The Day Some Hillbillies Moved to Beverly Hills

Dirt-poor Jed Clampett gives away his oil-rich swamp this week for a measly 25 dollars. Fortunately, the OK Oil Co. pays him in that “new kind of dollars”--millions.

Even that amount might not sound like much in these days of $50 million Lotto jackpots, but in 1962, when The Beverly Hillbillies first aired, it was more than enough to load up the truck and move to Beverly (Hills, that is).

In the premiere episode (Tuesday at 11 a.m. on KDOC), Jed’s not so sure he wants to leave his Ozarks paradise-a place crawling with critters, eight miles from neighbors and without indoor plumbing. But he decides the family can rough it when he learns about such wonders as smog (must be a kind of small hog, he figures).

In their first days in Californy (airing the rest of the week on KDOC), Granny, Jed, Elly May and Jethro will discover their prison-size house, the cee-ment pond and those big pink chickens; next-door neighbor Mrs. Drysdale will discover that the Clampetts are hazardous to her mental health.

The critics took to “The Beverly Hillbillies” about as well as Mrs. Drysdale did, but the viewers loved the show, so it lasted until 1971 (by which time the Clampetts’ fortune had grown to $95 million).