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.
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