Trips to Mount Airy, Part I: My First Trips

A couple of posts ago, I noted that author Neal Brower was wearing a t-shirt from a Facebook group I co-manage about The Andy Griffith Show. How he happened to be wearing one of our shirts is a story intertwined with why I formed Liberty Grove Press LLC.

I have been a Mayberry fan all my life. I was too young to have watched or remembered the early seasons, but certainly, by the color years, I was watching while sometimes seeing the black and white episodes in reruns under the title Andy of Mayberry. My interest in the show was rekindled in college when my roommate and I would sometimes watch episodes in our dorm room on the comically tiny black and white television I had. I was relatively oblivious to the early years of the festivals as we were raising a family by that time and simply “out of the loop,” especially pre-internet.

I attended my first Mayberry Days festival in 2006, the year Don Knotts passed away. The loss of such a comic icon may have been what drove me to finally attend one of the festivals, but it actually was not my first time in Mount Airy. My wife is the talented counted cross stitch designer behind Heart in Hand Needleart (www.heartinhand.com). For years, we attended a national needlework trade show in Charlotte and in 2001 made the decision to not do the week-long trip to stand in a convention hall for so many hours any longer. Since it was the last one we would be doing (though we still do a regional show every year in Nashville), I convinced my wife she should fly home while I drove the cargo van back home with an overnight stop in—you guessed it—Mount Airy.

I spent the night in Andy’s childhood home which is now operated as, in essence, a bed-and-breakfast by the Hampton Inn (with the breakfast component being the standard fare available at the hotel nearby). Being in town not during Mayberry Days made for a different experience. My impression is that things have changed in Mount Airy, but at the time, I was disappointed to hear a local shop owner complaining that Andy Griffith did not publicly visit which they thought he should as it would be a boon to the local economy. In spite of that, I had a nice stay, which included not only spending the night in Andy’s old home but a meal at Snappy Lunch on Main Street.

Mayberry Days 2006 was quite a different experience. Tens of thousands of fans descended on the town, especially on Saturday. I attended the festival with that same college roommate with whom I used to watch the series in our dorm room, along with another college friend. I don’t have any photos from that trip readily available but we had a blast.

Four years later, I attended again, this time with my oldest daughter’s boyfriend. At the time, I wasn’t sure if he really liked the show or was just trying to “get in good” with his girlfriend’s dad.