Did An Imposter Claim Stolen ‘Real-Life Floyd the Barber’ Valor?

It’s only natural for a creator to build their fictional worlds around their real ones. It adds an otherwise unachievable level of authenticity, like you’re really getting a window into Scorsese’s New York, John Waters’ Baltimore or whatever planet Stanley Kubrick grew up on. That’s probably why so many people assume Mayberry, North Carolina is based on Andy Griffith’s real hometown of Mount Airy. The universe of The Andy Griffith Show is so full of vivid characters and small-town charm that it couldn’t possibly be fake. Could it?

According to Griffith, yes. In a 1998 interview with the Archives of American Television, he insisted that the only reason Mayberry was in North Carolina was because he hates “made up names,” so when Mayberry residents discussed nearby towns, he just threw in the ones he knew from his home state. Other than that, the jurisdiction of Sheriff Andy Taylor had no intentional connection to Mount Airy, and Griffith was pretty grumpy about any suggestion to the contrary. “I’ve argued about this too long. I don’t care. Let them think what they want to think,” he said, adding, “A barber up there says he cut my hair when I was a child, hell, he’ll have to be 115 years old.”

Griffith was almost certainly referring to Russell Hiatt, who styled himself as a real-life Floyd the Barber, even going so far as to rename his Mount Airy establishment Floyd’s City Barber Shop in 1989. Hiatt gave conflicting statements over the years about his experience cutting Griffith’s hair, according to those who insisted they heard them. Some say he made the bold claim of having cut Griffith’s hair as a boy, which was impossible, as Hiatt was only two years older than Griffith. Others maintained that he told them he only cut Griffith’s hair a few times on his trips home from college, while Griffith himself denies any relationship wholecloth (or wholecape, as it were). After all, the City Barber Shop wasn’t even Griffith’s regular hairstyling institution, to which some men show more loyalty than their wives.

Despite the shakiness of this foundation, Hiatt staked his career on it until his death in 2016 at the age of 92. Whatever he might have told wide-eyed tourists to drum up some business or Griffith might have barked at a journalist, what are the actual facts? 

“No one can know for sure at this point,” said Jim Clark, an Andy Griffith Show superfan turned historian. He heard the “home for the holidays” stories from Hiatt and wouldn’t pretend to “know if Russell also cut hair other places in town — such as Palace Barber Shop, which Andy frequented — before settling into the City Barber Shop.” 

Ultimately, Clark allowed that “Russell did not cut Andy’s hair on a regular basis,” though “as to whether Russell actually cut Andy’s hair once or twice, with a lack of clear documentation one way or the other — and of course, why would there be for an 18- to 22-year-old’s routine haircuts circa 1944? — I go with Russell’s recollection of seeing Andy in the shop and the assumption that he cut his hair a time or two.” 

In other words, “I’m not here to call a dead old man a liar.”