Reflecting on Mayberry

© Dr. Gary D. Lemmons, March 5, 2006

In a lot of ways 1960 was a pivotal point in my childhood.  I was 11 years old…no longer a little boy, but not yet a full-blown adolescent.  The fact that within another year I would be entering junior high school was very real to me, and I struggled with thoughts of how I would make it in what,  to an elementary school boy, seemed to be such a challenging world.

I began to lose my innocence that year.  No, it didn’t involve relationships with the opposite sex.  I was still much too young and ugly for that.  Rather, I began to realize that life was not at all the safe and secure environment that up to that point I had felt it to be.

In March, Morris, a fellow student in Mrs. Windom’s Fifth Grade class accidentally hung himself in his parent’s detached garage.  Reports said that he was alone and playing cowboys and Indians, a game many of my generation played.  It was a frightening moment.  I had known people who had died before, but they had always been old.  No one my age had died.  Suddenly, I realized that I was not invincible.

In April, Anna, a teenage girl whose family lived in a house that my family had lived in years before on the Riley Creek Road, went missing.  A week later her body was discovered on the old Camp Forrest Reservation just south of our town and a prominent insurance salesman was arrested for her murder.  This tragedy provided fodder for much front porch and kitchen table conversation for the next two years.  This event impacted me in that I began to realize the world was not safe and even people as nice and respectable as an insurance agent could be dangerous.

Television was a major source of entertainment in those days.  It was also, at least in our house, a source of state and national news, which was watched regularly.  By my daughter’s standards for her children, my parents were very lax when it came to allowing my brother and me to watch T. V. in those days.  Generally, we could watch anything we wanted to watch and our time was relatively unlimited, so long as the grades in school were always up to par.  In defense of my parent’s liberality, there were virtually no four letter words used on television in those days, and, while occasionally there might be a program that approached an adult theme, by today’s standards, such a production would be classified as extremely mild.

At the beginning of the 1960 television season, a new comedy program, The Andy Griffith Show, came on the air.  This funny, half-hour program was set in the rural North Carolina town of Mayberry and introduced a pantheon of characters not the least of which was the town’s dedicated yet bumbling deputy sheriff, Barney Fife, played by Don Knotts, who passed away on Friday, February 24, 2006.

The major star of the show was Andy Griffith in the role of Sheriff Andy Taylor.  Sheriff Taylor was a widower with a young son Opie, played by Ron Howard, and lived with his Aunt Bea, played by Frances Bavier.

As I said earlier, there was a pantheon of characters, both regular and guests, who either lived or wandered into Mayberry over the next eight years.  The themes of the shows covered a wide range of issues and over time the show and its characters matured.  The level of sophistication of the productions rose and Mayberry grew-up during that time of “agonizing reappraisal” of the 1960s.

I guess, in a lot of ways, I grew-up in Mayberry.  Like the town, by the time the show ended in 1968, I was totally different from what I had been when I first visited the place before our television set.  I had experienced too much, and the eleven year old boy that had once been was no more.

Over the 38 years since the last show of the original series first aired, Mayberry has been an integral part of American society.  Countless children and adults alike have watched the old episodes time after time and laughed anew at the antics of Barney, Floyd, Otis, Howard, Emmett, Goober, Gomer, and Earnest T. Bass, not to mention tapping a foot to Briscoe, Sharlene and the Boys, aka: the Darlings.

Many of the people who worked on The Andy Griffith Show went on to other projects and many enjoyed other successes.  Don Knotts, after some hilarious movies, starred with John Ritter in Three’s Company, a comedy oriented to more contemporary themes.  Ron Howard grew up.  After great success as Richie Cunningham in Happy Days, he has become a successful director of movies.  His latest work, The Da Vinci Code, will premier later this year.  Andy Griffith, himself, continues to work and enjoyed almost equal success in the series Matlock.

There is a little of Mayberry in all small towns.  There is scarcely one of us, who has watched The Andy Griffith Show, who cannot identify someone that we know or have known in our lives that reminds us of some character from that fictional town. Mayberry lives forever.

Somewhere, in the great beyond, I like to think that Don Knotts (in the genre of Barney Fife) is sitting on the front porch on a warm Sunday afternoon with Frances Bavier (in the genre of Aunt Bea) as she is getting acquainted with John Ritter, who has just been introduced to her by Barney.  The three of them are sipping iced tea and enjoying the quiet of a small town from yesteryear.

A foolish thought?  Maybe, but I do believe there is a heaven.