Then, a couple of years after they met, Nabors introduced Pursell to another one of his friends, Chrissy Parker from Sylacauga.

“Jim Nabors introduced them, and they kind of became a thing,” David Pursell says. “And the love affair started.”

THE MISSING RING
In 1953, while Jimmy Pursell was stationed at Mather Air Force Base in Sacramento, Calif., he and Chrissy Parker got married in the chapel on the base.

Nabors, who was by then living in Los Angeles and working as a film cutter for NBC, was Jimmy Pursell’s best man.

“They had invited Jim Nabors to come up and be the best man, to sing and usher in their wedding,” David Pursell says. “He was the one and only attendant on the groom’s side.”

Their wedding day was not without a little drama, though.

“Jim Nabors had been put in charge of the wedding ring,” David Pursell says. “The day of the wedding, he can’t find the wedding ring. Somehow, he had misplaced it, so I’m told.”

The mother of the bride, as mothers of brides sometimes do, quickly intervened.

“My grandmother, she was a mess,” Pursell says. “She goes up to Jim Nabors and points a finger in his face and says, ‘There will be a wedding today. I’ve come too far for there not to be a wedding.'”

The ring was eventually found, although David Pursell says that part of the story has been lost with time.

Twelve years later, though, during the second season of “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” Nabors used that wedding day near-fiasco as the comedic inspiration for an episode titled “Third Finger, Left Loaf.”

In it, Gomer is responsible for keeping up with his friend’s wedding ring, but on the eve of the wedding, he panics when he can’t find it, believing he may have lost the ring in one of the 600 loaves of bread he baked in the base mess hall.