Mount Airy, North Carolina, is the real-life hometown of Andy Griffith. He never really left it behind. He kept lifelong friendships with people he grew up with and stayed connected to this community his entire life.

If you watched the old Andy Griffith Show, you may remember that people in the show talked about going to Mount Airy as if it were the big city. Mayberry itself never existed.

But walk downtown and you would swear it did. Downtown Mount Airy was the live set used to portray Mayberry, and many of the storefronts are real shops that are still operating or easy to recognize from the show. Snappy Lunch still proudly calls itself the home of the pork chop sandwich.

Floyd’s Mayberry Barber Shop still has its striped pole out front.

And city tours run in an entire fleet of circa 1960 police squad cars, identical to the one Deputy Barney Fife drove on TV.

One of the most fascinating things in the whole town is a wall of photos in the lobby of the Andy Griffith Museum. It fills in the real-life inspiration behind people and places in various episodes of the show.

Here’s something else that surprised me. Music played a big role in the show, and I honestly thought that was just something the television writers built in. It wasn’t. Mount Airy has deep musical roots. There are Andy Griffith’s own record albums. Donna Fargo is from here, and the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History tells how her 1972 hit “Happiest Girl in the Whole USA” went to number one on the country charts. A gospel group called the Easter Brothers became a dominant name in gospel music. And the area supported a serious industry building guitars, mandolins, and banjos. A display on the local radio station, WPAQ, lists the legends who recorded or performed live there, including Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Mother Maybelle Carter, and Bill and Charlie Monroe.

The museum also does a good job of acknowledging the different groups who shaped this place. That includes the Native peoples who were here long before European settlers and lost roughly eighty percent of their population to disease and conflict by 1800. It includes the English, Scottish, Irish, and German families who settled first, the Italian and Eastern European stone carvers who came to work the granite quarry, Chang and Eng Bunker, the famous conjoined twins from Siam, and the Black store owners who ran businesses in the community.

But here is where it gets messy.

The Andy Griffith Show premiered about the same time I entered elementary school. When you watch it through today’s lens, it becomes painfully obvious that there simply were not any African American or Hispanic characters. And while there were plenty of women, every one of them stayed in her place according to the social standards of the time.

It is easy to forget how real those limits were. I want to be careful here, but I think we owe it to each other to remember. So let me take you back to 1961, the year I started elementary school.

A woman could legally be paid less than a man for the same job. The want ads were split into “Help Wanted – Male” and “Help Wanted – Female.” A bank could turn a woman down for a credit card or a loan unless a man signed with her.

In Texas and across the Southwest, many Mexican American kids went to separate schools, and some store windows had signs that said “No Mexicans Served.”

And for Black Americans, discrimination was everywhere, and in many places, segregation was the law. Many couldn’t vote, and the Voting Rights Act was still four years away. Fear and violence, including cross burnings and lynching, were used to enforce it.

I’m not saying any of this to spoil a good TV show. I still smile when I think about it. But that’s exactly the point. The warm, fuzzy memories the show gives me are real, but they are not the same lived experience as many people who grew up at the same time I did.

Many kids of color who started first grade the same fall I did walked into schools that were never built for them. They got hand-me-down books from the white schools. Their buildings were run down and never maintained the way mine were. And some of them watched a parent get turned away at a restaurant door. We were the same age in the same year, but we did not live in the same Mayberry.

That is our challenge as leaders: figuring out how to bridge the divides between the many dramatically different life experiences in our communities. Part of it is being honest about our history. And part of it is learning to respect, honor, and celebrate the life experience, and the culture, of people who are different from us.

One example of a bridge

This weekend, Mount Airy gave me one example of what a bridge can look like for a community. I happened to be there for Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.

For anyone who hasn’t experienced it, Día de los Muertos is a traditional Mexican celebration, held around November 1 and 2, to honor the people we have loved and lost. Remembering the ones who came before us is something every culture shares, and this tradition has its own beautiful way of doing it. Families build an ofrenda, an altar filled with photographs, candles, flowers, and favorite foods, and they gather to share stories and laugh and remember. The exhibit at the museum described it as a happy, festive time for families to be together, the living and the dead.

The Mount Airy Museum of Regional History sponsored the celebration. Inside, a large, well-done exhibit featured an ofrenda. Outside, the museum hosted a free street festival with food trucks, craftspeople, kids’ activities, a mariachi band, and a folkloric ballet. About half the people there were Hispanic, and about half were Anglo and African American, all celebrating together.

Think about what that means. A traditional cultural celebration that belongs to one part of the community became a celebration for the whole community. Nobody pretended the past didn’t happen, and nobody asked anyone to leave their culture at the door. The banner on the fence said it best: todos son bienvenidos. Everyone is welcome.

Learn More About Mount Airy

Visitors can see the places and stories mentioned here at:

• Mount Airy Museum of Regional History

• Andy Griffith Museum

• Visit Mayberry (Mount Airy visitor information)

About Ron on the Road

Ron Holifield speaks to over 6,000 local government officials annually and has coffee with over 250 local government officials each year as part of his travels. If you have a cool site you think he should visit, email Ron@CivicMarketplace.com. You can also learn more about efforts to help local government become architects of their own destiny at www.CivicMarketplace.com.

NOTE: This column was written with the assistance of Melissa Valentine, senior director of operations and support at Civic Marketplace. 

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