Growing up in the Shadow of Walton’s Mountain

My grandfather used to say that nobody owns a mountain; but getting born, and living, and dying in its shadow, we loved Walton’s Mountain and felt it was ours. -Earl Hamner’s narrated prologue from ‘The Homecoming,’ 1971 television movie pilot for ‘The Waltons’

BIOGRAPHY OF EARL HAMNER VIA LITERARY ANALYSIS

With memories of that movie and ensuing television show that I watched while growing up in Texas, I now lived in Virginia.

Taking a short drive to route 29 which connected me from my Northern Virginia home to that of Walton’s Mountain, we eventually reached a mountain road where we bumped along earlier this summer.

Finding many spots from the tv show from Earl Hamner’s real life, I purchased a biography of the author, which I hoped would crack the code on how much of his fiction stories were built from reality.

Opening the biography, Earl Hamner: From Walton’s Mountain to Tomorrow by James E. Person, Jr., I even found Earl Hamner’s autograph!

More than biography and photographs, this book also contains literary analysis of Hamner’s writings compared to his life, which helped me explore Earl Hamner, the writer.

Desiring to be a writer myself, I found myself drawn to John Boy, who represents Earl Hamner…telling much of the true story of how Hamner attained entrance to college when his family had no money.

Thus, I began a journey with a Virginia Blue Ridge author’s memories as they impacted mine, while growing up in Texas through a popular television show that my mom loved.

THE WALTONS TV SHOW 1972-1981

As in ‘The Homecoming’ we will be telling warm stories about the Walton Family who live in the Blue Ridge Mountains during the mid-thirties. We never mention a specific year and the time is roughly: The Depression…In each show we wish to capture as much color of the times as possible: Radio broadcasts, songs of the thirties, Burma Shave signs, NRA posters, etc. We feel that this is important not only for authenticity but for the nostalgia today’s audiences feel for the recent past. (Hamner’s description of The Waltons to Lorimar productions, p58-59)

Like many families that lived through those desperate times, the Hamners were poor, though they did not consider themselves as such; like others who lived through the Depression the Hamners reasoned that they, after all, were experiencing the same circumstances as everyone else. This was the hand life had dealt them, they believed, and it fell to them simply to make the best of it. (p7)

While my mom and grandparents watched the show with me, they’d point out things that reminded them of their past, not that my mom had been born yet.

But she’d tell me of her past, like my grandparents told me of their past.

Now I find myself telling my kids about my past…and how we made the best of the worst of times.

NOSTALGIA

Even though families are said to be shattered these days, and God is said to be dead, if people can revisit the scenes and places where these values did exist, possibly they can come to believe in them again… (Hamner quote, xviii-xix)

The 1970s were turbulent with high divorce rates, kids arriving home from school as latch-key kids…at the Walton’s house, Mama might have cookies waiting on a plate while talking to the kids about how their day went.

I was blessed in that my mom was exactly like that and didn’t seek employment until I was in high school. To me, watching The Waltons was an extension of the home I already had.

All during the school year, my mother supervised all eight of us children as we gathered around the long wooden kitchen table to do our homework. Then one by one we drifted off to bed and there, sometimes with snow falling outside, we would call goodnight to each other, then sleep in the knowledge that we were secure. We thought we lived in the best of all possible times. (p8)

On one summer vacation in the hotel, we played the Walton game of calling out “goodnight ________” to one another. Although my family didn’t usually get this silly, we did that night…and it was wonderful.

And this is the common tie that binds together all the fans that watched The Waltons…we instantly connect to the past in our shared memories.

This is important because, as the eighteenth-century English statesman Edmund Burke has noted, ‘People will not look forward to posterity, who never looked backward to their ancestors.’ During the 1970’s-a decade riven by the worst economy since the Depression, political corruption in the highest office of the land, the collapse of American resolve in Southeast Asia, and widespread cynicism-‘The Waltons’ gave many Americans a weekly glimpse of a time when hope was the nation’s lifeblood, during an almost-forgotten era in their history as a people. (p60)

When I taught the Great Depression in my homeschool, I asked my mom how her family got through those difficult times.

Although she hadn’t been born yet, she knew the stories of how the family pulled together by offering lodging and food to other family members seeking work.

Family sticks together. They banded together. We see that in The Waltons too.

GREAT DEPRESSION-COLD WAR CONNECTIONS

Regarding The Waltons television show, a comment was made in the book about Cold War children portraying Great Depression children.

The Cold War years in which I grew up were indeed fraught with tension on the news in the background of day-to-day life.

Although my family and neighbors didn’t dwell on those fears, neither did my classmates.

Nevertheless, when our history class studied the Cold War, that’s when all the hands shot up to tell stories.

Since many of us were military families, classmates shared stories about seeing the Berlin Wall first hand.

I grew up in a part of San Antonio where few of us had a lot of stuff.

Due to the poor economics of the late 1970s, we lived life rather simply.

Yet, to this day I think we have created the best memories of fun moments with what we had.

While focusing on God and family, we took life realistically, enjoying the good moments when they came, and dealing with the difficult as needed, as we grew up with The Waltons.

In the twilight years of the American youth movement of the mid to late 1960’s, with its emphasis on sexual adventuring, protesting American involvement in the Vietnam conflict (and the American military in general), throwing down the established order, and sneering at all things beloved by earlier generations, a wave of nostalgia came to the fore in American culture. This was manifested during the early seventies by a fashion for collecting and displaying memorabilia of days past: old photos, movie posters from Hollywood’s golden era, soft-drink signs from store displays, penny-banks, and dozens of other artifacts from the 1930’s and earlier. Amid a faltering economy, strong evidence of political corruption, and immense social upheaval, many younger people wondered if things had always been as unsettled and unsettling as they were in the present era, and if there was any truth to the old stories told by their parents and grandparents of quiet joy amid struggle and hardship during the Great Depression. (p58-59)

When I turned on the tv for classic cartoons of my parents’ generation after school, I found Watergate hearings droning into endless boredom.

Running off to play with friends, I buried those frustrations in the autumnal leaves that my friends and I raked, piled up, jumped in, then raked again.

I can imagine the Waltons doing the same.

JOHN BOY WAS MY FAVORITE

Key for me was John Boy’s character, who reflected my desire to write…so I always felt he was a bit of a kindred spirit.

I’ve also always enjoyed Richard Thomas’s voice inflection as he read stories aloud, which encouraged me to fall in love with reading books aloud to children in my classroom and in my own home.

Richard Thomas famously portrayed John Boy, based on the life of the show’s creator, Earl Hamner.

FANS IGNORE THE CRITICS

Critics called ‘The Waltons’ saccharine and unrealistic, but the family members weren’t portrayed as perfect, and they faced many challenges…each family member struggled hard to live life under the framework of the family’s principles and values. Honesty, hard work, respect, responsibility, self-sacrifice, compassion, and kindness-today they package it and call it ‘character education.‘ (p85-86)

In my aforementioned reference to divorce and latchkey kids, the turbulent 1970s created a yearning in everyday people for nostalgia…either to remember what they once had, or to experience through a television show what they never had.

By Hamner’s own admission, family life in the Walton household is a bit idealized: it is truthful in essence, though some aspects of fact are veiled to protect his family’s privacy. (p87)

‘The Waltons’ continues to be especially popular with television audiences. In the United States (and today, from around the world), fans of the series have written often to Hamner to say that The Waltons reminds them of the way they remember their childhood during the Depression, or the way they wish their childhood had been. (p91-93)