Betty Lynn was a vaunted guest during her many appearances at the Mayberry Days Festival in Mt. Airy. After all, the picturesque North Carolina was Lynn's adopted hometown. She moved there after retiring from the entertainment industry. So, when she attended the Festival each year, it was a sort of homecoming!

You may be thinking, "Wait, Betty Lynn was a famous TV star! Surely she would've spent her time poolside at her Beverly Hills mansion!" Well... That's partly true. Lynn certainly was one of television's brightest stars. She was a crucial element in each of her Andy Griffith Show appearances, often providing a much-needed voice of reason, particularly in grounding Barney's antics. However, she wasn't exactly rewarded for her contributions in any notable way.

According to an article on myimaginarytalkshow.com, Mayberry Days Festival 2016 attendee Christi Pelt quotes the figure as a rather paltry sum. To hear it from Betty Lynn, all those years later, her compensation was hardly a fraction of what her costars were paid.

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Betty Lynn was paid a mere $500 per episode. That's just $13,000 total. Of course, it's easy to write off the figure in terms of 1960s buying power. And, sure, that $500 was worth much more than it would be now. But it's still a meager salary compared to Andy Griffith's $25,000 per episode. Yes, Griffith was the title star of the show, but was he really bringing fifty times more talent to each episode than Betty Lynn? Griffith made even more money through his ownership of Mayberry Enterprises, netting a percentage of each season's total revenue.

Despite the wage gap, Betty Lynn fondly recalled her days in Mayberry (...the fake Mayberry, the one on the Desilu lot, not the one in Mt. Airy [which she, of course, was also fond of]).

“We love The Andy Griffith Show, all of us who were on it," said Lynn. "We were so privileged to be on that show. And I couldn’t wait when they put a call in for me. I couldn’t wait to go because I loved doing it so much, and everybody on it was wonderful. As actors, they were all great to work with. And that doesn’t happen every day of the week in show business. I did a lot of movies and things, but the thing I’m proudest of, really, was being on The Andy Griffith Show. And I loved it so much.”