Andy Griffith!
There are some incredibly nice and kind people in this world and Andy Griffith was one of them. One got the feeling that the person that we saw as Andy Taylor on the 1960’s Andy Griffith Show was probably about the same person in real life as he was on the screen. Griffith was a kind understanding individual who had the best interest of as many of his fellow human beings in mind as he possibly could. He was part of a constellation of actors and actresses who graced our world when television was much younger and seemingly everything that was done was some sort of ground breaking achievement. The 1960’s were a time of contrasts. We had just passed the evil of Joe McCarthy and the oversized achievers such as James Arness and Griffith who taught the more simple virtues that seemed to exist in a more simple time than what we seem to face today.
America was more at one with itself in Griffith’s early television and movie years. The 1946 film “The Best years of Our Lives” might best describe those times as we face seemingly unfathomable challenges in the year that Andy Griffith died. Griffith starred in his only unseemly role when he played an overreaching television broadcaster in the film “A Face in the Crowd”. Andy Griffith was a face in the crowd of our history and our times who earned the title “icon” because we will never see his like again. The simple whistled theme song of “The Andy Griffith Show” as he and a very young Ron Howard walked home from a fishing trip could be the anthem for a generation. Griffiths times were our times as we reflect back on an age when things were much more certain and in their place than they will ever seemingly be again. Opey Taylor could look forward to a life where he could provide for his family and have the assurance that his father would be there for him and he for his father in a seemingly endless parade of constancy and sameness that this current generation may never see again.
We were never really told what happened to Opey’s mother but the venerable Aunt Bee filled in admirably as the family cook and housekeeper in an age when women were beginning to achieve so many of the supposed advances that characterize this modern but so uncertain age. There was certainty in Andy and Opey’s world. It was such a quant time that Andy’s venerable deputy, Barney Fife, played to perfection by Don Knott’s could be limited to one bullet for his gun so that he would not damage himself or anyone else in his never ending quest for a justice that was as fictional and unnecessary as it was so completely comical in its enduring nature. Otis checked himself into his jail cell after a night of too much drinking, fulfilling the image of the quant town drunk in a time before alcohol was superseded by the drug and prescription medication culture that we find ourselves entwined in today. America, as the 1960‘s progressed along,, was already changing and the simple rural culture portrayed in Mayberry, North Carolina, was already beginning to pass away. Andy was portrayed in the fictional movie “Sheriff Without a Gun” and it stands in such stark contrast to things like the Fast and Furious controversy as we try to make some sense out of how a government could allow weapons to be readily taken into hostile hands as we try to come to grips with the fast changing world that we are confronted with today.
In a way, however, Andy Griffith was ahead of its time as it did portray Andy as trying to raise a son in a world without a mother as we now confront an age when so many are raised in one parent households where the father is or never was on the scene. The fact that Andy and Barney were both perpetually single and Andy could never seem to tie the knot with his perpetual girlfriend is reflective of this age when so many commitments have been lost and new ones are so very difficult to make when the apparent but unspoken hurt is so great that it seems to supersede everything else at hand. How many in the 1960’s when Andy and
Barney reigned supreme might think back on first loves lost to great and costly wars past and present and how so many had to make some of the same decisions that Andy grappled with as he raised a son that he apparently loved more than anything else on earth. Mayberry was a seemingly simple place with simple wants and desires but it was, in so many ways, reflective of the deeper currents that have run through our society since its inception. In past ages we have been able to keep a bridge to the future across those conflictions but, as we reflect back today on the passing of Andy Griffith, we confront things that make us yearn for those seemingly simpler times that might have, in reality, never been quite that simple at all.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
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