Member-only story
Why I Loved Elly May
It had nothing to do with her looks
I grew up in New York City so I was never much into The Beverly Hillbillies or The Andy Griffith Show when I was a kid. I loved I Love Lucy, however.
When I moved to South Carolina, however, I found a whole lot of my friends loved those two shows featuring Southerners. For Halloween one year, several of them dressed up as characters from The Beverly Hillbillies — Jed, Granny, Jethro, and Elly May.
By this point, I had developed a bit of fondness for these characters myself, but my favorite was Elly May.
Not because she was beautiful, or because she liked to “wrastle”, but because she loved “critters”.
I loved critters too. I have ever since I was a young child begging my parents to get a dog. Eventually, they bent enough to let me have a hamster. I would sneak it bunches of cilantro which irritated my mother, but not enough to actually do more than scold me. She got how much I loved my pet.
The thing is, if you saw old TV shows or movies, there were many examples of animals treated with affection. There was Mr. Ed, the talking horse, and Wilbur, the friendly pig. There was Lassie and Rin Tin Tin and That Darn Cat.
Yet were actual animals during that time period well treated?
