This Wall Street Journal piece about Mount Airy’s Andy Griffith/Mayberry based tourism contains the usual information, but it also touches on the future as the town faces the post-Andy Griffith era.
Judy Travis said she can’t help but worry about what she calls “this Andy situation.” She has lived for 30 years beside Mr. Griffith’s boyhood home, now a bed-and-breakfast. She said she used to have to leave her front stoop when the exhaust from the tour buses got thick. That doesn’t happen now.
Ms. Travis, a retired seamstress, said her adult children haven’t been able to find jobs in the town. “If tourism dies, Mount Airy’s hopeless,” she said. “We’d really have to get on our knees and pray.”
