- This program is made possible in part by generous support from Dogwood Health Trust, a private foundation based in Asheville, North Carolina, focused on dramatically improving the health and well-being of all people and communities in the 18 counties and the Qualla Boundary of Western North Carolina.

♪ - Coming up on Best of Our State, we got you riding shotgun, cruising through Mount Airy as one local brings the spirit of Mayberry back to the streets.

And we go behind the scenes at the North Carolina Zoo with the folks that know every paw, feather, and footprint, where wildlife and conservation thrive.

We dip into the treasured stories for a look at all the beauty and character of North Carolina.

Hello, I'm Elizabeth Hudson, Editor-in-Chief of Our State Magazine and your host.

In a town carved from granite and from memories, one man keeps the spirit of Mayberry rolling along.

Visitors come from across the country and from around the world to take a ride back to a simpler time, a place where the windows roll down, the speedometer doesn't matter, and a little Mayberry magic is always just around the corner.

[MUSIC] [old police siren wailing] - Well, you know old Barney like to do that and I do too.

[old police siren wailing] - I'll start off by telling you that Andy was born here in 1926 on June 1st.

Andy's mother was born about 30 miles northeast of here.

Guess what that little community's name was?

Mayberry.

[MUSIC] ♪ - All right, we got to watch for jaywalkers.

- There is 155 references of Mount Airy and the surrounding area in that show up here of eight years.

- I was watching one of the shows last week and I heard Andy say to somebody, "We're going to the Grand Theater tonight to see a movie."

Right here it is, right there where the green lights around that glass.

That was the Grand Theater in his day.

He worked in there and sold tickets to popcorn for people to see the movie.

- That's where Andy really got inspired to get in the show business.

He saw a lot of free movies with his job.

He said once in an interview that his mother would give him a quarter on Saturday morning to get him out of the house so she could clean house.

Andy said, "I could take that quarter and go to the theater and see a movie for a dime."

Then a lot of times I'd come back to Snappy Lunch, get two hot dogs and a drink with the 15 cents I had left.

[MUSIC] - Anytime they mention a street on the show, and I think they mention 40-some streets, they're all streets here in town.

- He referenced this intersection right here five or six times.

Main Street and Pine, Main Street and Pine.

- Now Andy loved hot dogs.

That's the reason Matlock eats hot dogs on TV.

- But anyway, we'll get back to Andy in just a little bit.

♪ - You know, I didn't come home from work that day planning on going to it.

I was just going to ride through and see how many people was there.

In 2002, Andy was here for the Highway 52 dedication that runs through town.

They named it the Andy Griffith Parkway.

Well, you know, Mount Airy is Andy Griffith's hometown.

We've been called Mayberry ever since I can remember.

Most of the people there around me were all from out of town.

They would come to Mount Airy just to see Andy.

So people started asking me questions when they found out I was from here.

You know, when I left that day, I said, "I need to come up with something, give people something to do when they come searching for Mayberry."

♪ So I decided I was going to fix up a squad car and show them the town.

Well, you had to have an old Ford Galaxy to make a squad car out of, so it looked like the squad car that they used on the Andy Griffith Show.

Ford was a corporate sponsorship of the Andy Griffith Show, and every year of the show, Ford would give them a new current model year Galaxy to use on the show.

So I saw this car.

It was a '62.

It was all black with a red interior.

I told the guy that if he would paint the roof white and paint the doors white, then I would buy it, and so he did.

And coming home, a lot of people would pass me, blowing horns and giving me a thumbs up because they could see, you know, what was going to happen, you know, I guess.

So I fixed the car up.

Put the red light on it, put my siren on it, got some emblems to go on the door.

Hey, I got a squad car.

♪ So I was going through town, and I'd see tourists on Main Street, and I would just say, "Hey, you all want to ride around in the squad car?"

People would jump in, and we'd ride around for a few minutes, and I'd tell them a little bit about Mount Airy.

'You need to see Snappy Lunch.

'You need to see Floyd's Barbershop.

'You need to go to Andy's Homeplace.'

When I'd pick people up, you know, I would stop at Wally's, you know, to give them a bottle of pop, and that's kind of how I got connected with Wally's.

It's just taken off since then.

You never can tell from one hour to the next who's going to pull in the parking lot.

I need another car, and I need some more help driving.

My concept was to use older guys, retired guys, somebody that, you know, can talk and carry on a conversation and grew up around here for the most part.

- 2002, I came up from Raleigh for a day trip, walked out of a restaurant on Main Street, and he was sitting at the stoplight.

I about had a meltdown.

I was one of his first customers.

- He was.

- And I said, "One day, I'm going to move up here and drive your car."

And I started adding cars.

My idea was I want one from every year.

'61 through the '67 were the Galaxies they used.

- Ford gave them the cars for free advertising.

- Yeah, every season had the latest model Ford Galaxy.

- Some drivers open it like it's a limousine.

I want you to figure out where your thumb goes on that button, because cars haven't opened like that for what, since 1970s?

- You want me to sit in the center?

[door shutting] - A lot of them get in that car and look around for a few seconds, and it's like they've opened a Christmas present.

- The roll-down windows, I've never done that before in my life.

- Some of the older folks, you may hear stories like, "Mama and Daddy had a car like this."

You know, "One of my first dates had a car like this."

It just brings back memories.

- And they all come looking for Mayberry.

- Where are you ladies from?

- Toledo, Ohio.

- Illinois.

Quincy, Illinois.

- Rochester, New York.

- We're from Chicago.

- Here we go.

[old siren wails] - Ah!

They're looking for the days we'd like to go back to.

- Which is what the TV show did.

It got you out of whatever troubles you had for 30 minutes, and they get that here, too.

- I find that at times when we leave from down here, we've got the siren going.

And a lot of people, especially women, will just scream.

They're that happy.

- Probably afraid of your driving.

[laughter] [siren] ♪ - We were known for this for over 100 years before Mayberry was ever talked about.

What you're going to see over here on the right is the largest granite quarry on earth.

That area was called the Granite City for a lot of years before Mayberry.

All solid granite.

Been in operation since 1879.

- One time in the early 1900s, it was one of the biggest employers in the area.

There was a couple thousand men that used to work out on the quarry in the early 1900s.

They tell us if they get it all out of the original 90 acres to the bottom, it would take another 500 years.

So it's a lot of stone there yet.

- All this granite all over town, most of the churches are made out of it.

Our municipal buildings, several homes, practically all the stores along Main Street.

It's what put Mount Airy on the map.

♪ - Have y'all seen this?

- The quality is excellent.

It looks like it was machine printed.

But this boy never picked up a paintbrush.

This was all painted with spray paint.

If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't believe it.

- We call this the Five Faces of Andy.

It started out as a very young man on the left right here.

Ended up as Matlock on the right there.

- Three in the middle are kind of during the period of the show, 249 episodes over seven and a half years.

If you look closely, you can see a shadow come up right across it from left to right.

That is the mountain.

That's Pilot Mountain.

That's what Andy called Mount Pilot.

♪ - Right there's the statue of Andy and Opie going fishing right there.

- I had a lady there, when I was explaining to her, I could tell what year the show was filmed based on what year the car was.

But the lady told me she didn't need to know that since she watched Opie grow up.

She knew what year the show was based on Opie's age.

♪ - This was dirt street when Andy was a kid living here.

- And right there's Andy's home place right there.

They did not have a bathroom.

They had a privy in the backyard.

He lived like that for about nine years.

He left here and went down to Carolina, Manteo, New York, and California.

♪ - The beauty of it to me is the people that come in from all over the country, and really all over the world, just to see how much they love it, and how much they love Andy.

It's just a real sense of pride.

- Yeah, it was great.

- It was awesome.

- They were great.

- Yeah?

- I didn't get to speak hardly.

[laughter] - I had a couple from Houston, and we got done with the tour, and the lady in front just broke out in tears.

- Brought her to tears.

- That happens.

- A lot of people get out of the car in tears.

- The whole Mayberry thing has got such an influence on people.

Who knew that this was on people's bucket list?

- It's a special day.

- My birthday!

- It's Larry's birthday.

- We're going to let him blow the siren, because all birthday boys get to blow the siren.

Yep, push it down.

[siren] Happy birthday to Larry!

- Happy birthday to you!

- All right, put your hands up and get arrested.

Y'all been bathing in a public fountain in the presence of a mule.

- I mean, the rest of your life, you're going to remember riding a squad car through Mayberry.

You're not going to forget it.

♪ [whistling Andy Griffith theme] [laughter] - Our state is home to one of the largest natural habitat zoos in the world where the animals you once read about in books suddenly feel close enough to watch you watching them.

Behind the scenes, keepers work quietly and carefully, tending not only to animals but to the fragile future of species like the red wolf.

- Conservation is truly the heart of everything we do here at the North Carolina Zoo.

- I think that anytime we can get a guest to connect with an animal, they learn how to care about it.

And if they care about it, they're probably going to do more to help preserve and conserve wildlife.

- The reality of it is the wild is disappearing at rapid rates.

Habitats are being destroyed for all kinds of different purposes.

We need to promote education, we need to promote passion in the general public to make sure that these habitats are restored and conserved in stable situations for all these species.

- That's the deeper mission of what we're trying to do.

We really are trying to save wildlife and wild places around the world.

[Music] ♪ - The North Carolina Zoo is magical and it's special because of everything that we do.

It's a beautiful place to visit and this is a place where the animals are a priority as well.

What that has translated to is we're the world's largest natural habitat zoo.

- We love to give the animals choice and control.

Giving them that ability to choose what they want and how they want to experience it, that's a big part of being a zookeeper now.

- Just the conservation aspect paired with animal behavior really interests me, as well as taking care of wildlife every day.

- The keepers are remarkable.

They form really, really strong bonds with these animals.

- There you go.

That's not scary.

- Our day-to-day looks different every day, depending on what the animals need and what we have going on.

- We're in the grizzly bear habitat and we are just going to kind of clean up and reset his habitat, put out some enrichment that has some of his diet in there.

It's either cleaning holdings, picking up hay, doing diets for the next day.

So this is alfalfa and then they get a mix of timothy as well.

- It's a lot of cleaning, it's a lot of hard work.

It's a lot of lifting hay bales and logs and sticks and doing all these great things for the animals.

- They can chew on it.

It's a really good source of calcium.

They can also play with it.

We see the wolves playing tug of war with it.

I think that if you understand where these animals are coming from and all of their stories, like majority of these animals wouldn't be alive if the zoo wasn't an option for them.

Atta girl, Luna.

- Zoos don't pull animals from the wild now unless it's an actual conservation or if they're injured for some reason.

Both our grizzly and our black bears here were rescued situations.

That's where zoos play that big part is they can take in these animals and give them a home to finish out their lives.

- Good job.

- Training is a way to stimulate the minds of a lot of the animals.

- This is Luna.

We're about to do a training session.

- In the Northwood section, we train all the animals we can.

So we train both bear species.

We train the bison, the elk.

If there's an animal, you can try to train it.

- See, I have meat and other fun stuff in there.

- You just need to find that right reinforcement, that right thing that makes an animal motivated.

- Up.

Good job.

So it can be anything from behaviors that are just for like relationship building between us and the animals.

It can also be stuff for cognitive stimulation.

Reach.

Good.

Hold.

- A lot of our training is focused around medical care, getting them to participate in their own health care.

So you're going to see us like train them to open their mouth so that we can see all their teeth and see how those look.

Put their paws up so you can see the bottom of their pads.

We're trained to take a hand inject into their shoulder so that we can give them vaccines or different antibiotics.

- For Luna, she can hold her mouth open while we spray some mouth flush solution in there.

And that's been really helpful.

We're also working on a toothbrush behavior, which she can do really well in the front half of her mouth.

And we're working towards being able to brush the back molars as well.

So that can really help out her dental care.

- Good girl!

- We're actually a state-owned facility.

So one of the things that allows us to do is we've tried unique things that you're not going to see at a lot of other zoos just because we have the time and the keeper staff to work through it.

- Do you want to go find Annie?

We'll go find her first.

Yeah, so Annie, one of our bison, she started presenting some allergies.

And the way that the allergies show up with her is she gets really itchy.

When she does get itchy, she likes to scratch her face on things.

Unfortunately, that results in her tearing up the area around her eyes.

And then that attracts all of the flies.

So we tried a couple different fly solution remedies, and they worked a little bit, but nothing was really allowing it to fully heal.

So I'm going to take off her old mask, and then I'm going to do her medications.

And then we'll put on the new mask, depending on how tolerable she is today.

Hi, pretty girl.

- The keepers decided they wanted to try to put a fly mask on after they saw a rhino wearing one.

We're like, "Well, nobody's done a bison before, so let's give it a shot."

- Hi, pretty mama.

How you doing?

First and foremost is our safety and Annie's safety when we're doing this.

Having someone else touch an area that, for a bison, is not something that happens very often.

How do you feel about this one?

So we want to make sure that we're working safely in and around her, giving her the space and reading her behavior as well.

Like today, if she didn't want to wear it, then she has that choice and control to walk away and not participate.

That's up to her.

I know you're not having it.

It took a lot to build that relationship with her, but watching her work through that was really, really cool.

- So the fly mask keeps those flies away.

I make it so it's harder for her to itch her eyes, which helps heal up better.

And they trained it, they did it, she wears a fly mask.

- Okay, Chica, that's it.

Thank you.

So it's just very rewarding as a keeper in that aspect that we do get to create those bonds.

She is pretty.

Look at her fly.

- And that's something that North Carolina Zoo just has, is that we have this big keeper team that allows us to really take care and look at the animals and spend some time with them and actually do a job that we should be doing.

[Music] So here at the North Carolina Zoo, we have several native, regional conservation projects.

We do bird watch, we do frog watch, we do all these different local biodiversity projects just to promote good, healthy habitats here.

- Our philosophy is we're not going to have animals here at the zoo without having a program that is saving those animals and the water.

Another really cool aspect of the job is actually getting to participate in red wolf conservation.

- We have the second largest group of red wolves in the country.

We have 23.

- They are the most critically endangered canid in the world.

And they're only found in the wild here in North Carolina.

- The American red wolf population at one point was declared extinct in the wild.

The last 13 were actually rescued and they were all brought into a zoo in Tacoma, Washington to start the recovery program, to start the breeding program there.

So North Carolina Zoo was able to participate in that by having 11 different spaces for these wolves to live in.

- You can see the red wolves on Habitat.

Those are our forward-facing animals, if you will.

And then we have got close to 20 behind the scenes where we keep them away from humans.

We interact with them as minimally as possible because these are the red wolves that hopefully will be released back into the wild.

- Red wolves are pretty shy, actually.

If there's a human around, they're just going to tuck away in their den or stay as far away from you as possible.

But if you watch them on camera when we're not around, they can be kind of goofballs.

They're highly social.

They'll be grooming each other, laying near each other, playing keep away with sticks.

They're very inquisitive.

- It's important because this is a keystone species in its native range, in its habitat.

You see disease spread across deer populations because there's not your top keystone predator picking off these sick, weak individuals.

And that's something the red wolves can help out with.

Reintroducing this species that helps control these populations is going to make healthier habitats in the long run.

So that's our big purpose here is to help produce new individuals to release back to the wild.

One of the most successful ways to reintroduce a large carnivore or a canid like the red wolf is to actually take a puppy from an under-human care born litter, bring it out to the wild and give it to a new mom.

And she accepts it.

She will raise that puppy as a wild wolf.

This last year, we took our puppies here from the zoo, we brought it out to U.S.

Fish and Wildlife.

They gave that puppy to the new mom.

That mom did a good job and actually raised that puppy up.

And it's still living out there.

And that's a big conservation win for us.

Since 2016, we've had the most puppies born under human care in the country.

Total, we've had 69 red wolves born here at the North Carolina Zoo.

To kind of put that into perspective, there's only around 300 total wolves between the wild and human care right now.

Knowing that we're such a big part of that program, it's just an incredible feeling.

- When you form a connection with an animal, you care.

You begin to care about them.

And then our hope is to extend to acting and doing the things that we need to do to save them.

- Hi!

[high pitched whistle] [laughing] - At the end of the day, that's what we're trying to do.

We're trying to make a better world for these animals.

- There you go, pretty girl.

(music) ♪ - I remember the summer my dad came home with his new red pickup truck.

He believed that any man living in the country ought to have one.

He was so proud of that truck and I was too.

We rode all over town just the two of us.

The windows rolled down with hot breezes blowing across the dashboard.

For the next 20 years my dad drove everywhere in that truck.

Hauled peaches and watermelons from Kander.

He hauled mulch for the yard and Christmas trees for our living room.

When I went off to college he hauled everything I needed for my dorm room.

Later on when I had places of my own to be he'd take my dog Muffin along with him.

She kept him company on those drives.

All those years and all those miles added up 350,000 of them until one day the truck came to rest at the end of the yard where it sat for a long time.

Then one afternoon a 16 year old boy and his father pulled up.

"Your truck for sale?"

they called out across the yard.

My dad stood quiet for a minute and said, "I'll take $300 for it."

They came back with cash in hand, got in the truck and drove away, the boy and his dad.

My dad stood there watching the truck go down the road until it rounded out of sight and disappeared.

When I think of them, that boy and his father driving away together, I remember the nights my mom worked late and my dad and I would head into town in that truck to pick up supper.

On the way back we'd take the long way home.

I'd stare into the night as dad drove, the golden glow of the AM/FM radio on the console, hoping the ride would never end.

[music] ♪ - More information about Our State magazine is available at ourState.com or 1-800-948-1409.

- This program is made possible in part by generous support from Dogwood Health Trust, a private foundation based in Asheville, North Carolina, focused on dramatically improving the health and well-being of all people and communities in the 18 counties and the the Qualla Boundary of Western North Carolina.