News & Politics

Gary Tischler • July 12, 2012

There was always more to Andy Griffith than meets the eye, or at least that part of his legacy which consists of the self-contained world of Mayberry, the small North Carolina town in which he starred as Andy Taylor, the town sheriff who didn’t pack a gun and raised his son Opie to grow up normal.

That was the world of “The Andy Griffith Show,” a hugely successful television sitcom which ran for eight-years into the teeth of the 1960s, extolling classic, small-town values and virtues in a United States that was rapidly changing in its cultural mores. Mayberry existed fictionally in a country where the birth control pill sparked a sexual revolution, where the war over civil rights was entering its most dramatic, violent and transformative phase in the South and all over the country, where America’s war in Viet Nam would expand until it began to tear the country’s politics into pieces. Still popular, the show ended in 1968, the year both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, Richard Nixon elected president and the Black Panthers became a political force. Need we add the surprise of the Tet Offense and the power of the “Silent Majority”? In Mayberry, the 1960s stopped just outside the town limits, or stayed on a train that never whizzed by and never stopped.

In Mayberry, the talk was often led by Aunt Bea, or about finding a mother for Opie, gossiping on the town’s only phone line, father-and-son doings between Andy Taylor and Opie, Deputy Barney Fife’s hysterical doings and the occasional speeding ticket or moonshining trouble. The whistling theme which announced the opening theme of “The Andy Griffith Show” was every bit as familiar to Americans as Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changing,” which had long ago become a battle hymn of the counter-culture republic. In Mayberry, the times were not a changing, which might account for its audience appeal in a country constantly in mounting turmoil.

When some of us who grew up in small towns watched this show—however, we might not admit it to our long-haired hippie friends—we were drawn back into our school days, in the town we ran away from screaming. It was one of those strange constants in America’s popular culture life where both Andy Griffith and the music of Andy Williams would co-exist with the Byrds and eventually, yes, Meathead from Archie Bunker’s TV world.

Because the show was so well-acted, especially by Griffith, who underacted American decency to the point of authenticity, and so heavily populated by outrageously eccentric characters, it became an enduring part of our life, unforgettable in its own way. The only pot prevalent in Mayberry was the pot containing Aunt Bea’s latest cooking miracle.

Griffith, who died at the age of 86 this week, would be the first to tell you that he was hardly as saintly virtuous and common-sense steady as the part he played on the show. “He was the best part of me,” he said. “But he wasn’t the only part.” In fact, Griffith said his personality contained chunks of the character he played in “A Face in the Crowd,” a dark film about American politics directed by Elia Kazan in which he played, to chilling effect, a malevolent country drifter and television host who used his position and everybody around him to become a highly popular and despotic politician.

Griffith came from a town similar in size and ambiance to Mayberry: Mount Airy, N.C., which today has its own Andy Griffith Parkway. He had hard-scrabble beginnings but was encouraged by teachers in his interests in music and drama. He tried his hand at acting and being a stand-up comedian, with a bit that included trying to explain football to a non-gridiron fan. He became noticed in a hit live drama performance of “No Time For Sergeants” during television’s golden age of live drama. The show was eventually turned into a hit Broadway production and included a cast member named Don Knotts, who became a close friend of Griffith.

In 1960, “The Andy Griffith Show” debuted, and nothing Griffith did after that—and he did a lot—quite registered so perfectly in the popular mind, heart and memory. Griffith was the driving force behind the show—but it was also memorably for being so densely full of characters with a capital C, and that rhymes with Bea, that it was practically an anthropological merry-go-round of American and Southern types, a wished-for bucolic place where broken hearts go to mend. We do not know what the unemployment figures are or were for Mayberry, but it was obvious that most everybody made it to the town diner and Aunt Bea made cookies and pies to spare.

Knotts played Barney Fife the irrepressibly near-psychotic, bumbling deputy, and he wore his uniform as if it was infested by ants. At the time, Ronnie Howard played Opie, the sheriff’s son. He would become a television star in his own right with “Happy Days,” a movie star with “American Graffiti” and a Hollywood mogul as a director (he won an Oscar for “A Beautiful Mind”). Gomer Pyle got his start here as an inept mechanic, played by Jim Nabors, who played the same character in the hit television series “Gomer Pyle USMC.” The great western character actor Denver Pyle—he played the Texas Ranger who did in Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in “Bonnie and Clyde”—was the head of the Darlings, moonshiners and bluegrassers. An actress namned Aneta Corsaut played Helen Crump, Opie’s teacher and Andy’s girlfriend. Francis Bavier was the sweet-hearted Aunt Bee who raises Opie as her own.

From 1986 to 1995, Griffith also starred in “Matlock” and acted throughout the rest of his life on television series, made-for-tv movies and movies in general. In 2005, he was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and you can bet that it’s a Mayberry medal.

Mayberry exists—like a brigadoon with a twang, with pies, with fishing poles and no power outages. It’s hard not to think it rose up again just the other day on the Fourth of July, somewhere in a place where there’s nothing but a gas station, two roads intersecting, a pond nearby and a diner where someone starts singing and the coffee is the best and not latte.

It’s hard to put a whistle into words. So we won’t.

Jeff Malet •

“A Capitol Fourth” is the free annual Independence Day concert extravaganza on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. This year’s concert was hosted by Emmy Award-winning television personality Tom Bergeron, of the hit TV series, “Dancing With the Stars”; and an all-star cast featuring Megan Hilty of TV’s “Smash”; four time Toni nominee Kelli O’Hara, Javier Colon winner of “The Voice”; R&B superstars Kool and the Gang and other’s. Olympian Apolo Ohno appeared in a tribute to Team USA and five-time Academy Award winner John Williams conducted his “Olympic Fanfare”.

We got some great close-ups at the dress rehearsal which you can view by clicking on the photo icons below.

View additional photos by clicking here. [gallery ids="100891,128013,128005,127997,128030,127989,128036,127979,128043,127969,128051,128021" nav="thumbs"]

Alexis Williams •

Looking to get out of the house for a full day of fun? If your summer schedule has come to a standstill, venture out to the National Mall for the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The two-week artistic event, which kicked off on June 27, features countless musicians, artists, activists and performers sharing their traditions and embracing cultural differences.

Three program themes — Campus and Community, Citified, and Creativity and Crisis — take attendees on an educational excursion from learning about how to improve their local communities to experiencing classic funk music.

Campus and Community features public universities and the U.S. Department of Agriculture together for discussions and activities about issues such as health care and sustainable living. The Citified program focuses on creativity, identity and neighborhoods in Southeast Washington, D.C. Finally, Creativity and Crisis exclusively centers on artistic expression of grief through performances and crafts.

A classic centerpiece of the festival is the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which celebrated its 25th anniversary. The quilt, which is the largest community art project in the world, allows individuals to commemorate, through quilt-making activities, friends and loved ones who succumbed to AIDS.

Coinciding with the AIDS programming, Tony-nominated actress and AIDS activist Sheryl Lee Ralph performed a series of monologues entitled “Sometimes I Cry”: Raising Our Women’s Consciousness to This Crippling Epidemic HIV/AIDS. Featured as part of the Creativity and Crisis program, Ralph performed nine moving stories of women infected with HIV/AIDS.

To find out more about the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival, visit the Smithsonian Folklife Festival website. The first week of the festival lasts through July 1, and the second week runs July 4 through 8. [gallery ids="100882,127510,127501,127506" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

I became a United States citizen in 1959 on my 18th birthday after I had already graduated from South Amherst High School, in South Amherst, a small (pop. 1,500 or so) town, south of Cleveland, Ohio, with all the requisite virtues of small town life along with some of its restrictions and limitations.

I raised my right hand and swore to uphold and all the rest in a county court in Elyria, Ohio. I think I loved this country, the United States of America, long before I swore to obey its laws and honor it in the company of other citizens-to-be who came from everywhere.

I started to love this country when I first set foot on American soil for real–the New York airport doesn’t count. That was in 1952 when I was put on a TWA propeller driven airliner that took me from Munich, to Paris to New York. I was all off ten years old, couldn’t speak a word of English or American, except “hot dog” and “GI Joe.”

I was the last installment in a three-pronged immigration plan begun when my step-father, Mihailo Radicanin, who came here for a job in the U.S. Steel mill in Lorain, Ohio, a mid-sized city near Lake Erie where many of his fellow Yugoslavians, a-k-a Serbs and Croatians, had come to join the great and soon-to-boom American work force. In time, Mihailo earned enough money to send for my mother, a factory worker, Bavarian, and a divorced mother whom he married here. Four years later, it was my turn to come to America.

I mention all this because at that age–even then–I wanted to be an American more than anything in the world except a cowboy, which was the same thing in my mind. I loved hot dogs immediately–ate a dozen at my first picnic and got sick–but I also loved the movies, the abundance of books, both comic and actual, the blue skies which I knew stretched to everywhere out there in this big country. Coming from a country which was still clearing out rubble from its major cities in the wake of World War II, the streets of Ohio, the farmlands surrounding South Amherst, the car-filled roads, the football and baseball fields, the homeyness of American homes seemed as fresh as a hearty baby to me. Mihailo drove a 1952 Pontiac which I would drive into an apple tree years later.

I fell in love immediately, much like an adolescent boy gets stone smitten by the sight of an impossibly beautiful girl except that the girl rewards the love in impossible ways. I heard that phrase a lot over the years: the pursuit of happiness and I think I understood it a little better than some because my memories of Germany were always close to the surface, with additions from studies in recent history. My stepfather and mother understood it too–they weren’t rich, not even without economic worry since strikes and layoffs were regular features of the economy in the 1950s. But they acquired a house on eight acres in the South Amherst area for $8,000, which included an apple orchard, a bunch of chickens, plowed lanes and a falling-down barn.

They retired to Sun City, Arizona, which did not have cowboys, but I was long out of the house by then. I grew up and was raised through an American childhood. I learned to love the country–not uncritically, without question–but with an enduring passion for the old verities of freedom of thought, diversity, tolerance and such even when they were not being practiced. There was a reason there were so many people named Washington and Jefferson in America.

I lapped it all up in my growing up in small town America. Every year in high school, I won an American Legion essay contest on patriotism and its American variations. This essay is probably not as good or as fresh as any of the ones from my youth.

I grew up in sunlight and the green grass of a long front yard which I mowed diligently. I know that in America, opportunity always beckons, not always obviously, not in equal ways, but nonetheless, in all manner of occurrences. I feel even at this advanced age, lucky to live here, in the nation’s capital, to take in its history, its celebrations of history, the closeby breath of history.

I thought about this going through the exhibition about the War of 1812, thinking of Decatur House, of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Park. Lake Erie looms big in this tale, which is large and complicated, and the words of Oliver Hazard Perry, “We have met the enemy, and they are ours,” our part of Ohio junior high school history books along with Tecumseh. Here, the British torching of government buildings in 1814 is a local tale, but “the Star-Spangled Banner” is everyone’s song.

To this day, I remember, as Neil Diamond sings in his hokey but undeniably affecting song, “Coming to America.”

That was 50 years ago on a month in June, a summer in Ohio beckoning. Mihailo passed away in Sun City in the late 1990s; my mother followed in the post 9/11 world. And here I am, still in love with America, waywardly, critically, but always passionately.

Happy Fourth of July. Happy Birthday, America.

Gary Tischler •

Just when you think it’s safe to go out on a Friday night, you discover a new creature blasting out of the weather misery index headed straight to a neighborhood near you.

What we had here, folks, was a derecho, a storm phenom that occurs under conditions of extreme heat. All around D.C., we had all the fixings for a derecho visitation, which is short (maybe a half an hour) and extremely intense, as we found out in the morning.

It was as bad as it sounds, and it was enough to make you retcho. Along with sorrow for the deaths the storm caused, my sympathy—heartfelt and relieved—goes out to everyone who was otherwise most directly affected by the results of the derecho—trees falling on houses, power outages, loss of communicastions, loss of homes and shelter, loss of frozen food, loss of care, long lines spent idling in gas stations, of which there were precious few in the D.C. metro area. People lost power and resorted to eating by candlelight, and all their gadgets suddenly dimmed, or failed, or were of no use. There was maximum texting and tweeting but only if your gadgets worked.

Some of us were lucky, some of us were not—but the whole area, to some degree or another felt the effect of what’s basically a really extreme summer storm, full of hail, lightning, powerful winds, sheeting rain and thunder brought on by extreme summer heat—in June, no less. In D.C., temperatures had hit 104 June 29, and early in the evening, weathermen were already warning about the oncoming stretch and line of storms. “Everybody’s going to get it,” and “There’s no escape” and such and such a place “is getting hammered,” where common expressions of what was coming and what was happening. Of course, it’s tough to heed the warnings when your television shuts down.

We heard the 70 to 80 to 90 miles per hour winds in our Adams Morgan neighborhood, which for the most part escaped relatively unscathed, although all of us feared the worst, having experienced 50-inch snow, power outages and a real hurricane. But we could see the aftermath—branches all over the streets, some smaller trees down along with big branches. On Woodley Place near the National Zoo, a major, old, huge tree had cracked and uprooted, stretching itself across the street and on top of two houses.

Similar sights—in the forms of videos and photos on line were seen all over the District and in Maryland and Virginia. Huge power outages occurred—and Pepco, in spite of all those television commercials about caring for their customers and getting their act together, appears still not to have its act together, with at last count around 30 to 40,000 customers without power and not expected to bring back full power for another week — a situation Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland said was completely unacceptable.

We live, of course, in an age of extremes—extreme partisanship, extreme fighting, extreme Kardashian, and especially extreme weather, although not extreme global warming, according to some. Still, it’s 106 in Atlanta, Colorado is burning, and we’re facing 90-degree-plus heat for the next ten One of the things we find about events like these is that it brings people out to help each other—libraries open their doors and air conditioning to displaced persons, neighbors take in their neighbors, people check on their neighbors, their children and pets. Or not: a Motel 6 hotel apparently upped their rates to $500 a night, anticipating a huge profit. Deretcho indeed. [gallery ids="100886,127650,127627,127645,127637" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

On behalf of the Georgetown Media Group, we would like to welcome our new neighbor, Zoe Feldman. This local designer started her business, Zoe Feldman Designs in 2004 and relocated to her new office space above the Georgetown Media Group on Potomac Street June 29. We had the opportunity to sit down with Feldman and ask her about her company and what got her there.

Q: How did you get started?

A: A couple of good choices and a lot of luck. I went to school for advertising and found out it wasn’t my jam. So, I went to interior design school, and got an internship with Mark Hampton, Inc. It turned into an assistant job, and by the time I left I was a designer.

Q: How long have you been in the interior designing business?

A: I started my business in 2004, and I’ve been in the Georgetown area for almost five years. We just moved from down the street because it was too small. The new space is the perfect fit, and it was the push we needed to take a risk.

Q: What’s your design style?

A: Classic modernism. I grew up in a mid-century modern home with pop art. I use a blend of classical and modern, and I like to modernize traditional spaces but also pay homage to the history. My design style is always evolving.

Q: What kind of demographic do you try to appeal to?

A: I’d say young professionals. Cool couples in their 40s, a few bachelors and more established clients. Basically, people looking for a little more of a less traditional D.C. look.

Q: What inspires you?

A: I’m very inspired by art, nature-like colors and texture in nature and fashion. I look at what the space is begging for. The space I work in and the clients are the most important things.

Q: Is there any thing else you’d like the Georgetowner readers to know?

A: I’m a fan of Georgetown, and I’m for hire!

To see Zoe Feldman portfolio visit. zoefeldmandesign.com [gallery ids="100888,127652" nav="thumbs"]

Lisa Gillespie • July 11, 2012

The Washington Kastles bring live
tennis tournaments to Washington,
D.C. each July. Owned by entrepreneur
Mark Ein, the Washington Kastles are
the 2009 and 2011 World TeamTennis
champions and the only team in league
history to go undefeated through
the regular season and playoffs. The
Kastles’ fifth season will again be led
by 27-time Grand Slam tournament
winner Serena Williams and 21-time
Grand Slam winner Venus Williams.
The Kastles play a total of 14 matches,
seven at home and seven on the road,
with the top two finishers in each conference
moving on to the playoffs. Gates open at
5:15 p.m., matches start at 7:10 p.m. Tickets
are available through www.washingtonkastles.
com or Ticketmaster. Located at The Wharf
at 800 Water St. SW, the closest Metro stop is
Waterfront-SEU and L’Enfant Plaza.Williams
and 21-time Grand Slam winner Venus Williams.
The Kastles play a total of 14 matches, seven at
home and seven on the road, with the top two
finishers in each conference moving on to the
playoffs. Gates open at 5:15 p.m., matches start
at 7:10 p.m. Tickets are available through www.
washingtonkastles.com or Ticketmaster. Located
at The Wharf at 800 Water St. SW, the closest
Metro stop is Waterfront-SEU and L’Enfant
Plaza.

Lisa Gillespie •

Screen on the Green starts on July 16 and
goes through Aug. 6 on the National Mall. Films
are shown on Monday nights beginning at dusk,
around 8:30-9:00 p.m. People start to claim their
spots on the lawn as early as 5 p.m. Movies play
except in extreme weather, and there are no rain
days. This years films include “Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid,” “It Happened One
Night,” “From Here to Eternity” and “Psycho.”