The Chris Moeller Archives

The older I get, the more I appreciate the very unique environment in which I was raised. My hometown had a population of fewer than a thousand people, and growing up in a farmhouse, along a gravel road, five miles out of town, there was even a distinction made at times between "town kids" and "country kids." (In town, they had cable television!) So I'm not lying my way into a club here. This is as countrified as a childhood can get.

I'm a full generation behind the Andy Griffith Show. Little Ronny Howard was born less than two years after my mother. By the time I was Opie's age, Ron's Richie Cunningham had already been married to Lori Beth for four seasons on "Happy Days." (Though they got married too early.) I remember the Griffith show being on daily, and that was still our life. Imagine that. A show about small-town life perhaps best remembered today as already being anachronistic when the original episodes were airing in the '60s was the life I was living two decades later. In Newhall, we could play and ride our bikes as far as our little bodies would take us. You knew every store on the only commercial street and the people that worked in each one. Violence never interrupted my childhood. In fact, I remember being completely surprised the first time I saw a gun at somebody's house, kept high up on the wall in the garage. They simply were not part of my childhood in anything but the most remote way. The people in Newhall, like the ones in Mayberry, were warm and friendly, and we knew them well. Among the older generations, the traditional church music, like the kind Andy Griffith cherished in his real life, was still a thing. Newhall was Mayberry. With bowling.

Griffith was just a beloved man, a man of great humanity in his public presentation, the Stan Musial of television. He was the real thing in a rather phony world. I try not to ever confuse that genuineness and humility, though, with our traditional ideas of "wholesomeness." That word was long ago transformed into a political buzzword, a complete inauthenticity. Mayberry doesn't survive to me in that way. It survives because it was true in respect to human kindness and folly-- and funny as shit. I'm not too parochial to believe that Mayberrys can't also exist within urban neighborhoods. There are men and women of Andy Taylor's character walking around in our largest cities, and in worlds that are as black as Mayberry was white. Griffith presented us the world he knew, and made it a place of love and grace that any of the rest of us would want to call home. Newhall and I have been separated now for nearly twenty years, but now Andy Griffith is gone, and Newhall has come flooding back in my mind.