About Aunt Bea...

I hate to have to spoil her image and this may or may not be legit. There are competing stories about her...

 

Despite her good-hearted image on screen, cast members of "The Andy Griffith Show"  often remember Frances (Aunt Bee) Bavier as difficult, temperamental and somewhat cold. Griffith himself said, "There was just something about me she did not like." In an interview, when Ron (Opie) Howard was pressed as to the stories of discord with her on the set, all he would say was "I just don't think she enjoyed being around children that much."  

Yup - that's her all right... 

After 15 years of the weekly television-series grind she’d had it with the Business of Show, one of the reasons why Bavier moved — alone at age 70 — all the way across the continent to Siler City, NC where her biggest fan operated a family furniture store, hoping to discover the small-town goodness that she herself had come to represent in the minds of middle America. 
What began as an immersion into Americana quickly disintegrated into what can best be described as an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” On Saturday mornings, school buses pulled up in front of her split-level brick home on West Elk Street to unleash the Cub Scouts with instructions: “Go find your Aunt Bee!” There were neighbors peering through her windows at all hours of the day expecting her to be in character, a role she despised. The few townsfolk she grew close to insisted on calling her “Aunt Bee.” Irritating, but she had to have some friends. A visit to the town center meant all eyes casting judgment, the ladies at the beauty parlor never forgave her for not joining one of their churches. Small wonder that, by the 1980s, the former television star was living out of her back bedroom, curtains pulled tight, with 14 devoted kitties for company. 

In 1986, three years after she’d stopped venturing out in public, Griffith and Howard made a surprise visit to Siler City’s reclusive cat lady. Bavier refused to allow her decade-long coworkers inside, speaking to them only momentarily through the closed front door. This was after declining repeatedly to be part of their Mayberry reunion movie. 

When she died in 1989, Bavier funneled most of her $700,000 estate into an annuity that, to this day, pays out a yearly Christmas bonus to every Siler City police officer. But her true legacy began gestating not long after she was laid to rest at Oakwood Cemetery. When her home was donated to a local hospital, Bavier’s cats scampered for the countryside, causing one hell of a population explosion that is only now, decades later, beginning to subside. Ask any Chatham County, NC veterinarian. They were all too familiar with someone bringing in “one of Aunt Bee’s cats.”