Jim Nabors, the singer and actor who became a TV icon in the 1960s playing the lovably naïve Gomer Pyle on “The Andy Griffith Show” and the spinoff series “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” has died. He was 87.
Nabors, who underwent a liver transplant after contracting hepatitis B in 1994, died Thursday at his home in Hawaii, his website announced.
“Everybody knows he was a wonderful man. And that’s all we can say about him,” said Stan Cadwallader, who had been Nabors’ partner for 38 years before the couple married in 2013. “He’s going to be dearly missed.”
A tall and lanky Alabama native, Nabors was singing at a small nightclub in Santa Monica called the Horn in 1962 when Griffith caught his act, in which he’d sing in a booming baritone and then talk in a higher-pitched Southern hayseed accent.
“It was the stupidest act you had ever seen,” Nabors said in a 2000 interview with The Times. But Griffith was so impressed, he told Nabors he’d call him if a part in his TV series ever came up.
“Two weeks later, they called me,” Nabors recalled. “The character’s name was Gomer Pyle. So I read it as the character I was doing in the club. It was the first time I had ever acted.”
The guileless Gomer was the attendant at Wally’s gas station in Mayberry.
As Gomer said to Griffith’s Sheriff Andy Taylor: “Me, I don’t do no engine work. Just gas and oil, water and air. Water and air is free. We don’t make no charge for it.”
The eager-to-please character who wore a ball cap with an upturned bill soon became known for his signature exclamations: “Well, gaawl-lee!” “Shazam!” and “Sur-prise, sur-prise, sur-prise.”
“Everybody thought [Gomer] was stupid; he really wasn’t,” Nabors said in an interview on 2008’s “Pioneers of Television,” the PBS documentary miniseries. “He just wanted to see the goodness in everybody.”
Gomer’s popularity led to a spinoff series in 1964, in which the Mayberry innocent joined the Marine Corps, where he encountered the gruff Sgt. Vince Carter (played by Frank Sutton).
“Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” a top 10-rated show, ran on CBS for five seasons.
In his 2000 interview with The Times, Nabors said the military series never generated criticism, despite airing during the height of the Vietnam War.
“We had established it was a peacetime situation and every episode was a peacetime situation. War wasn’t mentioned,” he said. “I shot the first few episodes at the Marine base in San Diego — the opening where I was marching along. The Marines were very supportive of it.”
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