Thursday, October 19, 2006

Wally's Filling Station

Wally's Filling Station

Just a note on a search string. Somebody was looking for "the name of the gas station in Mayberry."

The name of Mayberry's gas station is twofold. Originally, it was simply "Wally's Service Station." In its time, it employed on Montgomery "Gomer" Pyle and his cousin Goober (Montgoobery?) Pyle, among others.

It was known colloquially (and later officially) on the Andy Griffith Show as "Wally's Filling Station." It was called that on account of that's where you'd go to get your gas tank filled, and possibly because Wally ran Mayberry's only brothel in the back of the gas station.

None of the characters on the show frequented the brothel regularly, with the exception of Howard Sprague.

They never did an episode about it, either on the Andy Griffith Show or Mayberry R.F.D. Partly because the show was ostensibly about Andy Taylor, the Sheriff of the town, and they didn't want to shine a bad light on him, what with his tolerating a brothel in the Bible Belt (the same went with Ken Berry's Sam Jones for Mayberry R.F.D.).

It was also not shown in part because Wally's brothel was a fairly racy place, and it's hard to film that for 1960's TV without offending a major portion of your viewing audience.

There were plans to have a 2-episode story-arc concerning the I.R.S. (revenuers) unwittingly uncovering the brothel while trying to root out moonshiners. They would spend the rest of the story trying to shut it down. The episodes were scrapped, ultimately, because they were deemed "too racy" by Network executives. Mayberry R.F.D. was cancelled for the perhaps ironic reason of being "too rural" later that year by CBS executive Fred Silverman.

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