Smiley Burnette (engineer Charley Pratt) died of leukemia right after filming wrapped for the fourth season. During the show's fifth season (1967-1968), Floyd Smoot (Rufe Davis) took over running the train alone as engineer and conductor. The absence of Burnette's character of Charley was explained by allusions in several episodes to his death. Floyd was replaced the following season by Wendell Gibbs, played by Byron Foulger. During the show's last season (1969–70), Foulger had become too ill to continue and did not appear. Davis guested as Floyd Smoot for two episodes, one of them being "Last Train To Pixley". He was also addressed off-screen in one episode as an invisible character. Coincidentally, Foulger died on the same day that the final episode of Petticoat Junction aired: April 4, 1970. Bea Benaderet, who played the main character Kate Bradley, died in 1968 after a two-year illness with lung cancer; June Lockhart then joined the show as Dr. Janet Craig, a mother figure to the girls, from 1968 until the show's end in 1970. ReunionsPetticoat Junction was the only one of Paul Henning's country trio not to return in an updated reunion movie. In the 1970s, Meredith MacRae and Linda Kaye Henning tried to produce Hello Again Hooterville: A Thanksgiving Reunion, but the project never came to fruition.The Ottawa Journal July 15, 1978 p. 112 available online at Newspapers.com retrieved October 15, 2015 The game show Family Feud featured a Petticoat Junction cast reunion in 1983, when Frank Cady, Linda Kaye Henning, Lori Saunders, Gunilla Hutton, and Meredith MacRae (Edgar Buchanan had died in 1979) competed against cast members from The Brady Bunch. Henning, Saunders, and Hutton reunited again in 2015 for a MeTV promotional ad. In 1990, the character of Sam Drucker appeared in Return to Green Acres, in what was Frank Cady's final acting role. In 1981, Linda Kaye Henning and Charles Lane both appeared in The Return of the Beverly Hillbillies, but not as Betty Jo and Homer Bedloe. Henning played a secretary named Linda, and Lane played Chief. Green Acres and Beverly Hillbillies crossoversPetticoat Junction is set in the same fictional universe as Green Acres. Both shows are set in Hooterville, and they share such characters as Sam Drucker, Newt Kiley, and Floyd Smoot. A number of core Green Acres characters, such as Fred and Doris Ziffel (originally named "Ruthie" after Paul Henning's wife, Ruth), Arnold the Pig,