Andy Griffith Remembered in Northern Nevada

Andy Griffith, who played Sheriff Andy Taylor in the fictional town of Mayberry, died at the age of 86. Born in Mount Airy, North Carolina, in 1926, Griffith graduated from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1949 with a degree in music.

He originally planned on being a preacher, but instead became a teacher. After teaching high school music for a few years, he began his entertainment career with regular appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and Broadway.

Griffith received a Tony nomination for “No Time for Sergeants,” and later “Destry Rides Again.”  He made his film début in “A Face in the Crowd,” but it was the 1960 début of “The Andy Griffith Show” that brought his greatest fame and ran for eight-years.

Twice during the late-1970s, Andy Griffith unsuccessfully attempted to launch a TV detective series as  Abel Marsh, Jasper Lake’s police chief whose back-woods demeanor hides a sharp analytical mind and gift for deduction.  The first pilot film was “The Girl in the Empty Grave;” the second was “The Deadly Game.”

“Girl in the Empty Grave” gets under way when a girl shows up in town, whose  believed dead, leading town-folk to wonder whose buried in her grave. First broadcast September 20, 1977, “Girl in the Empty Grave” was followed a couple of months later by “The Deadly Game.”

Once again Griffith stars as resort-town Jasper Lake’s sheriff Abel Marsh, this time wrestling with a military conspiracy involving a dangerous chemical spill. “Deadly Game” first aired December 3, 1977.

I recall watching both made for TV movies when they first aired.

It was in the mid-90s when I first saw a rerun of “The Deadly Game,” and suddenly recognized much of the landscape in the movie. While the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists both of these movies as being filmed at Big Bear Lake, California, Washoe County old-timers have confirmed what I’ve suspected all along — filming of “The Deadly Game,” took place around Lake Tahoe and the Washoe Valley.