Mr. Tucker (Robert Emhardt): You people are living in another world!
Andy (Andy Griffith): Easy, Mr. Tucker.
Mr. Tucker: This is the 20th century. Don't you realize that? The whole world is living in a desperate space age. Men are orbiting the Earth. International television has been developed. And here, a whole town is standing still because two old women's feet fall asleep!
Barney (Don Knotts): I wonder what causes that.
It is reasonable to believe that people have the same priorities, whether they live in cities or small towns.
After all, deep down we all want the same things, right? Sure, we're all individuals, and we differ from each other in rather small ways, but, as President Kennedy said in 1963, "In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal."
You could add that we all have the same basic needs — food, clothing and shelter — that must be provided.
It was probably a cliche 55 years ago to speak about the fast pace of the modern world.
How long have people been saying there is too much to be done and not enough time to do it? As long as I can remember — and almost certainly well before that. Heck, the cavemen probably complained that they didn't have enough time to hunt for game to feed their families and invent the wheel.
Yet as basic as those priorities were, individual cavemen almost just as surely had their own priorities. Then as now I'm sure there were those who had no dependents and, with only themselves to support, could devote more time to invention.
Such distinctions are not confined to city and country, but sometimes it helps to narrow it down to that.
The episode of the Andy Griffith Show that premiered on this night in 1963, "Man in a Hurry," was about a big–city businessman, Mr. Tucker (Robert Emhardt), whose car broke down outside of Mayberry on a Sunday. He needed to be in Charlotte the next day so he walked to town in search of someone who could fix his car.
He soon discovered what anyone who ever spent much time in a small country town could have told him — it is almost impossible to get anything done in such a place on a Sunday. Or at least it was. Times have changed, and even small towns don't observe a day of rest anymore.
But Mayberry was always a casual town.
In Mayberry Wally's filling station was open — but just barely. Gomer (the recently deceased Jim Nabors) was there, but he only put gas in cars. Wally handled engine repairs, but he didn't make repairs on Sundays.
In a desperate attempt to do something, Mr. Tucker stole the truck at Wally's filling station but was apprehended shortly thereafter.
Andy let it slide because he understood Mr. Tucker's predicament, but he urged the businessman to come home with him, have something to eat and wait until the next day to get something done. Mr. Tucker grudgingly agreed to go back to Andy's house, but he insisted he wasn't hungry and continued to try to summon help by phone.
Unfortunately for Mr. Tucker the local phone lines were tied up on Sunday afternoons by two elderly sisters who lived in different towns and found it difficult to get around. So they were allowed to talk for hours on Sunday. (While this sort of thing is unheard–of today, my guess is this was in the days of party lines, which were pretty common in country towns at one time. For that matter they were also in use in many college dormitories.)
Their conversation was hilarious. Mr. Tucker wanted to get a call out to someone — anyone — in the outside world, but the old ladies kept going off on tangents.
First, they spoke at length about feet falling asleep. Then, when Mr. Tucker tried to interrupt and identified himself as Mr. Tucker from Charlotte, the ladies began speaking of a Charlotte Tucker they had known. Apparently, she married a fellow who fell down a lot.
Country folks and city folks just don't see things the same.
But somewhere buried deep inside Mr. Tucker was some country sensibility, maybe some leftover from his childhood. When he stepped out on Andy's porch and found Andy and Barney (Don Knotts) singing "The Church in the Wildwood," they tapped into that hidden sensibility, and he sang softly along with them.
It was a nice change of pace for Emhardt, a character actor who was frequently cast in villainous roles. Sometimes he played corrupt businessmen. The audience never found out if he was a corrupt businessman in this episode, but we got a glimpse — incomplete though it was — into his character's background in that scene on Andy's front porch.
Obviously somewhere in Mr. Tucker's past was a little brown church in the vale — and a more relaxed way of life — and the memory of it had a calming effect on him.
He got worked up again when Gomer showed up and announced that Wally had come to the station after all and they had towed Mr. Tucker's car in. Gomer assured Mr. Tucker they would fix it that day.
And they did.
But somewhere that deep–inside sensibility that got tapped earlier made Mr. Tucker realize that the slower pace of country life wasn't such a bad thing, either — that stopping and smelling the roses was a good thing to do from time to time. He decided he would do precisely that and opted to spend the night in Mayberry.
He would get to sleep in Opie's room. That meant Opie (Ron Howard) would sleep on the ironing board. Mr. Tucker thought that sounded awful, but Opie disagreed. He called it "adventure sleepin'."
Folks see things differently in the country than they do in the city.
That's still a pretty valuable thing to know.
