Values Not Critical Issue in Town Known as Mayberry

A black-and-white sheriff’s squad car is parked outside the motel room. Which is disconcerting, even for those of us who sleep with an easy conscience.

A case of small-town moonshining, perhaps? A guest en route to a law enforcement convention?

It is a handsome car, on inspection. Looks like about a 1963 Ford Galaxie 500, perfect for those Appalachian speed traps. On the door is a two-foot-high silver star with the letters Sheriff Mayberry.

Yes, Mayberry. As in TV.

Inadvertently we have stumbled into the past.

That jug-eared hillbilly, Andy Griffith, came from Mt. Airy and fashioned his campy, bromidic 1960-68 television sitcom, “The Andy Griffith Show,” after this town.

What does this have to do with politics and the 1992 election of a President?

We’re getting there.

Turns out the squad car at the Mayberry Motor Inn is an old prop from the TV show. Andy and Barney and Opie and Aunt Bee may have gone into reruns a generation ago, but the series lives on here as a curious backdrop to everyday life.

Some of it is pure commercialism--but not all.

No, the faded old show lives on year after year in Mt. Airy to satisfy a self-image of simple small-town pleasures, small-town ideals. Corny but comfortable. Here at the knee of the Blue Ridge Mountains, many want to live that way still, even the ones who come here from the big cities, like Charlotte. People want to know each other and say hi when they pass and gossip up a storm when the doors are closed. They want to move around without congestion and poke their noses into each other’s business and not be hurried about it. And they want to sleep at night knowing the neighbors will be there in time of need.

As for us, we need a haircut. Which requires stepping around a small, live pig that is standing in the doorway to the ancient clutter of Floyd’s Barber Shop on Main Street. Russell Hiatt has been behind a chair here since 1946.

Two years later, Griffith left town. Floyd’s Barber Shop came to be featured centrally in his show.

“I have people come in here from all over the country, all walks of life. They’re saying this is what they’re looking for, a town like this,” Russell says.

American values. There’s our connection between the silly pop culture expressions of wholesome Americana from Mayberry--Gomer Pyle, Barney Fife, Andy Griffith and friends--and the contemporary clash of Quayle, Bush, Clinton and Gore.

In real life, Mt. Airy contains what seems like a dozen or more places to go to church, and it sounds like there are as many preachers as disc jockeys on the radio dial. The heaping plate of fried shrimp on the dinner special at the seafood restaurant is $3.11 with tax. You have to ask where you can find liquor, and then it’s only wine and beer. Downtown, there is a hardware store with a potbellied stove, a pharmacy, a bank, two bookshops (Playboy is held behind the register) and the Snappy Lunch, where folks gather every day at the worn counter. And as we said, there was a bristly little pig in the doorway of Floyd’s.

“Well, every person and every place in the show was based on someone or something that he knew here in Mt. Airy,” Russell says. “There was Aunt Bee . . . and the town drunk, why, that could have been any number of three or four guys. We’ve got them too, you know.”

A drunk, eh?

And that’s not all. If you are a fan, you already know, and if not, you can be reminded. The central theme of “The Andy Griffith Show” was the ennoblement of the daily life of a single parent trying to rear a child. Andy and Opie.

So tell us, Russell, was “The Andy Griffith Show” all that unlike today’s “Murphy Brown”?

“Really, you can’t say there is much difference, is there?” he replies.

Imagine that.

Besides, people tell us, these matters may be good for gossip. Maybe. But not for picking a President.

Russell waves it off. Won’t sway voters here.

“Clinton, he’ll win this county. I’m not saying he’ll win the state, but he’ll win the county,” he says.

That would be a switch. For the last three presidential elections, Surry County went Republican. Russell is not sure why the change, except for the temptation of change itself. But he has detected the trend among his customers.

We raise the matter of values with Russell’s niece, Donna George, who works part time at the barbershop and arranges her hours so she can be with her kids.

“I tell you honestly, I’m surprised. I didn’t expect it when I first started, but all these people who come in from other places are just like me. I don’t know why, but I expected they would be different. The only difference is their accents, and they think we got one.”

Yes, she says, there are people in Mt. Airy who have different values, including some, say, who favor same-sex marriages. “Those aren’t my values,” she adds. “But there are people like that here. They come into the shop. . . .”

Imagine that.

Back at the Mayberry Motor Lodge, co-owner Alma Venable, with a shy grandmotherly smile, points to Aunt Bee’s room. One of the 27 guest rooms has been set aside as a roadside shrine to the TV character, with photographs of the late actress, Frances Bavier, and the bedroom furniture from her estate.

Alma is not partisan. Probably both candidates would make good presidents, she says. As for values, her expressions have more in common with Murphy Brown than Dan Quayle.

“My father was born out of wedlock. These kinds of things affect every family, don’t they?”