They Called Me Opie.

I grew up in the groovy 60’s and swinging 70’s in a small Wisconsin city on the shore of Lake Michigan. Life was fairly Mayberry-esque in our town and with our limited television channels when a popular show was on, everyone was watching it. Everyone, that is, except me.

I was a kid who loved the outdoors and had lots of Twinkie and Koolaid induced sugar energy to burn, so after Saturday morning cartoons I was off on some adventure of exploration. Our town had miles of beaches, a winding river running through it and forests all around where a kid could experience the freedom of imaginative play without constantly worrying about being too loud or breaking some adult rule. Looking back, it seems quite idyllic and not at all unlike the fictional town of Mayberry which has become symbolic of small town values.

In my book MENTAGENESIS: Free Your Mind To Create Your Future! I explain that there’s a mysterious and fortuitous connection between myself and the character Opie on the Classic TV comedy “The Andy Griffith Show”. It has to do with one particular episode (season 2, episode 17- The Jinx). In this episode, the always paranoid Barney Fife believes himself to be jinxed. He reads a book that says rubbing the head of a kid with red hair will bring good luck. He follows this advice and hilariously proceeds to rub Opie’s head whenever he can. The subtext of this episode has an important message. What we believe becomes our reality.

This connection brought much good fortune my way and predisposed me to accidentally begin using the power of MENTAGENESIS from a young age, without even knowing I was doing it!

Furthermore, the good people of Sheboygan, (my home town) were complicit in creating this connection because they obviously thought I looked like the young Ron Howard who played Opie on the TV show. Wherever I would go they would point at me, call me Opie and try to rub my head! Why they were doing this was a mystery to me at the time. All I knew was that at any moment I could be ambushed by someone who would grab my arm and vigorously rub my head with their other hand. Sometimes they would exclaim “Give me some good luck!” Since I was a kid who loved to be outdoors, I never saw the episode and no-one ever explained the mystery to me. Years later I discovered why and this led me to a revelation about the way MENTAGENESIS (mind-manifestation) works!

With so many people trying to extract luck from me, I came to believe I must be lucky. Whenever I would play a game of chance, I felt my inherent good luck would work in my favor. And guess what? It did. I came to be knows to some of my friends as “the kid who was born under a lucky star” because of how often fortuitous circumstances happened to me.

Side by side pictures of Ron Howard and Daniel Wolfert at age 7. — Ron Howard and Daniel Wolfert

So what do you think? Did I bear a resemblance to Opie/Ron Howard on The Andy Griffith Show? Would you go out of your way to try to rub the noggin of this kid? Did you know that children hold the key to manifestation by the way they play and the imaginative way they interact with the world?

An image of a smiling Jesus surrounded by happy children.

What did Jesus mean when he said that to “enter the Kingdom of Heaven you must become as a little child?” Is it possible he was referring to the free use of our imagination to manifest our preferred reality? I invite you to bookmark this blog if you’d like to learn more! What have you got to lose but your limitations?