Jim Nabors, TV’s Gomer Pyle, dies at age 87
Jim Nabors was a comic actor who found fame in the role of the amiable bumpkin Gomer Pyle in two hit television shows of the 1960s while pursuing a second career as a popular singer with a booming baritone voice.
Jim Nabors, a comic actor who found fame in the role of the amiable bumpkin Gomer Pyle in two hit television shows of the 1960s while pursuing a second career as a popular singer with a booming baritone voice, died on Thursday at his home in Honolulu. He was 87.
His husband, Stan Cadwallader, confirmed the death, the Associated Press reported. He said that Nabors’ health had been declining for a year and that his immune system had been suppressed since he underwent a liver transplant in 1994.
Gomer Pyle, the character that so indelibly stamped Nabors’ career, originated in 1962 as a supporting role on “The Andy Griffith Show,” a bucolic CBS comedy that had been running since 1960. Nabors’ character became a favorite, and his sheepish “gawwwleee” and wideeyed “shazam!” became popular catchphrases.
In 1964, the character was spun off into his own series, “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” in which Gomer, still bumbling but well meaning, joined the Marines and, on a weekly basis, tried the patience of his loudmouthed drill sergeant, Vince Carter (Frank Sutton).
Nabors first showed off his booming singing voice for a national TV audience in 1964. To fans who knew him only as Gomer, his full-throated, almost operatic baritone was surprisingly striking, if strangely incongruous.
James Thurston Nabors was born on June 12, 1930, in Sylacauga , Ala., the third child and only son of Fred and Mavis Nabors. Jim sang in his school glee club and church choir and played the clarinet in the school band.
After earning a degree in business from the University of Alabama, he moved to New York, where he worked as a typist at the United Nations while harboring hopes for a stage career. By the end of the 1950s, he had moved to Los Angeles.
Taking a job as a film cutter at NBC, he started to perform, for no pay, at the Horn, a cabaret in Santa Monica, where Griffith caught his act and decided that Nabors’ twang made him a natural for “The Andy Griffith Show.”
He also made dozens of albums — recording ballads, show tunes, gospel and sacred music, country songs and Christmas carols, and performed regularly in concert.
He spent much of his later years in Hawaii, where he had a home in Honolulu and a 500acre farm in Hana, on the island of Maui, growing macadamia nuts and tropical flowers. Nabors married Cadwallader, his companion of 38 years, in 2013 in Seattle.
The Marines have recognized the character, calling Nabors “a great American.” In 2001, in a whimsical ceremony in Honolulu, Pfc. Gomer Pyle — Nabors, in character — was promoted to lance corporal.