Old things in this show that seem foreign to anybody like me born in the 80s.

Moonshine was illegal but I would imagine that wine, beer, and spirits sold through stores were no problem. TAGS did not show that because that was part of the escapism that television pushed during the 1960's. That aside Andy Griffith himself said that Mayberry was already a dated idea when the show premiered in 1960. That Mayberry as shown would be typical for an American small town just prior to the Great Depression. Like you hinted at most of the downtown business district would be gone in favor of big box stores. Having said that the pedestrian laws and vehicle laws shown would still be enforced in most towns and cities today.

I did an inflation calculation and .75 in 1965 is equal to 6.32 today. Not a lot of money, you're right. But it's still enough for a kid to get some stuff.

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Was Mayberry dry?? I thought the only time they dealt with it was illegal moonshinning.

I'm the same age as Opie (Ron Howard). When I was a kid in the early 1960s, my dad started me out on 25 cents allowance, which eventually made it to a dollar after a few years. A candy bar or a Coke was 10 cents, a comic book was 15 cents.

In the early '60s, my grandfather was the one and only cop in Long Beach, Washington. He didn't even have a "Barney" to help him.

There were still quite a few towns in the early '60s where you couldn't get alcohol. It's still difficult to find in Utah.

We played cowboys and Indians all the time, except when we were playing army. All the boys had toy handguns and rifles. Many boys had real .22 rifles, and their dads took them shooting.

In the early '60s kids rode their bikes all the time, without adult supervision, on the street, not on the sidewalk. We rode to school, to the store, to the park, or anywhere else we wanted to go. Always on the street.

There's a regional issue here as well. Mayberry is a small town in the South. In LA or Chicago in the 60's, Mayberry would have seemed foreign to them.