A Dubious Achievement

As of last Friday, March 1st, I have seen all episodes, all 168 half-hour episodes, of The Rifleman Television series. Some of them I saw more than once, but I have seen them all at least once. The series ran from September 1958 to April 1963. Eighty-four hours of rootin' tootin' shoot 'em up! Eighty-four hours of my life that I will never get back, but I enjoyed it, so what is the loss. Maybe reading some books or doing something constructive. Hummmm.

One thing I wonder about is just where the town of Northfork, New Mexico Territory, is supposed to be located. They mention more than once the towns of Lordsburg, Roswell, and Hobbs, all of which towns I lived in for three, two, and three years respectively between 1951 and 1960. So Northfork has to be somewhere in the southern third of New Mexico and not a long distance from the Mexican border. The town of Yuma is also mentioned often as if it were not more than a couple of days' distance to travel. Yuma is actually all the way across Arizona on the California border, about 300 miles from the New Mexico border. Does anyone know in what geographic location Northfork was supposed to be? Maybe it floated around the area as needed for the storyline.

This may now be filed with another of my dubious television achievements: I have also seen all 234 episodes of Leave It To Beaver.