One of the many reasons I purchased the biography of The Waltons creator, Earl Hamner, when I visited his boyhood home in the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains was to discover what happened to the insane movie I watched years ago, Spencer’s Mountain.
Stumbling upon the movie in a video rental store in the 1990s, I curiously popped it into the VCR to see this forerunner of The Waltons.
Shocked, I knew the Wyoming family of the 1960s was a huge deviation from the famous Great Depression family from Virginia.
While I recognized many story lines I had seen on The Waltons (Remember when the new minister accidentally got drunk on the Baldwin sisters recipe?), the tone of the movie Spencer’s Mountain brazenly elevated hussiness with steroids, unlike the character of the author of the original story I grew to know.
Another familiar storyline from the tv show that was more fully developed in Spencer’s Mountain, centered greatly on a real event.
BEAUTIFUL FAMILY HERITAGE OF LOVE AND SACRIFICE
Earl Hamner, Sr., a tradesman who never graduated high school but worked hard to provide for his family whom he deeply loved, dreamed of building a large house with a huge picture window overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains for his wife.
Although that dream was never achieved, his son, Earl Hamner, Jr., wrote:
…he did achieve his dream another way. He instilled enough confidence and security in me for me to become a writer and through my writing he built ‘Spencer’s Mountain’…The plot is simple and tells of how a father sacrifices his dream to give his son a college education. (A Biography Earl Hamner: From Walton’s Mountain to Tomorrow, James E. Person Jr., p.34)
HAMNER FAMILY STORY PUBLISHED
Working on a draft of his family story in spare moments during college in Richmond, WWII, completion of college, in the midst of other works, Earl Hamner finalized two decades of spare moments into a completed novel in 1960.
As a coming-of-age novel, the book showcases a year in the life of the 15-year-old son in his senior year of the local mountain school with dreams of college, falling in love, and a father who sacrificed his dream for the love he had for his son.
Even though the premise of the story was based on family history, some details were creatively chosen to fictionalize the account.
For his fictional family central to his book, Hamner chose the name Spencer, which came from his family tree.
New first names were also created, such as Clay (father) and Clay Boy (son), which was common in the South, until junior reached adulthood.
Although Earl was never, himself, called Earl Boy, his college training in literature led him to insert this Southern tradition for this regionalism-themed coming-of-age book.
Although Hamner grew up in the small village of Schuyler, Virginia, twenty-five miles south of Charlottesville in the Blue Ridge mountains, he placed the Spencers in a Virginia village called New Dominion, which was a variation of Virginia’s state nickname, The Old Dominion.
Published in 1961, the Spencer’s Mountain book did so well, that Reader’s Digest adapted it for one of their publications.
Impressively, President John F. Kennedy chose Spencer’s Mountain, along with ninety-nine other books considered significant as American stories, to presidents and monarchs around the world.
MOVIE VERSION POORLY PRODUCED
Soon after, Warner Brothers purchased the rights to produce a movie by the same name, which premiered in 1963.
Starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara as Clay and Olivia Spencer, James MacArthur portrayed their son, Clay Boy.
Excited about all these developments, Hamner grew discouraged when the screenplay writer completely changed the setting and tone of his book for the movie.
Instead of the gentle Blue Ridge Mountains of 1933, the Spencer family was now set in the rugged Grand Tetons of Wyoming in 1963, for the movie.
Changing the tone of the book, the screenwriter created a leering context to which the actors added overly hokey portrayals of an uneducated backwoods family.
Although Earl Hamner, Jr. encouraged the director to tone things down, he was dismayed at the embarrassing misrepresentation of his family and neighbors.
CRITICS SPEAK OUT
While Bosley Crowther of The New York Times proclaimed the movie “slicked up…synthetic…insincere,” he called the book “real…moving.”
Especially scathing was Judith Crist of the New York Herald Tribune, who called the movie, “perverted morality…makes the nudie shows at the Rialto look like Walt Disney productions”.
1970 THE HOMECOMING: A CHRISTMAS STORY PUBLISHED
Seven years after the premier of Spencer’s Mountain, Hamner wrote another novel based on the Spencer family, again pulled from family memories.
Focusing on Christmas Eve in 1933, Hamner tells the true story of the day when his family worried if their father could safely arrive home after learning of a bus accident on his route.
That night, his mother sent him out to look for his father, a man’s job, when he was only ten.
This Southern tradition of the older boy stepping into his father’s shoes again reflected a coming-of-age Regionalism story.
Changing the age of Clay Boy Spencer from ten to fifteen, Hamner also weaves in the story of Clay Boy’s desire to become a writer, a journey the author also traveled.
When this novel soared in popularity, Hamner again received a movie deal, this time with Lorimar Productions from CBS.
HAMNER TAKES CHARGE OF NEW MOVIE DEAL
This time, Hamner insisted on writing the screenplay, himself.
Warner Brothers’ ownship of the rights to Spencer’s Mountain, included owning the names of many of the places and people in the movie, like New Dominion and the Spencer family name.
No worries. Hamner, as screenplay writer, easily looked into his family tree for another name from his father’s side of the family…Walton.
Easily setting the Walton family in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia during the Great Depression (as originally intended), Hamner created the fictional Jefferson County to replace New Dominion. (Thomas Jefferson’s home of Monticello is twenty-four miles north of Hamner’s boyhood home of Schuyler).
THE WALTONS A WEEKLY TV SERIES
Surprised by the huge success of the Christmas movie which aired in 1971, Lorimar Productions of CBS approached Hamner for a weekly tv series based on the Walton family, with Hamner as the co-executive producer, executive story consultant, writer, and narrator (opening and ending monologues of each tv show, as in the Christmas movie).
Each Thursday after The Waltons aired, Hamner called his beloved mother, Doris, on the telephone to ask how she liked the show.
For 148 episodes, from 1974 to 1981, she served as technical advisor for The Waltons.
After nine successful seasons that gleaned thirteen Emmy Awards, CBS hired Hamner to create another series that dug into the family tree on his mother’s side…another question I’ve been researching for decades and was delighted to find, reaching deeply into my 18th century love.
Stay tuned for that!
