It happened so quickly, unlike anything ever seen in Mayberry, or even in the real-life town of Mount Airy.
From the shadows near the back of the stage they came — four dark figures, lumbering toward an unsuspecting Allan Newsome.
Newsome is known throughout the world of “The Andy Griffith Show” fans as one of the preeminent Floyd The Barber tribute artists, as well as self-proclaimed Back-Up Head Goober of The Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watcher’s Club. He was at a Mayberry Days event, as Floyd The Barber, when the attack occurred.
He’d just walked onstage during the festival’s Col. Tim’s Talent Time show, peeling a banana, when they pounced — four Eastern Lowland Gorillas, seemingly coming from nowhere, falling upon Newsome right there in front of the shocked audience.
Okay, they weren’t really gorillas, though they certainly looked like it. In reality, it was four members of the playfully mischievous “She Called Me Creatster” chapter of The Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watcher’s Club. And they were having a bit of fun at Newsome’s expense.
“He was scared to death,” Allan Colyar recalled recently, laughing as he recounted the story. Colyar, from Johnson City, Tennessee, was one of those gorillas. “He doesn’t know we’re there, it scared the living daylights out.”
After carrying the dumbstruck Newsome off stage, the four returned, one by one, Colyar recalls. “One of us was wearing his hat, one was wearing his coat, one had on his glasses, and one was eating the banana. The people (in the audience) were just dying laughing. No one was expecting that, no one knew we were going to do it.”
While that might have been one of the more public bits of fun the group has had, it’s far from the only one.
He recalls during one of the annual pie-eating contests, Mayberry Deputy David Browning was in the midst of announcing the winners when several members of their club sunk their faces into a handful of pies, then ran onto the stage, each giving Browning a big old smooch on the cheek, leaving quite a bit of their facepies on the contest’s master of ceremonies.
And another time, he recalls participating in The Emmett Mayberry Days Golf Tournament which takes place on Thursday of the festival week, and switching out Browning’s golf ball with an exploding ball.
The unsuspecting Mayberry Deputy took a hard whack at the ball, with the expected results.
Not that it’s always a one-way street. The following year, Colyar says Browning returned the favor, slipping an exploding ball on the tee for Kevin Mullins, one of the fan club’s members.
“That’s one of the things we love about Mayberry Days,” says Colyar, a general practice physician. “Just coming up there, having a good time, playing some jokes, just to relax and have fun. I work five days a week, 10 or 12 hours a day. I can’t wait to get to Mount Airy and just relax and be a regular person.”
He points to another familiar aspect of the festival touched on by many who visit Mount Airy for the annual event — the feeling of a family reunion.
“We interact with a lot with people we’ve known for years coming in,” he says. “Thursday morning we’ll walk down Main Street, we’ll see a dozen different people we’ve known, people we haven’t seen since the last Mayberry Days,” he says, rattling off more than a dozen different people from across the nation he’s looking forward to seeing. “All of these people we’ve seen for years, it’s just nice to stop and talk. It’s like Mayberry, you stop and talk and see what’s going on in their lives, it’s just fun catching up.“
If that all wasn’t enough, Colyar singles out another Mount Airy mainstay — the pork chop sandwiches from Snappy Lunch.
“I look forward to those,” he says, almost smacking his lips together as he speaks of the Mayberry delicacy. “I get to eat three of them while I’m there, that’s supposed to last me a year. I usually eat one each day, I have had two at a time, back-to-back. Usually I won’t eat more than one in a day.”
Eating more, he fears, will erode some of what makes those sandwiches special.
Creatsters Work, Too
While Colyar and his friends from Tennessee — most of the chapter is based in Tullahoma, Tennessee, where he grew up — definitely have some fun at Mayberry Days, the group also comes to work.
For several years the club ran the horse shoe competition that was part of the annual gathering, until that eventually gave way to the popular cornhole tournament. While another group runs that competition, the Creatsters have continued helping out. This year marks the 20th year the group has run the annual Mayberry Minutemen Trivia Contest for youth age 14 and younger.
“We have been participating in the trivia contest since 1995,” he said of the Mayberry Days World Championship of Trivia, which includes adults. Over the years, he said the group noticed the questions were getting harder, and the younger folks participating weren’t advancing very far in the competition.
So, they approached Tanya Jones, executive director of the Surry Arts Council (which sponsors Mayberry Days), and soon they were running the Minutemen contest.
Most years, Colyar says the competition attracts 20 to 25 youth. While all of the participants are able to walk away with a prize, the winner takes the biggest haul, and gets a chance to compete in the World Championship Trivia against the grownups.
Rather than an elimination event, he said all contestants have a chance to answer each question, with a panel of three judges on hand to hear and score the replies. The participant getting the most correct wins the competition.
Given that the potential contestant field ages out of the competition every so many years, Colyar and his group are known to recycle some questions — sometimes turning them around or rewording them a bit, though they do try to come up with a slate of mostly original questions each year.
“Usually what we do, we sit down around the first of June, watching reruns of the show, and start trying to come up with questions. We’ll trade questions back and forth to come up with about 20 of them.”
What is a Creatster?
We’re not really sure exactly what a Creatster is, but the term originated from “The Andy Griffith Show” episode, My Fair Ernest T. Bass, when Mrs. Wiley hurled the insult at Ernest T. Actually, she called him a creature, but to Ernest T., it sounded like Creatster, and a new word was born.
It’s current use came from years ago, when Colyar said he and his brother, Dean, father Terry, and late mom Marilyn, would watch reruns of the show in their Tullahoma home.
“My dad read an article about Jim Clark starting a rerun watcher’s club,” he said. Clark, another well-known name among Mayberry fans and the original “Head Goober” of the first watcher’s club, had begun issuing charters and official paperwork for various chapters around the country. That was in 1986, just 18 years after the show had left the air and four years before the first Mayberry Days.
They wrote to Clark, saying they were big fans of the show and wanted their own chapter, even including a suggested name to Clark.
“He wrote to us, said the name we wanted was already taken, but ‘We’re going to call you the Creatsters.’”
The club eventually grew to include several of Colyar’s boyhood friends — three of whom accompanied him in the gorilla suits during the on-stage kidnapping of Allen Newsome. While Colyar has moved away from Tullahoma, the group still gets together occasionally, and almost always makes the trek to Mayberry Days.
And they help keep the seemingly never-ending popularity of “The Andy Griffith Show” alive and well, even more than five decades after the show left the airways.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com