LIFE

Just as we’d hoped, it’s all smiles in ‘Mayberry’

Teddy Allen

Joy. Rapture. What a break when you meet a person you’ve admired and they live up to the billing, or you visit a place on your Bucket List and it’s better than you’d imagined.

I’m channeling my inner Darling Boys here and telling you I’m all keyed up. Tingly, even. Very happy as I’ve hung up the phone with a friend who’d just returned from the annual Mayberry Days event in Mt. Airy, N.C., hometown of Andy Griffith, our television hero who brought to life Sheriff Andy Taylor in “The Andy Griffith Show,” still popular long after it first aired Oct. 4, 1960, 55 years ago this very day.

Thank you, person who invented electricity and the camera and the TV set. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Andy.

Shreveport-Bossier’s Terry Slack never remembers a time without “The Andy Griffith Show.” He was a fan as a boy, as a student-athlete at Louisiana Tech, and all these years as an area and statewide Fellowship of Christian Athletes director. Three times, he’d planned a September pilgrimage to Mt. Airy. Three times, it had fallen through.

And because of the unexpected early-September hip surgery to his wife, Peggy, this was almost the fourth cancellation. But Peggy, also a fan, insisted, Thelma Lou-like. So Terry and their son Hayden hit the road: first an FCA stop in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., then the Billy Graham Library/Museum in Charlotte, and then, “home” to “Mayberry.”

“What a huge blessing. Man...,” Slack said. “I can’t...it’s even too much to soak in. It’s still amazing to think I was there just yesterday morning. It was beyond what I expected.”

Sure, he wants to go to heaven. But he wanted to go to Mt. Airy first. And he got to, and there, he found at least a sliver of his final destination.

“People there of all shapes and sizes, all ages,” he said. “People just like me and you but from Indiana, Nevada...People you run in to on Main Street and you just pick up like you knew them or something...

“You now what I saw around there mostly? Just a whole lot of smiling going on. Didn’t see anybody upset about anything. Just a lot, lot of smiling. Good to see a lot of smiling faces.”

Friday evening my phone beeped and there was a picture with Terry and Otis and Gomer and Goob – just outside the Snappy Lunch diner. It was like discovering a buddy had slipped off and finally married the girl of his dreams, or finished writing the book he’d been talking about, or got the recording contract he’d been practicing for for years.

“He made it,” I’m thinking. “Slack made it!”

And he had. “They call them ‘character tributes,’” he said of his costumed friends. “Right when we got to Main Street, there’s an Otis walking right by us. Saw several Otises, several Barneys. Saw a Gomer, a Floyd...Mayor Pike.”

They ate at the Snappy Lunch and at Barney’s Cafe. Got a ride in a 1963 Ford Galaxie squad car from a local historian dressed up like Barn who drove them all through town and hit the siren and hollered and yelled out people’s names when he waved. They went by the house Andy’s daddy bought for $435 dollars during the Depression; it’s available through the Hampton Inn for overnight stays now. They went to the Andy Griffith Museum and the Andy Playhouse/Theatre that was the auditorium of the high school Andy attended. They enjoyed chapel Sunday morning in the outdoor amphitheatre right across the street. Rode on the Andy Griffith Parkway – that would be your U.S. Route 52 in Surry County.

He wants to go back one day and take Peggy. The people say summertime and late fall is a good time to come. It’s not Mayberry Days, but it’s still Mayberry days. And nights. “Told me they have stuff going on all the time,” Slack said. The cost is just getting there and back, and a place to stay. And if you wish, the special at the Bluebird Diner, if someone opens it back up. The lady who ran it for years just retired. Opportunity?...Anybody?...

“It was a special ... look, you can’t miss it. You’ve got to get there,” Slack said.

I respect his opinion since he is a founding member of Hagen’s Heroes, the name of The Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club’s local chapter (visit tagsrwc.com), of which I serve as president. (It’s a non-paying job.) I wish we could walk in the Mayberry Days parade as we did at Holiday in Dixie years ago. The club’s named after Earle Hagen, the gentleman who wrote “The Fishin’ Hole” tune, the theme song of our favorite show and a popular tune around town still, or so says Slack, who I just promoted to the position of Club Travel Planner and Mt. Airy Historian.

“It was like stepping into a vacuum of time where things just slowed way down,” he said. “Just a little piece of heaven, a glimmer of it. I’m sure it’s not a perfect town, but they sure do a good job of making it feel like Mayberry. You couldn’t walk up and down the street without hearing the theme song. You knew every step exactly where you were.”

Contact atteddy@latech.edu