Mayberry RIP

Main Street, Durant, Okla., down on its luck.

The tributes to the late Andy Griffith have been lavish. Did anybody compare his Sheriff Taylor to Joe Arpaio? I'm sure they did. Then there was Mayberry, the fictional setting of The Andy Griffith Show. As Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts wrote, "Mayberry was real, too — as real as the desire sometimes to escape the tyranny of What Is. It sat just outside of time, at a crossroads of nostalgia and need. There was a dirt path in the woods near town that led to a fishing hole. Sheriff Andy used to go there often with his little boy, to the whistling of a bucolic tune lifting above the North Carolina pines."

As I was preparing this column Monday, I noticed one big difference between today's reality and Mayberry: The Internet, or lack thereof. My connections were down most of the day, so no new Rogue post (much of Arizona rejoices). My jobs require me to me unusually wired, but the "tubes" of the 'Net — developed initially with federal money — are the big change in our lives. We didn't get moon colonies or manned exploration of Mars and beyond, but we got PCs, Macs and the Internet. It makes for an interesting thought experiment: Your work and personal life in even 1980 vs. today. Back then people wrote letters, typed on typewriters, filed in filing cabinets (and many more clerical workers were needed), and got their messages on those pink "While You Were Out" slips. Now I've got a Mac and an iPad for almost all of that.

One of the most ubiquitous comments about Mayberry (based on Griffith's real hometown of Mount Airy, N.C.) was the lack of African-Americans in a Southern town. That was actually possible. I lived in such a place for a few years, Durant, Oklahoma, in the "Little Dixie" southeastern region of the state. Durant had been a "Sundown Town." Blacks could work as domestics or laborers during the day, but they had to clear out to other towns at night. Old-timers told of signs at the city limits that said, "Darkie," or the N-word, "don't let the sun go down on your back."

Sundown or not, Mayberry represented something close to a real small American town in its downtown of local businesses, walkability and compactness. This was when towns were centered on the railroad station and before the destabilization of Interstate highways, mass-produced subdivisions, ubiquitous car ownership, sprawl and white flight. The races and classes lived much closer together, even if separate, in 1940 compared with today. This was even true in the small city of Phoenix.

In 1979, Durant was still largely such a town. Main Street was lined with retail businesses, banks and professional offices, mostly in buildings constructed in the early 20th century. These were almost all locally owned. While there was a Sonic and a chain taco fast-food outlet (Taco Tico?), most of the restaurants were local. Among them was George's, a hamburger joint in a run-down building that opened when George felt like it. Although, Phoenician that I was, I longed for a McDonald's as a sign of civilization, I soon realized George made the best burger I had even tasted. I was so conditioned by malls, chains and cars that at first I had little appreciation for the miracle of small-town America I got to witness before it was gone.

The Durant railroad depot after passenger service had ended.

A handsome railroad station with white and "colored" waiting rooms had once seen 24 passenger trains a day where the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy), Missouri Pacific (the old KO&G) and Frisco railroads came together. The last passenger train stopped in the 1960s. Decades before, this was where William Jennings Bryan had thrilled the crowd so much that the county was named after him. A fading multistory building that held a fabric store was actually the old opera house. The Hotel Bryan, the tallest building in town and near the railroad, was sadly closed. But much of downtown was full of life, especially on Saturdays, when the farmers came into town. This was big peanut-farming country — "the world's largest peanut" was a statue at city hall.

Durant was prosperous compared with the rest of Little Dixie, but poor compared with, say, an idyllic New England or Midwestern small town. Somehow a city library was lovingly maintained. The county courthouse was much as it had been in the 1930s. Prominent on the lawn was the statue of the Confederate Soldier. The one movie house in town, which probably dated from the 1920s, showed films a year after they came out. Leafy neighborhoods of wood-frame houses rolled up to the college and out to the headquarters of the Choctaw Nation (this had been part of Indian Territory) on the campus of the old Oklahoma Presbyterian College. Newer neighborhoods had been built contiguous to older ones. I lost a huge amount of weight just walking around town every day. The streets were almost uniformly narrow. There were plenty of front porches on which to sit and strum a guitar.

But probably not with a real-life Sheriff Taylor. The small city police and smaller sheriff's office kept to themselves. The local lore held that there wasn't much difference between the cops and the bootleggers. The old stills out in the countryside, where the snake-handling preachers held sway and outhouses were still common, had been replaced by pot growing. Law enforcement was not militarized; the sheriff's cars looked barely in running order. OHP, the Highway Patrol, was another matter: The officers were highly professional, but you didn't get too close.

Durant was represented by Carl Albert ("Ol' Carl), the Speaker of the House. This had been Democratic territory forever. The New Deal had electrified the countryside, built Lake Texoma, lifted up suffering farmers. But it was conservative Democrat. So the quick switch to red-state country was easy.

It was a big church town. First Baptist was a block from First Methodist. The Southern Baptists wouldn't play softball with the Methodists because the latter were going to hell. But the Four Square and Primitive Baptists thought the Southern Baptists were going to hell. And the Pentacostals were sure everybody else was bound there. But Durant being large by Southeast Oklahoma standards — about 12,000 — it even had a Catholic church. Speaking of spirits, Oklahoma had crazy liquor laws. Restaurants could only sell "set ups" — glasses — so patrons brought their own bottles. I've never seen more drunks per-capita. Beer was 3.2, further encouraging more guzzling to get a buzz. A few miles south, along the Red River, were the remains of storied honky tonks where Texans could cross over to party. If the Oklahoma law intervened, everybody could head south to Texas.

Sprawl, such as there was, had extended a bit on Main to encompass a shopping center with a TG&Y and, across the street, a Safeway. There was the highway bypass at the west end of town where a K-Mart, small Holiday Inn and a few squat newer businesses had been established. A little ways north was a newer subdivision and apartments. But there was a distinct break between the town and the rural. Durant seemed very isolated and timeless, in good and bad ways. For the most part, the town was intact, compact and in many ways charming. If you wanted the new-new, you could drive across the Red River to Denison and Sherman, Texas. And although Durant had few blacks, it was divided by class. The gentry mostly lived in stately houses west of downtown, including a few blocks along Main. The poorer whites and white trash lived east and south of the railroad tracks. Townies were separate from rural folk. And town and gown mixed only with discomfort. Durant was a microcosm of society, with its peculiar twists. The old boy who acted as if he had never been out of the county might have been all over the world. By the time I left, all the merchants on Main, who had once been stand-offish, knew me and I had learned to sit a spell and talk. When I left, with a new McDonald's sitting ominously on the edge of town, I actually missed this real Mayberry.

The Choctaw casino south of Durant.

Another view of downtown Durant, denuded by the Super Wal-Mart. Once it would have been difficult to find a parking place.

I visited Durant a few years ago. Now it has, as Kunstler would put it, an "asteroid belt" of ugly, stand-alone chains out by the overpass, anchored by a Super Wal-Mart and spilling out into what was once a lovely, empty meadow that floated into the horizon. Although the stately houses still line Main, the business district is dead despite efforts to hang banners and make it a historic destination. The prime local businesses are virtually all gone. A new bank building is at least occupied, but the architecture is brutal compared with its surroundings. The railroad station had been demolished, an arresting act of civic vandalism. At least much of the old downtown is still standing, in some cases with beautiful bones, but most buildings are empty and some — some of the best — falling apart. As with Globe (Ariz.), these priceless buildings are sadly just awaiting a fire that will leave an empty lot.

The isolation has been shattered by a divided highway running from I-35, where once there was only a two-lane road; by Dallas' creeping northward spawl along U.S. 69/75, and by retirees moving into more sprawl around nearby Lake Texoma. A huge Choctaw casino and "resort" sprawls out several miles south on the highway to Dallas. But what little of the Creative Class lives here is largely confined to Southeastern Oklahoma State University and the Oklahoma Shakespeare Festival. The talent and capital to make downtown worth caring about and something sustainable for the future — it's just not there, as in thousands of American Mayberrys.

 

Comments

[morecleanair]

Sadly, the retail carnage from WMT's Grim Reaper are not yet well-understood. They reap what we sow. Since Sam passed, this has become a company without a soul, dominated by engineers and logisticians.

[Truth08]

Though "Globe" is what you mentioned in comparison...(Globe's Downtown, for the most part, is still occupied by many restaurants and mom and pop stores, and now even has a Movie Theater and Museum in the Downtown District)

I believe its Miami/Claypool and Clifton/Chase Creek that probabaly have more similarities.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kresge86/2581334963/

Regards,
Truth

[Sibling Competition]

Where is the single location in the U.S. farthest from any casino?

[AzRebel]

Kekaha, HI

[koreyel]

From Sinclair Lewis' 1920 novel Main Street:

It was not only the unsparing unapologetic ugliness and the rigid straightness which overwhelmed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy temporariness of the buildings, their faded unpleasant colors. The street was cluttered with electric-light poles, telephone poles, gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods. Each man had built with the most valiant disregard of all the others. Between a large new "block" of two-story brick shops on one side, and the fire-brick Overland garage on the other side, was a one-story cottage turned into a millinery shop. The white temple of the Farmers' Bank was elbowed back by a grocery of glaring yellow brick. One store-building had a patchy galvanized iron cornice; the building beside it was crowned with battlements and pyramids of brick capped with blocks of red sandstone.

She escaped from Main Street, fled home.

She wouldn't have cared, she insisted, if the people had been comely. She had noted a young man loafing before a shop, one unwashed hand holding the cord of an awning; a middle-aged man who had a way of staring at women as though he had been married too long and too prosaically; an old farmer, solid, wholesome, but not clean—his face like a potato fresh from the earth. None of them had shaved for three days.

"If they can't build shrines, out here on the prairie, surely there's nothing to prevent their buying safety-razors!" she raged.

She fought herself: "I must be wrong. People do live here. It CAN'T be as ugly as—as I know it is! I must be wrong,

[koreyel]

PS:

Cooling centers will be our century's version of the last century's soup lines.

Casinos are cooling centers and soup lines in combo.

[Emil Pulsifer]

Struggling...struggling...to...be...polite...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kgYquX6H8g

Drat. Sometimes I hate myself.

[Rogue Columnist]

So, Emil, what do you want me to write about? Or are you leaving to start your own blog?

[morecleanair]

Pointing our camera into the future, we wonder what Anytown USA might look like 20 years from now. There's presently lots of under-productive retail footage out there and few elegant solutions (mixed use) for recycling much of it.

The emergence of the internet and the customer's changing shopping preferences are already having a cosmic effect. Strip malls and their vacancies have taken on a hollow look. Other than the ubiquitous Macy's, many larger more traditional malls have become homogenized into watered-down versions of their former selves. Big box "category killers" (read power centers) of yesteryear are rapidly contracting. Since I no longer travel with the Merrill Lynch retail tour, I'm not current on what the best and the brightest retailers are doing to adapt to "fewer bricks/more clicks", but I'm betting there's some serious downsizing and energy efficiency involved. Best present refuge: own Costco and Target and maybe one of the Dollar Stores.

[Emil Pulsifer]

Mr. Talton wrote:

"So, Emil, what do you want me to write about? Or are you leaving to start your own blog?"

Well...I already regret being naughty. After all, it's your blog and you can't please all of the people all of the time. I should have just kept my mouth shut and waited for the next installment. Still, since you asked the question:

Something more relevant to current events and issues. Something that offers an "aha!" moment. Something that invites reader feedback. I just can't get excited about Durant, Oklahoma. I know that fast-food chains (and corporations and general) have supplanted small-town USA in many places. Decades ago.

[Rogue Columnist]

You can be naughty. I don't promise to write this blog forever. Traffic was good on this post, BTW. And I'm surprised you weren't lecturing me with extensive research to show how small towns weren't dead or that badly hurt by Wal-Mart ;-)

[AzRebel]

Toooooooooooooo funny.

Emil, when did you sneak in to our house and record my wife snoring?

Why do you think I sometimes post at 3am and 4am.

Rogue,

We've discussed everything on this blog in the greatest of detail and from all angles.

How about we become a proactive blog.

Start with small ideas and grow them.

We can't fix the big issues. There are evil forces arrayed against us.

Let's start out with small things and challenge each other to do one better.

While I moan and carry on about our educational system, my wife picks out one teacher and helps her with supplies for her pupils. That kind of stuff.

Eclec mentioned this in a recent gathering, it's the small ground level ideas that catch on and grow.

What do you think?

cal doesn't just go around complaining about too many people, he hands out condoms. (some of them are used, but that's a whole other issue).

We're in the process of getting our ass kicked by evil forces, but damn it, let's go down fighting.

[AA]

As a longtime reader had to laugh at "Emil's" post. After all the long, tedious comments he's made ... and I've really tried to read them .. he's complaining that this post is boring him?! ROTFLMAO

[phxSUNSfan]

OT, I am no fan of Sen. McCain, but his chastisement of bat-shit crazy, Bachmann and Co., and her muslim brootherhood claims was great!

[cal Lash]

Well with all due respect to my buddy Jon this column did remind me of a writer recommended to me by Emil. A writer that I found to be rather snore boring in his detail of small-town Iowa.. And Emil seemed offended at my comments. I did not feel any regret. And AA has a point, however since I think Emil may in fact be the man child of Hal and David I understand where he is coming from. The aliens are here. And its good to know that robotic computers in human form have grown mentally to have "regrets". Susan Calvin would be proud.

Regarding Mayberry, I never lived there but I did live south of the tracks in Hicktown and Smallville. I really liked the photos in this piece as fewer and fewer places look like this or the old court house in downtown Phoenix. We have traded rurality in for Cityscapes. Talk about boring.

[cal Lash]

REB, those condoms come in a box depicting endangered species and I have a box with a picture of an elephant just for you.

[Emil Pulsifer]

In a previous blog ("The new hard times"), "cal Lash" wrote:

"I always seem to Identify with the Tongue."

Funny, that's just how I picture you:

http://static.desktopnexus.com/thumbnails/19419-bigthumbnail.jpg