Part 3 of "How to make a Dixie Liberal"
1968
Andy Leaves Mayberry as Sam moves in.
It is absurd to equate the end of "The Andy Griffith Show" with ANY of the real News from that insane year, but I gotta dance with the metaphor what brung me!
In 1968, Andy Taylor married his long-time sweetheart Helen Crump and moved to Raleigh, while single father Sam Jones was elected to City Council and starred in the new "Mayberry RFD". It was Ken Berry (playing Sam) who so aptly described Mayberry as "America's 'Brigadoon'" but there was SOME progress....Mayberry became integrated...sort of. Sam had a black neighbor who showed up in a couple of episodes.
In part 2, I wrote that Civil Rights became "mainstream" in "mayberry" but while legal rights were no longer denied, Social and Economic Justice were still imaginary concepts.
When the Schools integrated in 1967, I met and interacted with black kids for the first time. The new guys in my class (my pre-pubescent misogyny did not deign to notice Girls!) came to our formerly white school with what seems in retrospect to have been a Combat Infantryman's mentality: Keep your head down and Never Volunteer for anything. Can't say I blamed them for that, having myself adopted a similar philosophy since '64. The only kid with any "attitude" sported the name "Julius Caesar ___", so I suspect his "'tude" had very little to do with any political issues. I did form a friendship with "Eddie", who seemed just as much of a pariah with the black kids as I was with the whites. I even visited him at his home, and learned the meaning of "poor" thereby.
Eddie, his mother, father, brother and sister lived about a mile from the "Ranch House" manse I inhabited, INSIDE the city limits at the end of a 1/4 mile dirt road. There, among the pines, next to their 1/2 acre garden, sat the "house" (which more resembled a gypsy wagon than a home) which they rented. It was about half the size of a "single-wide" mobile home, and looked as if a strong wind would send it flying. There were three rooms, shotgun style: a kitchen and 2 bedrooms....that's all. No closets. No running water...just a well with a hand pump outside. No bathroom, just an outhouse and a large galvanized washtub, also outside. Instead of a lawn, they had a fenced-in chicken yard and coop. The only "luxuries" in sight were a Bible and a Radio. No TV, No telephone and no other books except for school texts.
Many Conservatives then AND now seem to think that people are poor because they're lazy. All I can say is that Everybody in Eddie's family worked, and worked harder than any of the Goobers or Floyds or even the Aunt Bees I ever knew there in "mayberry". His Mom cleaned houses and worked the Garden, his Dad "sharecropped" several acres of tobacco for his landlord; cut wood and hired out for whatever seasonal labor was needed on local farms. His sister cleaned the house and cared for the baby, while Eddie tried his best to help out in the Garden and around the house. I remember that one of Eddie's jobs was to feed the chickens. Once, when I was visiting, he was tasked with killing a bird for Dinner, which he accomplished by finding a thick stick: swinging it like a bat to break the unlucky pullet's neck. After it finally fell over, its frantic death-dance completed, he cut off its head and bled it in a bucket of water, then plucked it clean. You might say that Eddie was the chicken's landlord.
A couple of years later, the landlord sold the property to the city for a tidy sum to build a Recreation Center. Apparently "mayberry" had insufficient numbers of tennis courts...by then my family had moved across town, and we'd lost touch...I have no idea what became of Eddie.
Mayberry RFD continued to parallel "mayberry" in other ways. When Sam was elected to City Council, he had more frequent association with the City Clerk:"Howard Sprague", a timid mama's boy who eventually exited the show on a visit to NYC intended to promote "small town values". Instead, "Howard" donned a paisley Nehru jacket and abandoned Mayberry for the life of a "hipster". The message was clear to "mayberry". While Andy Taylor had always tried to avoid elevating "the letter of the law" above common sense, Howard had always been the parsimonious bureaucrat....OF COURSE he became a hippy!
While "mayberry" continued to elect "Democrats" to office at the state and local level, the 1968 Presidential Election effectively destroyed the once "Solid South". Particularly damaging was the campaign of George Wallace. The Former Democratic Governor of Alabama ran as a redneck populist and was well received in white working class neighborhoods in "mayberry", not only because of his racist credentials, but by '68, the 1965 EEO act forbidding discrimination in hiring was beginning to be enforced, and employers no longer gave any preference to whites. As I wrote earlier, "it's about the job", and Goober and his pals didn't like having to compete for the good jobs. Added to this was the end of "The Maid".
Before the Equal Employment Opportunity act, most middle class white households could afford to hire "a domestic", allowing the Lady of the House considerable leisure time, but as better paying jobs became available, as fewer and fewer black women were willing to do another family's dirtiest jobs for a pittance, this "invisible" vocation all but disappeared and Reality intruded on the mayberryian ideal. Wallace harnessed this resentment, and with Tricky Dick adding a nod and a wink, rank and file southern Democrats were convinced that the National Democratic Party was no longer to be trusted to "Protect America". Particularly not idyllic "mayberry".
Other events of 1968 merely reinforced their conclusions. When there were local riots in the wake of MLKing's assassination, Goober saw it as the beginning of a new civil war. When Bobby Kennedy was shot, Goober didn't mourn, in fact he probably gave a sigh of relief. The Chicago Convention, and "The Summer of Love", everything that threatened mayberry's ideal fantasy became the fault of Liberal Democrats. Goober wasn't a Republican....yet....but he was definitely not going to vote for a Democrat unless he personally knew and liked the guy.
Next Time: Mayberry moves to Dallas
Part 1 and Part 2