For many fans growing up with The Andy Griffith Show, Andy Griffith was the quintessential “TV Dad.” But when the filming was done, Andy was a father not to the millions of kids watching at home, but to the two children that he and his wife, fellow performer Barbara Edwards, adopted: daughter Dixie and son Sam.

Andy was “fun-loving, full of life, introspective, a perfectionist, decisive, so many things,” Dixie recalled when speaking with  The Cheatham County Exchange in 2024. She described her father as “bigger than life in many ways,” and a “very complicated individual” who loved animals, gardening and his antique car collection.