Author: Randy Turner

Since I have posted about the evolution of the title card for my This Week in Mayberry History segments on the Two Chairs, No Waiting podcast, I can’t neglect to also call attention to my professional introduction each week.

I previously mentioned that my old middle-and-high school buddy Marty joined us at Mayberry Days in 2016. At dinner the night he stayed, Marty regaled us with many stories of his days as a DJ, especially in Branson where he had the opportunity to interview many performers, including Rodney Dillard. His interviews were not limited to singers and included other celebrities such as Bob Hope.

 

Back in our school days, Marty was known for his impressions. As I recall, he won school talent contests so frequently that he finally withdrew himself from the competition and just performed for fun. In those thinner days, Marty also did a mean Elvis.

Marty still does characters, notably as Santa Claus in a stage show in the area where he lives.

While we were at Mayberry Days, I lamented that Facebook did not allow one to post pure audio as I thought it would be fun to have Marty do an impression at which he excels as an introduction. That impression is our own Ernest T. Bass.  When I started doing the podcast segments early the following year, I asked if Marty would be willing to record an introduction to be used each week so it would not be me simply introducing myself. Marty not only agreed but he also did an outstanding job.

While I would never dissuade anyone from listening to any of the podcasts in full, to hear Marty’s introduction, click on the video directly below and go to the 16: 10 minute mark and listen for yourself.

If you listened to that introduction, you first heard Allan correctly say the name of our Facebook group and then add, “Got it!” The reason for his comment was that when I first started doing the podcasts, Allan would occasionally—and understandably—stumble over our group’s mouthful-of-a-name. We actually chose The Gomer and Goober Comic Book Literary Guild in part as a nod to the parent group also having a mouthful-of-a-name, that being The Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club. WhileAllan has it down cold now, at first he would forget to say the words “comic book” when trying to say our group name or switch Gomer and Goober’s names. As a joke and with Allan on board, Marty recorded a second gag intro that was used a few times, You can hear it at the below link at the 8:30 minute mark. By the way, this is actually the second report I did in that episode and it was prompted by the fact I had mispronounced “Petry” when previously discussing The Dick Van Dyke Show. The supplemental report gives extra information about connections between The Andy Griffith Showand The Dick Van Dyke Show and ends with a joke.

Finally, I asked Marty to record a third intro that could be used periodically. When you listen to this, please understand that Marty is doing both voices!. You can hear Mayberry’s favorite mountain man interrupt the intro at the 1:50 minute mark at this last link.

I really appreciate Marty’s generosity in recording these intros which I think add considerably to my audio reports.

Zingerman’s is a cottage industry in Ann Arbor, Michigan centered around quality food. It is easily one of my favorite things about my oldest daughter’s college town.

Zingerman’s began as a non-kosher deli in 1992 founded by two men, neither of whom are named Zingerman. The original deli space is a small fraction of what now constitutes the delicatessen. When you enter the building, a counter selling many varieties of delicious bread is on the right, while their display case with an amazing selection of cheeses and meats is on the left. I can honestly say that for the first several trips I made there, I was never able to leave without spending at least $100 on goodies to bring home. The deli offers far more than that, though. Gourmet olive oils, salts, their own blend of pepper, their own roasted coffee… Well, it would be ridiculous to try to name what they carry. You would have to see it to understand it fully.

That would be enough, but being a deli they also sell sandwiches. And what sandwiches! Would you mistake them for a sandwich from a New York deli? No, they are not that overloaded, but they are a meal unto themselves and I have never had one that was not delicious. Oprah Winfrey once described their beef brisket sandwich by saying, “It’s an 11 on a scale of 1-5.”

When I first visited Zingerman’s, they also owned a building alongside the deli which primarily sold coffees and desserts and which also provided seating. In 2011, they were able to get zoning approval to vastly expand the size of their business. There is now ample seating whereas it used to sometimes be crowded.

What really makes Zingerman’s great is the care they take in curating their offerings. The company has grown into a true community of businesses under the Zingerman’s flagship. The delicious bread I mentioned is all made at the Zingerman’s bakery. Most of the desserts they serve are also made in-house. They also have Zingerman’s creamery where they make their own gelato and some cheeses. They roast their own coffees.

For a foodie, it’s paradise.

For Christmas, my daughter and her husband, who met at the University of Michigan, gave me a selection of foods from the deli.

G’s Granola has long been a favorite. When I first started buying it many years ago, it was sold packaged in a Mason jar.

If you look closely at the packaging on the Salt and Pepper Peanuts, you will see they were made by Zingerman’s Candy Manufactory, another of the Zingerman’s businesses. The peanuts are candied and have a bit of bite to them (though not too much) as they are made with Zingerman’s own “5 Star Black Pepper Blend.”

The candy division started a few years ago when the owners started thinking candy bars could be handcrafted instead of mass-produced for a superior product. The first candy bar they introduced was the Zzang! Their own description will say it better than I can. The candy bar-maker “starts with honey nougat made with natural peanut butter. He rolls it up in silky caramel made from organic muscovado brown sugar. Big Virginia peanuts come next, and the whole endeavor is finished off with a dip into a rich bath of 64 percent dark Colombian chocolate.”

The gift was a bag with six smaller versions of their candy bars, so it also includes others like the Ca$hew Cow, What the Fudge?, Raspberry Wowza, and Peanut Butter Crush bars. I will be taking my time to savor those.

My daughter and her family recently moved back to the Midwest after seven years in New York City and are living in a town near Ann Arbor. Of course, I am excited to have her, my son-in-law, grandson, and soon-to-arrive granddaughter within a much easier drive, but I am certainly not upset to have an excuse to be visiting close to Zingerman’s upon occasion!

By the way, they do an enormous mail order business. Even if you don’t think you would ever order anything, their information-packed website is definitely worth the visit for the whimsical artwork alone!

https://www.zingermans.com/

My wife’s family has a decades-old tradition of making their own, distinctive version of the German cookie lebkuchen. My family hails from Appalachia, so I had literally never heard of this traditional Christmas cookie before I met my wife. Years later, when I encountered traditional lebkuchen on a trip to Europe, I was surprised to learn their family recipe produced a treat virtually unrecognizable from the traditional cookie.

The lebkuchen I first saw in Germany—and I have now seen in the United States upon occasion—is similar to a gingerbread cookie. The ones I saw in Europe were often glazed and decorated with icing and many were formed in the shape of hearts though most were round. Other lebkuchen was completely covered with dark chocolate. The cookies are the thickness of a gingerbread cookie and are sweetened with honey. In fact, the forerunner of traditional lebkuchen was called a “honey cake” which eventually led to the invention of lebkuchen by German monks in the 13th Century. There are many varieties of the cookies produced in Europe, but common ingredients include the aforementioned honey along with nuts, spices, and candied fruit.

The lebkuchen made by my wife’s family—who with the name Pottebaum is clearly from German stock—are instead flat, moist bars sweetened primarily with molasses. The recipe is one that we know dates back to my wife’s paternal grandmother but is undoubtedly much older than that.

The lebkuchen cookie-making is traditionally done the day after Thanksgiving in the family. This year was the first time I had helped make it in many years. When my wife and her mother used to make it years ago, I would occasionally be called upon to help. While the batch they made was not as big as is now made, I don’t know how the two of them did it.

To begin with, dried raisins and currants and a variety of candied food such as cherries and lemon peel are fed through a meat grinder, along with walnuts upon occasion which have the added benefit of helping to clear the grinder of all the sticky fruit. When my wife made the cookies years ago, she and her mother used a hand-cranked meat grinder that was affixed to the kitchen counter with a vacuum seal. We now use an electric meat grinder.

 

The ground contents land in an enormous bowl and are stirred together. Heated molasses is added followed by buttermilk. Flour is then added and the sticky mixture has to be stirred. What I remember most about helping my wife and mother-in-law years ago was that as I would stir, it was not uncommon that the handles of the wooden spoons would snap in two. While we now use a teak spoon that can withstand the pressure, it literally takes one person to hold the bowl while another stirs the mixture holding the spoon with both hands while having to move their torso at the same time in order to stir so much dough.

The moist dough is rolled out in a thin layer and cut into bar shapes, then baked until done. The cookies do not rise much and when done are much thinner than traditional lebkuchen.

Allowing for a lunch break in between, the whole process took about six hours. We made literally hundreds of cookies.

 

 

At the end, we take the remaining dough and try more interesting shapes. This year, I cut shapes and used the knife point to carve into them. Since the cookies do not rise much, they retained my carved lines well.

By the way, the reason the cookies are made the day after Thanksgiving is to give them more than a month to age. They get better with age and I have even had lebkuchen that was many months old.

 

In several posts, I have referenced that my attendance at Mayberry events was intertwined with my writing and the formation of the publishing company, Liberty Grove Press LLC.

I have been writing what I view as my personal magnum opus on The Andy Griffith Show for many years intermittently. It was always a hobby I revisited upon occasion. I can’t remember when I began working on it, but I remember showing a friend a draft of the first half many years ago. I never worked on this book with a distinct idea of publishing it. The process was for my personal enjoyment.

When I started going to Mayberry Days regularly a few years ago after two previous trips years earlier, I started thinking about the available resources in print for fans of The Andy Griffith Show. I own every book that has been published about the classic shown and all those books together just fill up just a small part of one of my bookshelves in my den.

I decided I would start working harder on the afore-mentioned project I had been sporadically researching and writing for years. I eventually came to accept that if I wanted to release that book, it would be a good many years before it was completed and in the kind of shape I wanted it to be.

I already had ideas for other books about the show and its creators, so I decided to explore writing with a more refined approach. Around that same time, I began writing daily Facebook posts I called Today in Mayberry History which I announced at the 2016 Mayberry Days. Not long after, I also began doing This Week in Mayberry History segments for Allan Newsome’s podcast Two Chairs, No Waiting.

I already had developed some experience in the publishing field. My wonderful father-in-law has owned a publishing company for decades though it is a particular type of publishing. His company primarily publishes books for use in church liturgy for children. A number of years ago after my father-in-law suffered a health scare, my wife and I began co-managing his company. Thus, I already had worked with quite a number of printing companies.

I decided my belief that there were not enough books about The Andy Griffith Show was probably one others shared. And so, I decided that I would release my first book related to the show this year. I announced that decision at the 2017 Mayberry Days. 

I wrote the 2019 Mayberry Day-by-Day Flip Book Calendar in the midst of working on a lengthy traditional book about people involved in the series. Thanks to connections and friendships I have made in the Mayberry community, I have even been able to have some chapters of the lengthier book reviewed by their subjects which has been particularly gratifying. For example, the day my younger daughter went into labor with my second grandson, I got a call from Maggie Peterson Mancuso telling how much she loved the chapter she had reviewed.

I had originally hoped to release that book before the holidays but decided several months ago that I wanted to be sure I did the book right and did not want to rush publishing it. Thus, I will instead release it next year.

A number of people have asked me if there will be another Mayberry desk calendar next year. Of course! I will release another with all-new facts which, just like the recent publication, will be tied to each particular day.

And the magnum opus I mentioned? I hope to finish and release it someday. but it’s not the book I will be releasing next year

I truly appreciate the great reception my first calendar flip book has received from Mayberry fans. I have shipped them from Manhattan in New York City to Monterey, California on the Pacific coast. It is more than gratifying to know that my work is reaching fans of the classic show, and that is my ultimate goal and the true reason I formed Liberty Grove Press.

Contrary to wide belief, bourbon does not have to be made in Kentucky, but more than 90% of it is. Over the past several years, I have become a bit of a bourbon aficionado.

I enjoy fine bourbon the way it is supposed to be consumed, slowly sipping and savoring it. There is a wonderful bourbon bar relatively near me in Dayton, Ohio that is consistently named one of the best in the country. But if you go in, you will inevitably see many young people buying a shot of expensive whiskey then downing it in one swallow. If your only plan is to become intoxicated, why waste your money on superior, handcrafted brown water? A good bourbon is a “sipping whiskey” as far as I am concerned. And I personally never drink to excess. Rather, I enjoy bourbon for its flavor and history.

Now that I have finished recounting my past trips to Mayberry Days (though I have yet to discuss this year’s festival), I will get around to other topics more often. I will definitely return to discussing bourbon, but I recently got to experience what is likely a once-in-lifetime event for me.

Four years ago, as a Christmas gift for me, my lovely wife purchased a membership in a just-opened distillery in Northern Kentucky called New Riff. The distillery was started by the owner of The Party Source, the second largest individual liquor store in the country. He sold the store to his former employees and launched New Riff. The distillery itself is on the same grounds as the store. Their water source is right outside the distillery and is accessed by a deep well underneath the parking lot.

The membership made me a “New Riff Ranger” and entitled me to receive one the first bottles of bourbon they were producing when it was ready. Close to 5000 people become New Riff Rangers. New Riff did their bourbon right. They aged it four years and had a tasting party each year. Sadly, I was only able to go to the first one but it was a great concept for the members.  My wife purchased the membership early on so I was among the first to get one of the early bottles of bourbon they produced.

I was notified my bourbon was ready and invited to a “bottling party” last month. I assumed that was a clever name for a gathering where members who got their membership the same month I did could go and pick up their bottles.

The bottling party was held at their new rickhouse (a warehouse where the bourbon is aged in barrels on a wooden framework) and bottling plant. New Riff’s rickhouses are about a 10-minute drive from their distillery. They are new with the barrels having spent most of their lives aging in rickhouses owned by other Kentucky distilleries before being moved to their new aging location.

New Riff had purchased the former home of a trolley line called the Green Line. The building was built in 1903. What appears to be the middle wall of the building was actually the original rear wall. New Riff added to the building behind the wall. That main building is used for supply storage and bottling. The rickhouse was a new building they had constructed. They were also using a second building built in the late 1800s but used a Scottish method of storing the barrels as the space would not support the normal framework.

When one enters a rickhouse, there is normally a strong, delightful smell of bourbon that has evaporated from the barrels, That is called the angel’s share. New Riff’s rickhouse was so new, the characteristic smell was absent. Instead, the smell was of the freshly cut wood which formed the structure that supports the barrels.

The real treat for me was that the term “bottling party” was not a clever name of the event. I found out when I arrived that I was going to actually get to bottle it myself!

I had already seen New Riff on the shelf, being sold in bottles that look like an amber wine bottle. The Rangers received a special bottle shaped differently and with a line drawing of the distillery on the back, allowing the image to be seen through the bourbon when looking at the front. The bourbon had been transferred to a metal barrel which was elevated with a hose leading to machinery used to fill the bottle.

 

I was given an empty bottle which I then placed over a dispenser at a 45-degree angle and pushed upward to activate the device. I then straightened the bottle and sat it down with the dispenser automatically shutting off when the bottle was full. I was allowed to cork the bottle myself and then place a label on the bottle which contained my New Riff Ranger membership I.D. number.

 

I later had the bottle autographed by New Riff’s founder, who was present and passing out tastes of the same bourbon in our barrel in case anyone planned to never open the bottle in order to keep it as a collector’s item.

As simple as it sounds, when am I ever going to have an opportunity to do something like that again? It was a great way to finish up the four-year wait for my bottle of New Riff bourbon.

After the Saturday morning parade, we had a bit of time to kill before our next event which was Professor Brower’s Lecture, so I suggested we look over the items available at the annual silent auction. Neal Brower is the author of the excellent book Mayberry 101 and does an annual presentation at Mayberry Days (the aforementioned “lecture”). I was pleasantly surprised to see Neal checking out the auction items as well. We had never met, but I approached him and asked to be sure he was Neal. I told him how much I always enjoyed his presentations and cast member interviews and that his presentation was the highlight of the weekend for me. He thanked me, his eyes drifted down to our chapter logo on my t-shirt, and he asked, “Are you Randy Turner?”

I was completely blown away. I confirmed I was and he told me how much he enjoyed my daily history posts in our Facebook group. I told him I didn’t think he was in our group and he told me he was not. I then said I didn’t think he was on my email list and he again said he was not, He explained he just made it a point to check the post each day. He was complimentary about my writing style and told me how much he enjoyed them. Coming from Neal , I took that as a true compliment.

As we chatted, he asked about the t-shirts and I offered to have one made for him. He said he would love one and I later had it made and mailed it to him. And that—finally!—is how Neal Brower came to be wearing one of our chapter t-shirts when I saw his presentation at The Andy Griffith Museum this past summer during the Mayberry Meet-Up.

After Neal’s annual presentations (he interviewed Clint Howard that year), the annual meeting of The Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watcher’s Club  (TAGSRWC) is always held. During chapter reports at the 2017 gathering, I announced for the first time that I planned to release a book in 2018 and planned to release additional books later. I had not told my friend Rob about this. In fact, my wife was the only person who knew of my plans.

That afternoon, I was in the store Mayberry on Main and saw Ken Junkin, the tribute artist who plays Otis at Mayberry events. I told him how much I appreciated all he does for the Mayberry community and started to introduce myself. I only had the word “I’m” out of my mouth when he interrupted me and said he knew who I was. Ken and Allan Newsome often travel together to Mayberry events and I had been discussed at some point. Ken graciously invited me to a gathering held after the Colonel Tim’s Talent Time show and said bringing my friend Rob along was fine. That evening, we attended the Colonel Tim’s show, a revue including former cast members in attendance, tribute artists, and musical acts.

Afterward, we went to the gathering Ken had invited us to attend. While I had been working with Allan for close to 10 months at that point and had seen him one time quite briefly in July (a story I will eventually share), I had never had the opportunity to really talk with him at any length. Getting to chat for a bit with Allan and his wife, Jan, was a great way to wrap up Mayberry Days. The only sad point to the evening was his confirmation that David Browning, the Mayberry Deputy, had decided he was going to limit his appearances and would not be participating in Mayberry Days in the future.

On the way home the next day, of course, we made our annual visit to Hillbilly Hot Dogs.

This blog post completes my recounting of previous Mayberry Days before I was able to attend as an author this year. I will share stories of Mayberry Days 2018 soon.

As a postscript, I should add that Allan, whom you will remember I had given a couple of slices of the pungent salt-rising bread to at Mayberry Days, later shared that fact on his podcast. As I recall, he said his wife wouldn’t taste it. He did and liked it, but he described the smell by suggesting if a listener wanted to know what it was like, to put their nose in an old tennis shoe. I didn’t think it was that strong, but Allan being exposed to the “bottled up” odor after it had been in the ziplock bag I had left it in may have added to his olfactory nightmare.

Saturday morning Rob and I got up early and headed to Snappy Lunch to beat the rush for breakfast but Snappy Lunch during Mayberry Days is always busy. Still, being there early enabled us to grab a couple of stools at the counter right away. Tribute artist Bo Pierce who does a great Briscoe Darling sat alongside us so it was fitting to have a row of “hearty-eatin’ men” at the counter. As mentioned earlier, Snappy Lunch gets extra points from my buddy Rob because the waitresses always call us “honey” or “sweetie.” We were also amused to see that when the locals eating at the counter needed a drink refill, they just walked behind the counter and filled it themselves.

As a brief interjection, the 2017 Mayberry Days was a different experience for me in a fun way. At the beginning of that year, I had begun posting daily on The Gomer and Goober Comic Book Literary Guild Facebook group page with a feature I called Today in Mayberry History where I posted facts daily that related to that day, s similar concept to that used in the new 2019 Mayberry Day-by-Day Calendar. The group had grown from 86 members to around 3000 over the nine months of the year that had elapsed at that point. I had also begun doing weekly audio reports for the Two Chairs, No Waiting podcast and had done one every week over the same nine months.

Certainly, I received some feedback on the Facebook posts in the form of “likes” and other reactions and comments on the posts. I knew from the podcast chatroom that those visiting with one another enjoyed the audio segments. But it was impossible for me to gauge how many people might actually have been reached and to know whether people enjoyed my writings and audio segments.

I was unprepared for the reaction I got from people during the festival. We did have our chapter t-shirts on and people frequently stopped me to ask, “Are you Randy Turner?” and then tell me how much they enjoyed the posts or audio reports. It was also a hoot to have people hear my voice and then turn around to ask, “Are you Randy Turner?” as well from having heard me on the podcast. It didn’t take long for my buddy Rob to start kidding me about being a celebrity. While I am far from that status, dozens and dozens of people stopped me to tell me how much they enjoyed my work. It was truly gratifying to get such a broad and positive response.

I had been in touch earlier with tribute artist Michael Oliver to arrange for a photo before the parade. Michael portrays Gomer Pyle while Tim Pettigrew plays Goober. Rob and I went to the parade staging area and got a photo with our chapter’s two namesakes.

I also made a separate shirt with the This Week in Mayberry History title card on the back and so was sure to get a picture with podcast host and Floyd tribute artist Allan Newsome in the staging area.

The parade is always enjoyable but there was one celebrity in attendance I did not get a chance to meet, George Lindsey Jr. I hoped to get the opportunity to meet him at a future Mayberry event.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next event on our schedule was Professor Brower’s Lecture. I began this multi-part recounting of past Mayberry Days to lead up to how Neal Brower came to be wearing one of our chapter t-shirts when I saw him at the Mayberry Meet-Up in July. What led to him having one of our shirts began when we decided to check out the display of items available for a silent auction and I saw Neal doing the same.

Every year after the Mayberry Days trivia contest, members of the online Rerun Watcher’s Group gather for a photo near the amphitheater where the contest is held. During my past visits, we have always been in a hurry to get to another event and did not stay for the photo. But last year, I was determined to make it the first of a new tradition.

As previously described, at the beginning of 2017 I began serving as a “special correspondent” for the podcast Two Chairs, No Waiting doing a weekly audio report I call This Week in Mayberry History. The podcast is usually recorded live on Monday evening with the official, finished podcast available on Tuesday. During the live recording on Monday, a group of listeners typically visit with one another in a chatroom during the taping by typing messages.

A steadfast fan of my reports is a young woman named Sarah who is known in the Mayberry fan community as “Miss Mayberry.” A ray of sunshine to anyone she encounters, Sarah wears a crown and cape at events such as the trivia contest and presents the trophies to the winners. In the chatroom, Sarah is always vocal about how much she likes my The Week in Mayberry History reports, always typing words of encouragement such as “Great job, Randy Turner” and “I love This Week in Mayberry History.”

During the gathering, I asked Sarah if I could get a photo with her. She asked, “With me?” I told her of course I wanted a photo with Miss Mayberry. As we were getting ready for the photo, her dad said, “Sarah, do you know who that is? That’s Randy Turner.” Sarah’s expression was priceless. Getting to officially meet Sarah was a highlight of the trip.

That evening, Rob and I went back to the car to go to dinner and discovered the mistake we had made leaving our remaining salt rising bread in the car. As I said earlier, it has a pungent smell. I’ll just say that after it sat in a hot car all day, “pungent” is a bit of an understatement. Suffice it to say that the now-odorous bread immediately went into the dumpster behind the restaurant where we had dinner.

That night as we were waiting on the elevator to go back to our room, a family who had clearly just checked in were waiting as well. I asked them if they were looking forward to Mayberry Days. They responded, “What’s Mayberry Days?” They had planned their trip because they wanted to visit Mount Airy since it was Andy Griffith’s hometown yet did not realize there was an enormous festival taking place. I grabbed a copy of the Mayberry Confidential from a nearby table, a tabloid-sized publication of the Surry Arts Council during Mayberry Days that includes a schedule of events, and made sure they knew there was a parade the next morning. Considering how many fans of The Andy Griffith Show belong to various Facebook groups about the show and the viewership numbers of reruns on television, it is amazing to me that more people are not aware of the vibrant fan-driven Mayberry community that exists around the show.

Friday morning, Rob and I were up early and soon driving north on the spectacular Blue Ridge Parkway. The previous year, we had stopped at the Maybry Mill restaurant and were told that coming early was advisable so we had decided this time to have breakfast there. The bulk of the building that can be seen by the public is a gift shop and visitor’s center, The seating for the restaurant runs along the back of the building in a long but relatively narrow room that overlooks the woods. We had a great breakfast. Mine included a fried slice of country ham, something I don’t indulge in often but really enjoy.

Afterward, we traveled back to the community of Mayberry as we had the previous year to visit the Mayberry Trading Post. We ended up visiting with Peggy Barkley, the proprietor, quite a bit. She was kind enough to answer questions I had about the store and its connection to Andy Griffith. She did make one comment that ensured we would have to return to the restaurant by the Maybry Mill. She told us the sweet potato pancakes were what they were known for on their breakfast menu. I had chosen the cornmeal pancakes but said her recommendation meant we had to go back again someday.

I always encourage Mayberry fans to step outside the city limits of Mount Airy when attending the festival and visit the Trading Post at least once.

Keeping with what has become our tradition, we again visited the candy factory in Meadows of Dan to pick up sweets for our sweets back home. We then drove back past Mount Airy to Winston-Salem to visit a still-new branch of the Mast General Store chain, the first of which opened in 1883. The new Winston-Salem location had opened in 2015 and has an interesting inventory of everything from clothing to penny candy.

My big find was a barbecue sauce flavored with the great Southern pop, Cheerwine. Rob bought a s’mores maker that has a basket with clamps on the end that holds the graham cracker, chocolate, and marshmallow all at the same time. (As we later learned when using it, the contraption makes an interesting variation on the traditional s’more as the cracker gets toasted in the process.)

We spent a good deal of the afternoon touring the newly-renovated Andy Griffith Museum. The museum is small, but they did a masterful job of utilizing the space efficiently. The renovated space had just been unveiled to the public at the end of June a few months earlier. The half-million dollar project now includes touchscreen displays and facades of Mount Airy landmarks like Snappy Lunch and of familiar sights in Mayberry, such as the courthouse doors with the original sheriff and justice of the peace signs.

That afternoon we attended the annual trivia contest. I was especially interested in attending as there was a special person I was anxious to finally meet face-to-face who I knew would be at the gathering of members of the internet chapter to be held immediately after the contest.

As we drove to Mount Airy from Morgantown, I reached out to Allan Newsome, the tribute artist who portrays Floyd the barber at Mayberry events and the host of the Two Chairs, No Waiting podcast, to see if he had ever tasted salt-rising bread. When he indicated he had not, my first stop in Mount Airy was to buy ziplock bags. I put some of the pungent bread in bags and left them for him at the Mayberry Motor Inn.

Having spent the day on the road as a result of going through Morgantown on the way, we then went straight to dinner at Chile Rojo. We had dined there before and really enjoy it. I am no expert in Mexican or Tex-Mex cuisine, but I have never been there and not really enjoyed the meal and atmosphere.

I gave Rob one of the new shirts I had made for Mayberry Days. After the previous year when we had shirts with our Rerun Watchers Club chapter logo on the back of royal blue t-shirts, in 2017 I tried maize-colored shirts. Having imposed on my old college roommate and buddy Dick for everything from designing our chapter logo and banner, literally silkscreening the 2016 shirts himself, and designing my This Week in Mayberry History title card, I had a company I have used before make the shirts rather than impose on him again.

I used our logo on the front of the shirt this time and drew a new piece of artwork for the back. The back image is a parody of an old Grit comic book ad that I re-drew by hand and changed to make it an ad soliciting boys to sell Miracle Salve. I made it a point to incorporate elements from the episode “A Deal Is a Deal,” the Miracle Salve episode of The Andy Griffith Show, into the drawing.

I mimicked the Miracle Salve lettering in the ad to be similar to the lettering seen on the side of the boxes on The Andy Griffith Show.

I redrew one panel completely to add that a pony could be won. I made sure the salve price was 35¢ just as it was in the show.

On the coupon, I used the room number of 106 shown on the show as the Mount Pilot box number. The idea that only boys could sell the product is actually from the original Grit ad.

I had hand-lettered the original artwork since that is how the original ad was done. I mimicked the art style closely as it also was relatively roughly-done in the original comic book ad. In addition to the art not being polished, the lack of periods at the end of sentences was completely intentional on my part as that is how the original ad was written.

In order to turn the artwork into a silkscreen, it has to be turned into a vector image. When the artist at the silk screening company saw my original piece of art, he said the artwork itself would scan well but he would need to re-letter the piece though he could do so in a font that would look like hand-lettering.

When he later sent me an email to approve the artwork, I should have actually gone to the shop and asked to look at it larger. I had listed the ailments Miracle Salve could “treat” just as the show had done. However, I missed that the artist had misspelled the word “athlete’s” on the back when he retyped the text. Luckily, the original ad this was parodying was crudely done so I didn’t feel the misspelling was all that out of place—and that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call rationalization!

As we carried our new t-shirts and our luggage to our room, we left our remaining salt-rising bread in the back of the vehicle, not realizing the mistake we were making.