Trips to Mount Airy, Part VI: Mayberry Days, 2016

Mayberry Days 2018 was held last weekend. Rest assured I will eventually discuss this year’s festival but it was a spectacular trip.

Two years ago, the 2016 Mayberry Days celebration saw the debut of the first t-shirts for our chapter of The Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club.

I mentioned in one of my first blog posts that my early love of Mayberry was rekindled when my college roommate and I would watch reruns in our dorm room. Dick and I attended Morehead State University in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in eastern Kentucky. We were both from Ohio though we did not previously know one another and were placed together by the housing department. Dick, a college friend of ours named Jim, and I attended our first Mayberry Days together in 2006.

Dick did not pursue it as his primary career, but he is a talented graphic artist. Having seen various club chapters sporting t-shirts at Mayberry Days the previous year, I asked Dick if he could come up with, in essence, a logo for our chapter, The Gomer and Goober Pyle Comic Book Literary Guild. He agreed to do so. I designed the basics of the logo but Dick created the artwork and brought it all together.

If that were not enough, Dick also does silkscreening. In college, he would occasionally silkscreen t-shirts for area clubs or churches to make extra money. He taught me how to silkscreen and while I dabbled in it, I never developed the expertise he did.

Thus, Dick not only designed the original guild logo, he literally silkscreened the first shirts himself.

While Dick was unable to accompany us to Mayberry Days in 2016, a lifelong friend of Rob’s named Steve did. Rob had said he was sure Steve and I would hit it off. He was so right. Steve is also a huge fan of The Andy Griffith Show so Rob had ample opportunity to soak up a lot of Mayberry knowledge sitting in the back seat as Steve and I swapped information about the show most of the drive down.

We did not have an opportunity to stop at Hickie’s Hamburgers on that trip as we were on a schedule with a deadline. I had to be at the historic Earle Theater in the early afternoon as a result of an idea I first suggested and then arranged through a series of messages with The Mayberry Deputy, David Browning.