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Why small towns still reflect life in TV's 'Golden Age'
by Phil Soreide

My daughter was flipping through the channels on the television the other day, and I saw a few minutes of the old Andy Griffith Show. Andy was getting his hair cut in Floyd’s Barber Shop – remember Floyd? – when Deputy Fyfe came bursting in with big news about the county fair pie eating contest.

It got me thinking nostalgically about some of those old television shows of my youth such as Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver and My Three Sons.

In those shows, the kids never talked back and the family sat down to meals together. If the characters sat on the front porch – and they often did – a neighbor would soon pass by and they’d chat about the day’s trivia as the evening deepened. In those old shows, the paper boy always had a toothy grin and never missed the porch. Teenagers gathered down at the local malt shop to talk about the big game and who did – or didn’t – have a date to the dance. On those shows, the trees were always big and shady, the streets wide, and the ambient sound was the chirping of birds, the snick-snick-snick of hedge trimmers and the ringing of church bells or clock towers.

Okay, I understand that was fantasy, even then. Whatever family traumas Robert Young confronted on Father Knows Best, it wasn’t meth addiction or Internet porn. But, there are a surprising number of parallels that can be drawn between life in TV’s “Golden Age” and life in many Midwestern towns today.

For example, our town’s barber has a modern salon that looks not unlike one you’d find in the big city, and, granted, he does both men’s and women’s hair. But if you sit in one of his chairs and read a magazine for a few minutes, the chances are good that someone you know will come in and, if it’s County Fair time, the pie eating contest or livestock judging might very well come up as a topic of conversation.

One of the facets of small town life is that kind of “connectedness” with your community. Unless the town is really small, you aren’t going to know everybody, of course, but in my experience it’s pretty common to run into friends and acquaintances at the gas station, the bank, the grocery store or the pharmacy. When I lived in the city, running into someone I knew when I was out running my errands was unusual. Now it happens to me virtually every day.

Are the kids in small towns really more polite? I think so. Among my daughters friends is one who favors alternative rock music and heavy black eyeliner and black fingernail polish, accompanied by bracelets and other accessories with metal studs. You can imagine this makes her something of a rebel in a Midwestern small-town middle school, where musical tastes run mostly to Country Western.

Still, she is unfailing friendly, polite and respectful to me, clears her own plate when she stays for dinner, and helps her mother with the housework. And she’s not the only one. Even goofy adolescent boys with their caps on backwards will shake your hand and say, “hey” when introduced. It’s not exactly, “Pleased to meet you sir,” but let’s be realistic.

You can well imagine that in Mayberry, they didn’t lock their doors and might even have left their car keys in the ignition. When I first moved to a small town two years ago, I was struck dumb when I saw a whole row of bikes in the bike rack at the school, with none of them chained and padlocked. Where I came from, leaving your bike unlocked was the same as putting a sign on it that said, “Take my bike, please.”

Another aspect of that connectedness is the trust you often encounter in small towns. When I go to pick up my car from my local mechanic, he is as likely as not to hold up greasy hands and say, “Go ahead and take the car. I haven’t worked up your bill yet, but I’ll drop it by to your wife in a day or two.” Not unlike Gomer Pyle before he joined the Marine Corps. In my big city years, you never got your keys back until you’d paid the bill and they verified the check was good.

In my small town, the streets are wide and quiet, and the trees are big and shady. The church bells ring. The kids ride bikes in the long evenings and people sit on their porches. We don’t have a malt shop anymore, but the teens gather at the local burger or pizza joints to talk about sports, just like in the old days – although now, I suppose, they also talk about MySpace, iTunes, and Wii.

No, I know we can’t go back. The 50s and 60s are long gone, and the way they were depicted on television never really existed. But if you long for those scenes, those values, those moments, I would contend you’re more likely to find them in a small town than in urban corridors.

Because in some sense, the streets – and the spirit – of Mayberry lives on. If you know where to look.

Phil Soreide is a freelance writer living in Holdrege. You can learn more about his work on his web site at www.onegoodadguy.com.

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