“Hey Ford, we want to show a car that’s so broken the mechanic has to take it apart 9 times in order to fix it.”
“Well… Better not be a Ford.”
I think product placement deals weren’t quite as strict back then. They got several non-Fords on the show, including a Mercedes, Jaguar, Ferrari, and several Cadillacs.
… It’s entirely possible that I know too much about that show.
I live among almost 10,000,000 people in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area, and guess what? We wave and say hello to each other all the time. I’ve travelled to a lot of places in the USA for work, including small Midwest towns small Southern towns, small Western towns, and, by golly small Eastern towns, and the Big City. Guess what I discovered? We are all pretty much the same. Maybe you should get out more, @bing.
Well, you clearly know more about the show than I do.
Despite having watched it each week when I was a kid, as well as occasional viewing over the past few years, I don’t recall seeing any of those marques that you mentioned.
When I was a boy, Dad taught all our cars to use guns responsibly.
When I was a boy, my parents left the car in the driveway and took the bus to work. Meanwhile, I walked four miles each way to school, sometimes in three feet of snow, uphill both ways!
What if I don’t look like them?
Are they going to wave?
I’m not being a smart alec
it’s a perfectly reasonable question, in my opinion
And what happened to the policeman?
Was he fired?
Or did the town contract with the sheriff after the policeman retired?
When I drive through rural Texas, I pass through a whole bunch of Mayberrys, at least that’s the superficial impression. I’m not sure if I should whistle “The Fishin’ Hole” or “Town Without Pity” while driving through. Maybe “Harper Valley PTA”.
@db4690 I don’t know if they’d wave or not but I think they would.
I don’t know what they cop is doing now either but probably signed on with the Sheriff. No point not using the license once you’ve got it.
If we could just figure out how to build roads that go downhill both ways, we wouldn’t even need engines in our cars.
In my experience, yes, and the waitress will probably call you “honey” when she takes your order.
Baltimore is famous as the town in which working women (waitresses, receptionists…) call everyone ‘Hon’. A volunteer humorist snuck up to ‘Welcome to Baltimore’ signs on the freeways to add, ‘Hon!’; the fun police painted it over and tried to catch him. NPR’s Lisa Simeone stealth-interviewed him on ‘All Things Considered.’ A local comedy group, The Crabs, did a skit, ‘Attack of the Hons’, the attackers being friendly women who called everyone ‘Hon’. Whenever a cashier calls me ‘Hon’ I ask if she’s from Baltimore; occasionally I’m right.
Speaking of Andy Griffin, maybe his movie “A Face in the Crowd” was somewhat more representative of how things really were in the 1950s. Lonesome Rhodes was a polar opposite to Andy Taylor.
There’s a Honfest every year in the Hampden district of Baltimore to celebrate the Hon Era (1950s). Women of all ages put on Big Hair wigs, horned rim glasses, and hoop skirts to vie for the truest representation of the quintessential Hon. Some silly fun that caught on.
I remember the Welcome to Baltimore, Hon sign on Russell Street well. I was disappointed that the Fun Police kept removing the Hon addition to the welcome sign.
Maybe you don’t know the show as well as you think. Most of the troublemakers passing through Mayberry were coming from the larger towns nearby like Mt. Pilot.
Regardless, that is not the point. It is quite obvious you have a viewpoint that cannot be swayed even if someone posts something to the contrary. I figured it was more or less obvious but the point was we did not see ANY real crime until I was a middle teenager and even then, it was pretty far removed from where we lived. You see, towns where I grew up were pretty far apart. But news travels and when something big like that happened, where nothing like it had happened before, it’s really big news.
Apparently, you grew up in a much different realm and it has completely skewed your vision of the world. To the point that when people say it was different for them, you cannot accept that reality and prefer to call into question their memory. Bummer for you.
I think you’re both right. I think there were towns that were like Mayberry, but I guarantee there was a dark underside to them too. It might have been all Andy and Aunt Bee on the outside, but somewhere in town someone was beating their wife, or abusing their kid. There is no such thing as a 100% utopia, even in utopia.
Even in Mayberry there was an underworld involved in the illegal production and distribution of moonshine. Otis was the jolly public image of it, but someone was supplying him with the liquor, draining him and his wife of their finances to feed his alcoholism (and there were even a few episodes that showed the rough characters who were doing it).
On that subject, how did we get from freeways to the dark side of Mayberry? 
Maybe where you live it is. But crime rate in many gated communities around here is substantially lower. There have been several studies in MA and NH that have proven that. One gated community that was the focus of the study was surrounded by crime ridden neighborhoods. The crime rate in the gated community was almost non existent.
I’d love to take your word for it, but I’m going to have to ask you to cite those studies to which you referred. The only studies I find are either inconclusive, report no difference in crime rates, or they only focus on specific crimes, such as robbery.
This article didn’t reach a definitive conclusion, but it found that “certain crimes such as ‘intimate partner violence’ are actually at a higher rate in households that are part of a gated community.”*
*https://www.inmyarea.com/resources/home-security/gated-communities-not-so-safe
https://besthomesecuritycompanys.com/2013/are-gated-home-communities-really-safer/
https://www.homesecuritygeeks.net/home-security-debate-are-gated-communities-safer/
Here is another study, which states:
“When comparing property crime victimization in Gated vs Ungated communities in 2012 on a national level, Criminologist Nicholas Branic found no significant influence in crime rate from being in a gated community.”**
**http://neighborhoodguard.org/gated-vs-ungated-communities-which-is-safer/
This article suggests, “some forms of crime such as car theft are reduced, at least immediately after the streets are closed. However, data indicates that the long-term crime rate is at best only marginally altered” (Blakely, 1995, p. 1).
(Blakely, E. (1995). Fortress communities: The walling and gating of American suburbs. Land Lines, 7, 1,3., referenced at http://www.ifpo.org/resource-links/articles-and-reports/crime-prevention-physical-security-training-and-risk-management/prevention-of-crime-an-overview-of-gated-communities-and-neighborhood-watch/
Lastly, I’ll offer this Master’s Thesis from University of South Florida’s Department of Criminology, which states:
“Findings from logit and rare events logit regression analyses generally suggest that living in a gated community does not significantly influence the likelihood of victimization, although in some cases the odds either increased or decreased. Other measures of guardianship exhibit a variety of positive and negative effects on victimization likelihood.”***
***http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5184&context=etd
They were local news papers a couple years ago. Boston Globe and the Lawrence Tribune. I really don’t care if you believe me or not. Those are the news papers…do your own research. I know what I read…proving something to you is a waste of my time.
I just did, and what I found while doing that research contradicted your unsubstantiated claim.
I just told you where to look. If you don’t want to look…Fine with me.