The world may be crazy, but 50 years later, Mayberry's still an oasis

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Fifty years ago today, the hamlet of Mayberry, N.C., invited America in to enjoy its Southern charms. And, strangely, America is still coming.

Despite a dynamite-munching goat, kerosene pickles and the occasional citizen's arrest, Mayberry's boundaries have held up extraordinarily well.

Airing daily on cable's TV Land, "The Andy Griffith Show" has proven to be one of the most durable shows in the history of television. Mayberry is carved into the national lexicon, a synonym for simple and genteel living. Its bug-eyed deputy, Barney Fife, is still popular shorthand for bumblers behind a badge.

It was set in a Southern paradise free from the emotional turmoil of its age. While war, riots and racial strife battered the nation's psyche in the 1960s, Mayberry moved at a rocking-chair pace, projecting a come-sit-in-the-parlor mentality little known beyond its fictional ramparts.

And what most people don't know is, its comedic premise started out wrong.

At 9:30 p.m., Oct. 3, 1960, "The Andy Griffith Show" debuted to so-so reviews and terrific ratings.

In that episode, titled "The New Housekeeper," Sheriff Andy Taylor's Aunt Bee arrived to keep his house and be a mother figure to his son, Opie.

Griffith was cast as a comedic hayseed, milking laughs as a folksy bumpkin. That didn't last.

Playing opposite Don Knotts, whose hyperkinetic performance as deputy Barney Fife snagged five Emmys, Griffith realized that his talents were best spent playing the straight man to an eccentric cast.

"Originally, I was supposed to be funny," Griffith said in a 2003 interview with the Charlotte Observer. "I noticed on the second episode that Don was funny and I should be straight. That set it up, and I played straight to the rest.

"And I never regretted it," added Griffith, who at age 84 lives quietly in Manteo, N.C., and was not available for an interview. "The straight man has the best part. He gets to be in the show and see it, too."

Mayberry was magically insulated from the world where its viewers dwelled. When big trouble came - in the form of grifters, bank robbers or the three escaped inmates from a women's prison who captured Barney and barber Floyd - it came from beyond the ramparts, and eventually retreated there again. Mayberry's purity was organic.

Originally, "The Andy Griffith Show" was scheduled to debut Sept. 26, 1960, but was pre-empted by the first of the Kennedy-Nixon debates - an event that kicked off one of the most turbulent decades of the century.

By the time the show ended in September 1968, the nation had been through the civil-rights struggle, near flashpoint in the Cold War and the buildup in Vietnam. In its last year, the show played to a national backdrop of assassinations, race riots and social upheaval at the Democratic National Convention, in Chicago.

In Mayberry, there was only the rock-chucking misanthrope Ernest T. Bass and a town drunk who practiced self-incarceration.

Some still question the show's avoidance of reality in the final days of the Jim Crow era.

"I have an issue with that," says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, at Syracuse University.

"Politically, that was really disturbing. In the '60s, especially during the early years before the Civil Rights Act, the country was in the throes of major civil-rights issues. That show made this small town in North Carolina seem like the Garden of Eden. There was some nasty stuff going on then."

Griffith has acknowledged that producers were ineffective in mirroring the nation's pulse, particularly in racial matters. No African-American ever got a recurring role on the show that was set in the rural South.