Ziffel Piffle

Celebrating a Deathday™: Beefy barnyard hausfrau Doris Ziffel of Hooterville, USA went to the feeding trough in the sky on this day, July 19, 1969. A local yokel by appearances, Doris was actually born in New York City, as was her pompous lawyer neighbor Oliver Wendell Douglas. She had her sights set on show business as a lass and, indeed — before she went to hayseed — Doris was a bloody platinum blonde Ziegfeld girl. Alas, she met the rascally pig farmer Fred Ziffel on a cross-country train ride, and before the railcar reached its final destination, old Fred had sweet-talked his way into Doris' caboose, if you will — and he did — and it was life on the farm for her thereafter. The Ziffels went childless for many years — old Fred was firing blanks, it seemed — before their son Arnold the pig came into their life. He was adopted, but the four-legged Arnold was a Ziffel through and through. He was an avid fan of Westerns on the telly, drank his orange sodie pop from a straw out of the bottle and like his pa, he had an eye for the ladies, particularly Mr. Haney’s daughter Cynthia the basset hound. Doting mother Doris didn’t think Cynthia was worthy of Arnold’s attention at first, but was soon won over. The same can also be said of the relationship she enjoyed with her neighbor the Douglas’s, as Doris was cold to Hungarian beauty Lisa — whom she mistakenly thought had an eye for her husband Fred, but ‘twas all a misunderstanding over some tractor business, that was soon rectified. Her stone-deaf husband Fred also had trouble with the green-eyed monster, and would accuse county commissioner Hank Kimball and druggist Sam Drucker of having their filthy farm way with his missus, but ‘twasn’t so. He and Doris went on an overdue second honeymoon in Pixley, or possibly Crabwell Corners, and their love and affection was renewed. Doris was said to be no stranger to the distilled spirits and her weight ballooned in her later years, but, in the end, it was the bloody lumbago that got her. We don’t hear much about the dreaded disease of the lower back nowadays, but back then, lumbago dropped many a folk in their prime, and it was only through the efforts of the La-Z-Boy® reclining company that relief from suffering was realized. R.I.P. to Dorris Ziffel, hollering her head off in the great beyond.