![]() When one of these monologues, What It Was, Was Football was released as a 45-rpm single in late 1953, it was a monster seller, and Broadway came calling…Īlthough he used the internalized memories of his hometown when creating the The Andy Griffith Show, Andy never really forgave Mount Airy for all of its snubs. She sang (beautifully, it was said), and he told folksy, Southern monologues. He met his wife, Barbara, among the The Lost Colony’s rep company, and the pair became professional party entertainers, hirable for your neighborhood barbeque or Shriners’ banquet. Before, during, and after college, he was intermittently part of the cast of the “longest-running symphonic outdoor drama” in stage history, The Lost Colony, a regional North Carolina phenomenon still running to this day. He got out of Mount Airy as soon as he could, and achieved success in the drama and music departments of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializing in Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. It didn’t help that he was too gawky and uncoordinated for sports, and even when he discovered he had a talent for singing, his big ears and oversized pompadour hairstyle tended to provoke laughter whenever he performed as a youngster. Andy, an only child, was stuck in the middle and friendless. He was not well-off and posh enough to be accepted as a peer by Mount Airy’s wealthier society on the north side of town, and not poor enough to be accepted by the hardscrabble, working class families (who often had ten or more children) on the south side. Andy Griffith was born in 1926 and grew up in Mount Airy, North Carolina. They both had embarrassment and unhappiness to spare in their formative years. Don called Andy “Ange,” and Andy called Don “Jess” (a poke at his never-used real first name.) ![]() “Men very rarely are as intimate as they were together,” observed Don’s first wife, Kay Knotts. When you’re laughed at, you turn it to your advantage.” “Don says a comedian is born out of either unhappiness or embarrassment…and you start to learn to protect yourself. “One thing we’ve talked about a lot is the way a comedian is born,” Andy recalled. “When we talked about our relatives, they all seemed to be the same. At the core of their relationship is the bond of having been two bumpkins from nowhere, scaling the ladder on raw talent, and proving to the big-city sophisticates that show business was not their exclusive domain. De Vise writes in a relaxed, informal voice, and makes lots of references and comparisons to things in modern pop culture, intending to strike a chord with Gen X readers or younger, few of whom were born during the show’s original run.Īndy Griffith and Don Knotts met in 1955 during the 796-performance Broadway run of the service comedy No Time For Sergeants, which starred Griffith and featured Knotts in a small supporting role. The dual biography Andy & Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show by Daniel de Vise recounts the history of the long-time friendship between two slightly damaged men from rural Appalachian backgrounds. But from a more adult perspective, I realize that what I saw as the show’s weaknesses were actually its virtues. My older sister liked it, so I had to get through it in order to get to Dick Van Dyke at 12:30. I remember the reruns always airing at noon, so it was a summer vacation show for me. I much preferred the snappy pace and rapid-fire witticisms of Van Dyke over the pokey, measured plodding of Griffith. Syndicated reruns of it ran through my childhood, usually packaged with what I considered the superior show, The Dick Van Dyke Show. I had never been much of an Andy Griffith Show fan. I had seen this book, published last November, kicking around the shelves for a few months before I gave it a chance.
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