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After spending three years in the Air Force, he worked one year as a high school baseball and basketball coach and history teacher near Huntsville, Ala.
In 1956, he attended the American Theatre Wing in New York City and began his professional career on Broadway, appearing in the musicals "All American" and "Wonderful Town."
He moved to Hollywood in the early 1960s and then to Nashville in the early 1990s.
"There's no place in the United States I can go that they don't know me. They may not know me, but they know the character," he told The Tennessean in 1980.
At that time, he said the Griffith show "was the first soft rural comedy with a moral."
"We physically and mentally became those people when we got to the set."
He did some standup comedy -- ending the show by tap and break dancing.
One of his jokes:
"A football coach, holding a football, asks his quarterback, 'Son, can you pass this?' The player says, 'Coach, I don't even think I can swallow it.'"
Lindsey devoted much of his spare time to raising funds for the Alabama Special Olympics. For 17 years, he sponsored a celebrity golf tournament in Montgomery, Ala., that raised money for the mentally disabled.
The University of North Alabama awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1992, and he was affectionately called "Doctor Goober" by acquaintances after that.
Funeral arrangements were still being made.
[Associated
Press;
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