter whom they named Karen.

Karen Smallwood was a rocket scientist and she worked for the United States government at a quasi-classified testing site dedicated to research on rocket fuel thrusts. (This was located just outside of Smoky Corners. West Virginia.)  Dr. Smallwood was dating one of her co-workers, Major Bob Walsh, and eventually she would agree to marry him. 

When he teasingly questioned why she wouldn’t marry him back in the late 1950s, Karen put him off, saying that at the moment her heart belonged to the government; that it was her plan to be one of the first women to go to the moon.  Eventually, she did fulfill that dream, along with her husband Bob, as they were two of the first crew members at the ultra-secret Moonbase Alpha.  Tragically, Dr. Smallwood – she kept her maiden name - was one of the casualties of the nuclear dump explosion on the far side of the moon which had been caused by a 7-Up publicity campaign gone horribly wrong.

Helen’s sister had married a man named Morgan and Cynthia was their only child.  Because her husband accepted a job offer at Universal Research and Development, they had to relocate to the West Coast.  So the Morgans moved from West Virginia in 1967 into a house on Clinton Avenue in Los Angeles.  (When the blended Brady family moved in down the street two years later, the Morgans were the first to welcome them to the neighborhood.  Although she was a grade ahead of them, Cynthia would become better friends with Greg and Marcia Brady once they became freshmen at Westdale High School.)

Once she was settled into her new home, Mrs. Morgan* applied for a job at several Los Angeles hospitals, including Rampart General and Angels of Mercy.  She was hired by Community General, where she worked closely with Sharon Martin.  Nurse Morgan was a proficient nurse and operated strictly by the book when it came to the rules.  That included taking a firm stand against smoking in the hospital.

In 1973, Sharon Martin was murdered by Dr. Barry Mayfield and Nurse Morgan assumed many of the duties she had been overseeing.  This included the care of Dr. Edmund Hideman who was recovering from the heart valve operation performed by Dr. Mayfield – one which was deliberately designed to cause his death.  (Sharon Martin discovered this and that’s why Mayfield murdered her.)  Nurse Morgan became highly suspicious of Dr. Mayfield when she caught him hovering about the unattended tray of medicines at the nurses’ station – so much so that she acted on those suspicions and contacted the police lieutenant who was investigating Sharon’s murder.

As for Helen Taylor, she and the former sheriff of Mayberry eventually married and moved to Raleigh where they raised their son Andrew Samuel Taylor.  (Farmer and city councilman Sam Jones thought that the lad got his middle name from him, and the Taylors let him believe that.

Andrew Sam Taylor was actually named after his father Andy and his grandfather Sam Crump.)  By the mid-1980s, the Taylors moved back to Mayberry where Andy easily won the job of sheriff in an election against his old deputy – his cousin Barney Fife.  (I like to think that eventually Barney ran for the office of mayor and won – he certainly couldn’t have done any worse than Mayors Pike and Stoner.)

Sadly, Helen Crump Taylor passed away in the mid-1990s in her 60s, leaving her husband Andy, their son Andrew Sam, and her stepson Opie who was the editor of the local newspaper in Mayberry.  Andy eventually retired as sheriff and was succeeded in the job by his son Andrew Sam.  Andy spent the years remaining to him by relaxing on his front porch, softly strumming his guitar.

On a warm summer night in 2012, the music which the neighbors had become accustomed to suddenly stopped.  Responding to a worried phone call from a neighbor, Opie and Andrew Sam went over to the house they grew up in and found their father on the porch swing, his chin resting on his chest and the guitar held lightly in his hands.

As for Nurse Morgan, she’s still alive, a widow now and retired as a nurse.  She takes pleasure in spoiling her grandchildren by her daughter.  Cynthia became a television journalist who won both the national Humboldt Award and a local Teddy Award in Minneapolis.  In a way, now that they were adults, she was still showing up Opie competitively.

TV SHOWS CITED:

• ‘The Andy Griffith Show’
• ‘Columbo’ – “A Stitch In Crime”
• ‘Mayberry R.F.D.’ – “Andy And Helen Get Married” & “Andy’s Baby”
• ‘The Real McCoys’ – “The McCoy Hex”
• ‘Space: 1999’ – “Breakaway”
• ‘Murphy Brown’ – “And The Whiner Is” & “Bah, Humboldt!”
• ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ – “Murray Can’t Lose” (among others)
• ‘Flight’ – “The Havana Run”
• ‘The Brady Bunch’
• ‘Diagnosis Murder’
• ‘Dream On’
• ‘My Three Sons’
• ‘Jericho’
• ‘Emergency’
• ‘City Of Angels’
• “Return To Mayberry”
• 7-Up commercial

BCnU!

* O’Bservation – We never learned the first name of Helen Crump’s sister.