Date: Wed, 28 May 2014 21:09:16 -0400
From: Gene Galin
Subject: Aunt Bee’s Siler City cat house
Read the entire article at
http://triad-city-beat.com/
Frances Bavier, Emmy-winning actress who gave life to Aunt Bee on “The Andy Griffith Show,” was by most accounts the polar opposite of her alter ego. Hardly the domesticated matriarch, Bavier was a sophisticated lady who resided in New York and Los Angeles her entire life, working alongside esteemed actors like Bette Davis and Henry Fonda. A Broadway and motion-picture performer turned small-screen superstar who, in 1970, abruptly decided to walk away from her Top 10 sitcom, “Mayberry RFD.”
After 15 years of the weekly television-series grind she’d had it with the Business of Show, one of the reasons why Bavier moved, alone at age 70, all the way across the continent to Siler City, NC where her biggest fan operated a family furniture store. In this mythical shire mentioned so fondly in scripts produced for her by former writers from “Amos & Andy” and “Leave it To Beaver,” she hoped to discover the small-town goodness that she herself had come to represent in the minds of middle America.
Something she clearly had no concept of.
Naturally she was warmly received by Chatham County’s 3,700 aw-shucks-just-plain-folks. Grand Marshall in the parades, an honored guest at civic functions, the very flower of verisimilitude as she maneuvered the narrow streets of Siler City in the same pea-green, two-door 1966 Studebaker Daytona she drove on “Mayberry RFD,” now seen five days a week in syndication.