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Andy Griffith had the seat Don Knotts used during table readings bronzed and sent it as a goodbye gift when Knotts left the series
Griffith gave Knotts a present he wouldn't soon forget.
Bonded by a similar background and a shared love for comedy, it's difficult to imagine what Andy Griffith and Don Knotts couldn't do when working together. Although Knotts originally joined The Andy Griffith Show as Barney Fife, Griffith quickly realized that Knotts had talent behind the scenes and invited Knotts to join the writing room that developed episodes for the series.
Both Griffith and Knotts were raised in rural environments, and both of them utilized their experiences to enhance their writing on The Andy Griffith Show. "Andy and I had very similar backgrounds as kids," said Knotts, according to Inside Mayberry: The Andy Griffith Show Handbook, written by Dan Harrison and Bill Habeeb. "We were both from small towns. I wasn't from a real rural area, but I was from a small town in West Virginia. Andy is from North Carolina, of course."
Specifically, Knotts revealed that he and Griffith were responsible for the commonly utilized porch scenes that were often featured in episodes of The Andy Griffith Show. Often, Barney and Andy would sit together out on the Taylor front porch, exchanging few words between the two of them, simply enjoying each other's company.
Knotts explained that these scenes were directly inspired by memories of his own childhood. "We both [Andy and I] had similar experiences with some of these small-town people, particularly rural people," he said.
"That is, they don't talk a lot. And I was telling him about how my family would take me out to the farm to visit, and we'd sit around Sundays on the front porch or whatever, and no one would say much. You could sit there with them all day, and they'd hardly talk at all. And we started a little bit of that. We gradually worked it into that front porch thing."
So interested in hearing Knotts' perspective, Griffith pressed that he and Knotts sit beside one another during table readings, even going so far as to make guests find another spot when he saw they had taken Knotts' coveted seat.
Apparently, after Knotts left the series as a regular character, Griffith actually had the chair bronzed and sent to Knotts as a parting gift.
"He had it bronzed," said Knotts. "It was so heavy you could hardly pick the thing up."
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