

In 1952 Andy tried out his first comedic monologue, a country boy’s take on Hamlet. He took teaching jobs in Goldsboro and Chapel Hill, continued summers in Manteo at “The Lost Colony,” and worked with Barbara to develop traveling entertainment routines. The next summer he took the $25 a week “Lost Colony” job and by 1949 worked up to playing a lead role as Sir Walter and marrying his first wife, Barbara Edwards. Instead, he made more money as a carpenter with his father in Mount Airy. He chronicles Andy’s first connection to the town when in 1946 he turned down a $25 a week acting job as a soldier in “The Lost Colony” outdoor drama in Manteo. “If Mayberry is anywhere, it is Manteo.”Īs Rainey sets out to show Griffith’s long and close connection to Manteo, he gives an inside look at his subject’s life and career. Rainey quotes Griffith to prove his point.
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Even though Griffith grew up in Mount Airy and that town is full of memorials and reminders of his connection, Rainey argues that it is Manteo rather than Mount Airy that is the model for Sheriff Andy Taylor’s Mayberry. Railey, former editorial page editor for the Winston-Salem Journal, knows Manteo and its people well, having spent much of his life there and recently having written a book about an unsolved murder there.Īs the book title indicates, Railey thinks that Griffith’s chosen home was in Manteo on the Outer Banks, where he lived for many years. In his new book available now, “Andy Griffith’s Manteo: His Real Mayberry,” John Railey sets out to answer that question. We have Andy Griffith or Sheriff Taylor fixed in our minds so firmly that we do not ask what was Andy Griffith really like? People think of Andy Griffith or Sheriff Andy Taylor as the wise, friendly, kind person we unreservedly admire. Today, almost 55 years after the last production of “The Andy Griffith Show” and 10 years after his death, people all over the world still tune into that program every day.
