Month: March 2019

The gift of the 1947 Yackety Yak yearbook I received from my friend, Jimmy, pictured Andy Griffith as president of the Glee Club yet did not have a class portrait. This led to me looking at other years when Andy attended. As detailed last time, the 1945 yearbook which was published at the end of Andy’s freshman year also showed Andy as a member of the Glee Club. It did not contain traditional class portraits but did have photographs of all underclassmen shot around campus. However, Andy was not in any of those photos.

The 1946 yearbook would have covered Andy’s sophomore year which was when he switched majors from sociology to music. In that yearbook, the Glee Club photo shows a much larger group without the names listed. While it is hard to be completely sure, I believe Andy’s distinctive full head of hair is visible.

This was the first year Andy is listed as an officer of the club. As originally noted, he was president in the yearbook Jimmy sent me. This yearbook from the previous year shows he was working his way up to that position as he was vice-president during the 1945-1946 academic year.

By this time, Andy had also become involved with the Carolina Playmakers, a student theater group that staged several plays and musicals each year. He recalled that he was passing by the building that housed the group one night and, on a whim, signed up to audition for the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, The Gondoliers. He said at the time he did not even know who Gilbert and Sullivan were. He was cast and received good reviews for his solos in the show, which helped convince him to change his major to music.

However, yet again, Andy was not included in the class portrait section.

The 1948 Yackety Yack which follows the 1947 yearbook given to me and discussed earlier covered Andy’s fourth year at UNC. It did not include any distinguishable photos of Andy. If he was still involved in the Glee Club, it had grown so large that is is not possible to locate him in such a large group.

Once again, Andy was not in the class portrait section. That left only one last possible year to check.

As I had the chance to look through the 1947 Yackety Yack in more detail, I was surprised to see that, while Andy’s portrait was included on the Glee Club page since he was president, his photo was not among the class photos. As mentioned last time, Andy changed majors during his sophomore year and ended up staying at the University of North Carolina an additional year, graduating in 1949. So during the 1946-1947 year, he could have still been considered a sophomore but more likely was a junior. Yet his photo was not in either one of those classes.

This aroused my curiosity. I reached out to Jim Clark to see if he had any idea why that would be, offering my theories that perhaps Andy was unable to afford it or simply was not interested. Jim did not know. I even reached out to Dixie Griffith, Andy’s daughter, but she did not know either.

I then decided to look at other years of The Yackety Yak. Andy said that when he first enrolled at UNC, even though he was a sociology major, he joined the glee club, band, and a choral society. Looking at the 1945 yearbook, Andy was clearly visible in the Glee Club photo which even included a listing of those in the photo. Andy is in the back row, second from the left.

The only band shown in the yearbook was the marching band. While I can not be sure, Andy was likely in that as well since he stated he joined the band. Andy had become proficient on trombone while still in Mount Airy and learned to play other brass instruments as well. There was no separate page dedicated to a choral group, but that could have been an informal group he joined.

The 1945 Yackety Yak did not include traditional class portraits for any class other than the seniors. Instead, all other classes were represented in numerous photos taken around campus, usually with 10 students in each photo. The names, hometowns, and class of each student pictured was listed alongside each photo. Freshman Andy was not among them in this instance, either.

As mentioned, I theorized there was more than one possible explanation. Perhaps Andy just did not care about being included in these photos and so did not bother to show up. After all, in the Glee Club photo in which he is pictured, 29 members along with the instructor are shown while 38 other club members were listed as “not in picture.”  I also wondered whether a student perhaps had to pay to be included in a photo and Andy chose not to do so as he was not from a wealthy family or simply wanted to save his money or thought it could be better spent.  This led me to look at the 1946 yearbook.

As an aside, I will add that there is one other interesting point to note in these yearbooks. It was a different time since the lead sponsor was Chesterfield Cigarettes urging the students to learn their A, B, Cs!

A few months ago, I wrote three sequential posts about a gift I received out of the blue from fellow Mayberry fan, Jimmy Phillips. My friend sent me the 1952 yearbook, Gohisca, from Goldsboro High School where Andy Griffith taught after earning his college degree. Keep in mind that I have not yet met Jimmy face-to-face. He is simply an extremely generous man who thought I would enjoy such a treasure. And he was right, of course.

We were recently preparing to go out of town for a trade show related to my wife’s business. Imagine my surprise when I received another Facebook Messenger inquiry from Jimmy making sure my address had not changed. Jimmy was sending me another package. I told him I would be out of town when it arrived but would have a neighbor put it inside a glass-enclosed sunroom on our house. He didn’t tell me what it was but did say it was over 70 years old. When I said the suspense was killing me, he responded, “Don’t you love a good mystery?”

 

When we returned from the trade show, I learned what Jimmy had sent. It was the 1947 University of North Carolina yearbook, The Yackety Yack, one of the years Andy was a student there. Andy enrolled at UNC in 1944 as a sociology major, a field of study he thought would be helpful to his plan at the time to become a Moravian minister. During his sophomore year, he decided he would rather major in music. The end result was he spent five years at UNC, graduating in 1949. Thus, this yearbook was from his third year at the university.

Whether he was technically a sophomore or junior as a result of changing his major, Andy was the president of the Men’s Glee Club that academic year. Just as he did when he became a teacher, he was going by “Andrew” even though his legal name was “Andy.”

When I contacted Jimmy to thank him yet again for his great generosity, I learned he had won the yearbook by bidding for it on an eBay auction. He made it a point to find the photo of Andy he knew it contained, then boxed it up and sent it as a gift. Jimmy also wrote, “I hope there’s something in it that will help your research. If not, it’s still a neat piece of Andy memorabilia.”

Though we have only “met” over the internet, Jimmy knows me too well. His gift definitely inspired me to dig into a curiosity I encountered when looking through The Yackety Yak. But that’s the subject of the next several blog posts.

When I travel, I like to seek out different and interesting soda pops or chips I have never encountered. I was recently in Michigan and tried a variation on my norm by buying two types of peanut butter.

These two products are not national brands such as Jif, Peter Pan, or Skippy. They are both were excellent in their own ways.

I had purchased Cream-Nut Peanut Butter before. I had first seen it at Zingerman’s, the fantastic deli I have previously mentioned. The peanut butter is sometimes called Koeze’s after the family company that makes it. Its ingredients are literally roasted Virginia peanuts and sea salt. That’s it. It is not homogenized with emulsifiers so there is a layer of oil at the top of the jar that you have to be careful about when you first open it. You stir the oil back into the peanut butter but inevitably you get a creamier-than-usual peanut butter at first. As you work your way down through the jar, the oil that is no longer there thanks to the earlier servings makes for a dense peanut butter at the bottom. This is not a bad thing. Both are delicious. Cream-Nut is not a cheap product. It was especially pricey at Zingerman’s where I first bought it, I consider it to have been worth the money as you can count on Zingerman’s to curate only the best quality products. It is cheaper to buy it at a local grocery but is still more expensive than the national brands though I would argue it is worth it.

Not long before we went on the trip to Michigan, I had read about another peanut butter that was a fond memory for many Michiganders until a few years ago. Velvet Peanut Butter is made in Livonia, a town near Detroit that also happens to be the hometown of one of my son-in-laws.

Velvet Peanut Butter was developed in 1944 by Paul Zuckerman, an Ashkenazi Jew born in Istanbul. His family immigrated to the United States and Paul grew up in Detroit during the Depression. The new peanut butter was an early homogenized variety and the three freckle-faced boys on the label were part of the advertising campaign. The child’s face was modeled after Zuckerman’s son.

In 1948, Velvet was chosen by the government to provide one and a half million pounds of peanut butter annually for use in schoolrooms across the country. Zuckerman finally sold the company in the 1950s, He eventually bought the brand back as part of a new corporation involved in various foods, but then sold the entire business in 1984 resulting in Velvet no longer being produced. He died two years later.

So for many people of a certain age in Michigan, their favorite peanut butter from childhood was only a memory. However, in 2009, one of those people bought the brand and original recipe and re-introduced Velvet.

The peanut butter is closer to what the national brands produce than Cream-Nut but seems less sweet. I don’t know if the peanuts are actually roasted before being ground, but it does have the taste of roasted peanuts.

While different from one another, both peanut butters were excellent and worth trying if you are in the area.

I recently posted about the Roadside America website and app I contributed a small item to along with several photos. There are several roadside attractions near Mount Airy, North Carolina. In fact, the same website and app list many spots familiar to anyone who has visited Mount Airy.

First, Roadside America literally lists the town itself as a tourist attraction. It also lists individual spots in Mount Airy.

The most obvious are the statue of Andy and Opie erected by TVLand and Wally’s which houses a wonderful gift shop, offers tours in recreations of the Mayberry squad car, and also has recreations of the courthouse, jail cells, and the Darling’s cabin that make for great photo opportunities. 

TVLand erected the original statue of Andy and Opie in Raleigh since it is a large city and the capital of North Carolina. They soon heard from fans about that decision and so erected a second statue in Mount Airy itself.

Wally’s was once a real gas station that was built in 1937 and remained in operation until it became a tourist attraction in 2001. Supposedly—and it would not seem unlikely in the least—a young Andy Griffith would grab a bottle of pop there. The gift shop in Wally’s is known for providing a nice selection of Mayberry gifts at reasonable prices and also has a large selection of old-time candies. I have taken tours in the squad cars a few times and have yet to encounter a guide who was not extremely knowledgable about the town and its ties to The Andy Griffith Show.

 

The site/app also lists The Andy Griffith Museum and provides a separate listing for the Chang and Eng exhibit about the famed “Siamese Twins” who lived in the area for many years and are buried nearby.

 

 

 

Floyd’s Barbershop is also listed. This longtime Mount Airy fixture was not really called Floyd’s long ago, of course, but was re-named to take advantage of the tourist trade that has developed around Mount Airy. The well-known barber Russell Hiatt passed away a few years ago but was always friendly with the constant parade of Mayberry fans who came into his shop.

Mount Airy’s granite quarry made the list since it is the world’s largest open-face granite quarry. 

Andy Griffith’s childhood home is another listed attraction. The exterior is available for viewing from the street easily enough, but the interior is not. It is operated as a bed and breakfast annex of the Hampton Inn. (The breakfast part is just that you can drive to the hotel to have their standard breakfast offerings.) The house has been expanded since Griffith lived there. What is now a small bedroom on the back of the house was originally a porch. I have been lucky enough to stay there. The house had various Mayberry paraphernalia hanging throughout and was stocked with a collection of episodes to be watched.

Room 109 at the Mayberry Motor Inn is the last individual attraction listed. The room holds a large number of items that once belonged to Frances Bavier who played Aunt Bee in the series.

Amazingly, Snappy Lunch is not listed individually. It sounds like I have another tip and photos to submit!

While not directly in Mount Airy, another interesting sight can be found in nearby Thurmond, North Carolina. Along a country road is a trio of Baptist churches that look like Russian nesting dolls. The smallest church was the original. When the congregation outgrew it, a larger church was built on the land next door but the original building was kept for church activities. As the congregation grew, a third church was built larger than the second, with the two earlier buildings again not demolished. The end result is a novel sight.

Regular readers know that I have posted about Hillbilly Hot Dogs, a fine eating establishment in Lesage, West Virginia on the route between Cincinnati and Mount Airy that would definitely qualify as a roadside attraction.

 

There is one more attraction not far from LeSage that reminds one of Otis. A life-size pink elephant in Barboursville, West Virginia!