Much has been written about Mayberry, North Carolina, since the
death last week of Andy Griffith — about his show’s “false
cornpone nostalgia,” about the star’s indifference toward his Blue
Ridge Mountain hometown of Mount Airy. But no writer to my
knowledge has tried to imagine a contemporary Mayberry, a Mayberry
that would have endured the calamitous “progress” of the past forty
years. If America’s favorite fictional hamlet had — Pinocchio-like
— suddenly become a real town, it would have undergone many
changes since the show’s 1968 finale. And few of those changes
would have been for the better.
Mayberry’s downtown most likely would resemble a ghost town
where even the ghosts had departed in search of better
opportunities. Sadly, most rural North Carolina manufacturing and
tobacco towns are steadily losing both jobs and
population as — in a paradox worthy of a Joseph Heller story
— high school graduates move away, while would-be employers seek a
vibrant, well-trained workforce.
A wistful stroll downtown would yield little in the way of
nostalgia and much in the way of melancholia. The visitor stopping
at Floyd’s Barber Shop would find an empty storefront with a
flyspecked “for rent” sign in the window. Mayberry residents who
need a trim now drive out to the Great Clips in the Blue Ridge
Shopping Center, a strip mall that is home to a Dollar General
store, a Rent-A-Center, and a generic Mexican restaurant. Wally’s
Filling Station, unable to compete with the corporate-owned
Quik-Pik Food Mart out on the new Interstate, would be the site of
a used car lot, or quite possibly a Harley Davidson Super Center.
Main Street’s other longtime businesses — the hardware store,
Walker’s Pharmacy, the grocery, Emmett’s Fix-It Shop, the Blue Bird
Café — would likewise sit empty, done in by the Walmart, Walgreens
and fast food chains that roared into town in the 1980s, and set up
shop along what is now called Hamburger Row. Likewise, the Mayberry
Hotel, which stands catty-corner from the courthouse, would have
lost out to the new Holiday Inn Express. One may come across a few
antiquey shops on the square, like the ubiquitous Civil War surplus
store or the obligatory tattoo parlor, but the business district
would have relocated long ago from downtown to some former farmer’s
erstwhile tobacco fields.
Mayberry’s iconic courthouse would have been knocked down
decades ago, replaced by a Brutalist lump of “creative concrete.”
Why would a struggling city need a new courthouse, you ask? Like
many other hard-hit rural towns, Mayberry would have seen
incarceration rates skyrocket since the 1960s, and two jail cells
would not be nearly enough to house all its wantons. Back in the
1960s, you may recall, the only detainees were rock-throwing Ernest
T. Bass and Otis Campbell, the loveable town drunk. However, by the
early 90s, Mayberry’s cells would have been crowded with meth
cookers, trailer park wife-beaters, pot-smugglers, drunk-drivers,
and shoplifters. (Needless to say, the sheriff and his deputies
would now carry firearms and pack more than one bullet.) No doubt,
the new courthouse and jail would have been sold to the taxpayers
as a sign of progress.
Meanwhile, Mayberry Union High would sit idle and shuttered, a
victim of the school consolidation fever that ravaged the state
back in the '70s. Mayberry’s children, who once walked to and from
school, would be bused thirty miles away to TriCo High School,
located in the next county over. This was considered progress
too.
SEVERAL FACTORS WOULD have contributed to Mayberry’s decline.
The loss of manufacturing jobs, the waning of the tobacco industry,
the spread of higher education through federal government programs
for the poor, the encouragement of the best and brightest to decamp
for better opportunities in the cities, and the completion of the
four-lane Interstates that stretch (seemingly one way) to Raleigh
or Charlotte. Those young Mayberryites who did not run off to
college would have joined the military. Some returned in body bags,
others did not return at all, finding life more hospitable
elsewhere. The Federal Government would have had a hand in all
these factors, from the building of Interstates to changes in U.S.
trade policies.
TVLand’s Mayberry was in reality a set on the old RKO Path back lot in
Culver City, Calif., where many 1940s, '50s, and '60s movies and
television shows, from Star Trek to Superman,
were filmed. In 1976, the fictional Mayberry was razed for
re-development. The spot is known today as the Hayden Industrial
Tract. Perhaps a quick end by bulldozer was better than the slow
sad death a real Mayberry would have endured.
