Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show by Daniel de Vise Page B

excelled in light opera and outdoor theater. But he sensed his strongest talents lay elsewhere. Most of his fellow thespians made do with established acts. Andy began to create his own, experimenting with song and storytelling, weaving humorous stories among the songs and sometimes even between verses. It was part pop act, part comedy sketch, all suffused with Andy’s skill for parodying his own hayseed heritage.
    Robert Hurley, a fellow actor and singer at Chapel Hill, hadn’t regarded Andy as particularly ambitious until the night Andy appeared at his dorm room to announce he had started “a little nightclub act” in the basement of the student center, where boys brought dates on Saturday nights. Andy was acting as master of ceremonies and looking for talent. He wondered whether Robert and a few others from the glee club might come by and sing. Andy had heard, and occasionally joined, the five friends when their voices rose in tight harmony on the bus to glee club concerts. At the Saturday-night performances, Andy “would play popular songs, and he would tell stories between them,” Robert recalled. “I guess that was about his first gig.”
    After “five years and two summers,” as he put it, Andy finally finished college. It was spring of 1949. Andy and Barbara set their wedding for August 22, closing a nearly two-year courtship. It was a Monday, Andy’s day off from The Lost Colony . The couple traveled to Norfolk and chose a rust silk afternoon frock for Barbara and a navy suit for Andy. The ceremony was held at Fort Raleigh, the national park, in a log-cabin chapel.
    â€œI remember helping pick the flowers and helping decorate the church,” said William Ivey Long, whose parents were close to Andy and Barbara. “I remember my father making punch and little sandwiches.” There was talk that Barbara’s folks were “fancy,” William recalled, and “everyone wanted it to look as elegant a wedding as possible.”
    Andy was Moravian; Barbara was Baptist. They were married by a Methodist minister in a facsimile of an Anglican church. Someone played “Ave Maria” on a vibraharp. No one still living seems to recall how this denominational smorgasbord came about, but it suited eclectic Andy, who started life a Baptist, converted to Moravianism, and would later embrace the Methodist faith.
    Andy and Barbara Griffith settled into a rented house outside Chapel Hill. “They lived way out in the country,” recalled William Ivey Long. “They didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing. They had a well. Everyone was poor. We shared food.”
    On Saturday mornings, Barbara would travel to William’s house, where she and Mary Long, William’s mother, would give each other Toni home-permanent hair treatments. William’s father would prepare a vat of vegetable soup and pour it into quart jars to feed both families for the week. William would sometimes deliver the soup to the Griffith mailbox. One time, in what can only be termed an Opie moment, William opened the box to find a bird’s nest inside. Andy had put it there to “shake me up,” William recalled.
    Andy had no permanent job awaiting him as an entertainer, so he took a teacher training course and signed a contract in fall 1949 to teach music at the high school in Goldsboro, in eastern North Carolina. Clifton Britton, stage manager at The Lost Colony , ran the drama department there and was trying to build it into a regional powerhouse against long odds.
    â€œThey only had six hundred students,” Andy recalled. “He had three hundred of them in his drama department. He won every prize there was. He hired me to come up there as his assistant, teaching drama. The reason I was there was to build up the choral music department so he could put on musical plays. . . . He did every major production that the university would do. He would use