Actor Andy Griffith journeyed from Mayberry to Manteo

People on Roanoke Island, N.C., acknowledge that Andy Griffith (1926-2012) was a native of Mount Airy, but they insist he got to Manteo as soon as he could. The road ran through Chapel Hill.

 Griffith entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1944, intending to become a minister. His passion, however, was dramatic arts; he switched his major to music. 

Griffith got involved with the student theater troupe, and a door opened to spend the 1947 summer season as a member of “The Lost Colony” cast at Roanoke Island. 

First staged in 1937, “The Lost Colony” is the nation’s premier and longest-running symphonic drama. It was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Eliot Green, a native of Buies Creek in Harnett County. Green, too, earned a bachelor’s degree at UNC-CH. 

Griffith was cast as Sir Walter Raleigh in 1949 and performed on “The Lost Colony” stage alongside his future wife, Barbara Bray Edwards. (Barbara, who was from Lucama in Wilson County, played the part of Elinor Dare, mother of Virginia Dare, the first child born to English parents in the New World in 1587.)

 

Andy and Barbara were married in Manteo after the 1949 summer season. They continued to perform in “The Lost Colony” through the 1953 season. 

Stephen Fletcher, photo curator at the University of North Carolina Libraries in Chapel Hill, told the story about Griffith being paid $25 to be the after-dinner speaker at a banquet on campus in Chapel Hill in 1953, hosted by Grandfather Mountain’s Hugh Morton. 

Griffith delivered his famous monologue, “What It Was, Was Football,” and the audience loved it, Fletcher said. “A couple of weeks later, Chapel Hill record producer Orville Campbell recorded it. On Nov. 14, 1953, Campbell released 500 copies of the tale…and Griffith was on his way.” 

Of course, Griffith’s most famous role was on television, playing Sheriff Andy Taylor in “The Andy Griffith Show,” which ran from 1960-68. The show memorialized the small-town values of the fictional town “Mayberry.”

 

“From Mayberry to Manteo” was central to Molly Harrison’s column posted at OuterBanksThisWeek.com in 2012 after Griffith died from a heart attack at age 86. She expressed the sentiments of locals who felt his presence. 

Griffith bought an estate on Roanoke Island in 1989 and made an immediate impact. 

“We remember him bringing his TV show, ‘Matlock,’ to film two episodes in Manteo” to open the 1989-90 series on NBC,” Harrison wrote. “Locals were excited to be extras and to see their hometown on the small screen.” 

“We remember him appearing in a Brad Paisley music video” for “Waitin’ on a Woman,” filmed in 2008 at Tanger Outlets at Nags Head.

 

In praise of Griffith, Paisley told the Los Angeles Times: “There are very few people in the history of the world who have affected the world in a positive way as much as that man did. It’s something to be celebrated.” 

Marjalene Thomas of Manteo, a member of “The Lost Colony” board of directors, shared the stage with Griffith for six years. “She remembers him as a generous man who loved his community,” reported Stacy Davis of WRAL-TV in Raleigh. 

“He loved this island and this area as much as I do,” Thomas said. “He was always giving back, and those of us around here know that. I’m not sure the rest of the world does. He was an ‘islander’ – he was one of us!” 

Amen, amen.