Earl Hamner: From Walton's Mountain to Tomorrow

by James E. Person Jr.

“Since  Spencer’s Mountain  I have followed Earl Hamner’s career with much interest and much satisfaction, having picked a winner.”  —Harper Lee, author of  To Kill a Mockingbird Earl Hamner, one of America’s best-loved storytellers, has never been the subject of a full-length study.  Earl Hamner: From Walton’s Mountain to Tomorrow  fills that gap. A native Virginian, Hamner once said, “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, or . . . to adapt some kind of belief in God, or faith in the family unit, or just getting home again.” This vision of what makes for a whole life permeates all of Hamner’s work. It is present in the novel  Spencer’s Mountain,  upon which  The Waltons  was loosely based, and in his screenplays, such as the work he is perhaps most proud of,  Charlotte’s Web.  It is even present in such unlikely places as the eight scripts he contributed to the classic television series  The Twilight Zone  and the tales of cold-blooded betrayal and boundless ambition depicted on  Falcon Crest. In  Earl Hamner: From Walton’s Mountain to Tomorrow,  readers will discover the integrated nature of his career, finding that there is no real conflict between the warm folksiness of  The Waltons,  the offbeat fantasies of his  Twilight Zone  scripts, the unscrupulous ethics displayed on  Falcon Crest,  and the myriad other novels and scripts he has written and TV programs he has produced. Instead, readers will find that there is a pervasive theme running throughout Hamner’s work, that of a man forever taking a backward glance at his roots for direction in finding what makes life worthwhile. Upon learning that this book was being written, Hamner told one of his friends, “I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read a book about me, much less write one about me.” Readers of this book will find Hamner’s doubts indeed misplaced. They will also discover a delightful individual who has enjoyed a long, accomplished career as a storyteller laboring for a worthy goal: that posterity may know of an age and a people whose legacy has not, through silence, been permitted to pass away as if a dream.

Genres: Biography, Tv, Nonfiction

293 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2005

About the author

James E. Person Jr. is a writer, editor, lecturer, and Senior Fellow at the Kirk Center, who worked in publishing for more than thirty years, and as a freelance writer. He produced the first two books on Kirk: The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor of Russell Kirk (1994) and Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind (1999). Most recently, he edited Imaginative Conservatism: The Letters of Russell Kirk (2018). A native of Virginia, Mr. Person also wrote Earl Hamner: From Walton’s Mountain to Tomorrow (2005) on the Virginian novelist, screenwriter, and creator of the beloved television series "The Waltons."

Reviews

[Laurie Wheeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last summer my family and I drove from our house down route 29 to Jefferson County, Virginia, specifically to the town of Schuyler. We turned at the junction of route 6, then drove along a winding country road along the Rockfish River "to a place where the road just stops." (p xix) Many of us know this destination as Walton's Mountain.

While I was at Walton's Mountain I bought the biography, Earl Hamner: From Walton's Mountain to Tomorrow by James E. Person, Jr. It was even autographed by Earl Hamner, himself! Person says he worked quite closely to Mr. Hamner in developing the book. Apparently Hamner was surprised that anyone would have any interest in writing his biography.

Even though this book has some family history, this book is enormously heavy with literary analysis with bonus material of the numerous books that influenced Mr. Hamner.

I greatly enjoyed the intermingling of biography with literature whichhelped me to explore Earl Hamner, the writer.

Also I had lots of interest from having grown up with the television series, The Waltons. It was a must for my mom to watch, which meant I watched it too.

Key for me was John Boy's character. I have always enjoyed writing...so I always felt he was a bit of a kindred spirit. Richard Thomas's voice inflection as he read stories aloud encouraged me to read books aloud to children (in my classroom and in my own home.)

(Richard Thomas famously portrayed John Boy, who represented the creator of the show, Earl Hamner.)

Reading this book was quite the adventure into history and literary analysis. If I were still homeschooling, I would use portions of this book to teach 20th century literature.

An interesting point Person makes regarding The Waltons television show, is that Cold War children portrayed Great Depression children.

With that I begin the story of my own adventure in learning more about a Virginia mountain I experienced from afar as a child in Texas through a television show. Today I live in Virginia, not far from route 29, a common road the Waltons often traveled. In some ways, perhaps, Walton's Mountain overshadowed my life as well as John Boy's.

The Cold War years in which I grew up were indeed frought with tension that was sort of set in the background of day to day life. My family, neighbors and classmates didn't dwell on that tension, yet we certainly spoke out during history class when we studied the Cold War. Many of us were military families. Classmates had seen the Berlin Wall first hand. Few of us had a lot of stuff. We lived life rather simply due to economics. Yet we seemed to create great memories of fun moments with what we had. My friends and I focused on God and family. We took life realistically, enjoying the good moments when they came, and dealing with the difficult as needed. Most of us grew up with The Waltons. It was interesting reading Person's argument on the Cold War/Depression connection. Perhaps the impact that The Waltons made on the Cold War generation was indeed profound.

"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, or...to adapt some kind of belief in God, or faith in the family unit, or just getting home again." (Hamner quote, xviii-xix)

Like many families that lived through the Great Depression, 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)

"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)

"During one summer vacation, we played the Walton game of calling out "goodnight ________" to one another. My family didn't usually get this silly, but we did that night. And it was wonderful."


"In the twilight years of the American youth movement of the mid to late 1960's, with its emphasis on se*ual 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. Hamner's short novel, The Homecoming, the television special it inspired, and The Waltons arrived on America's cultural landscape at precisely this time of widespread reassessment and yearning for a simpler life." (p58-59)

"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, despite critic complaints that the show was dripping in saccharine nostalgia., p58-59)

"In The Homecoming and The Waltons, Hamner spoke to America's historical consciousness, which had been numbed by the rapid and jarring events of the post-World War II era. Writing of the importance of a people's collective memories, historian Wilfred W. McClay has claimed, 'In the end, communities and nation-states are constituted and sustained by such shared memories-by stories of foundation, conflict, and perseverance. The leap of imagination and faith, from the thinness and unreliability of our individual memory to the richness of collective memory, that is the leap of civilized life; and the discipline of collective memory is the task not only of the historian, but of every one of us. Historical consciousness draws us out of a narrow preoccupation with the present and with our "selves," and ushers us into another larger world-a public world that "cultures" us, in all the sense of that word.'" (p59-60)

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." (p61, Note: This book was written in 2006)

I remember those years of the political corruption that the above quote refers to. I'd come home from school, day by day, anxious to see after school programming on tv. However to my dismay, day after day, the senate hearings continued. I'd agonize to my parents, "When will this ever stop?" They agonized with me, "We have no idea." I'd run off to play with friends, burying my frustrations in the autumnal leaves that my friends and I would rake, pile up, jump in, then rake again.

Yes, my memories are of watching a family, based on a real family of the Depression, showing us week by week how they pulled together during tough times. That is a heritage that my families in the past held on to. When I taught the Great Depression in my homeschool, I asked my mom how her family got through those difficult times. She hadn't been born yet, but 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.

"In 1933 we were in the grip of the Great Depression. The soapstone mill and quarry upon which our village depended had closed and with it went payrolls, the company operated commissary, the cheerful sounds of a busy industry and a pleasant sense of security. People struggled to keep their families fed. In my family we relied on our family vegetable garden, my father's hunting and fishing, fruit and berries that were free for the picking. For some modest monetary income, my father took a job forty miles away in Waynesboro. He worked there five days a week and returned home on Friday evening. To get home he had to take a bus to Hickory Creek where Route 6 meets Route 29. From there he would either hitchhike or walk the six miles [to Schuyler].
On Christmas Eve of that year my father was late arriving home. A heavy snow had fallen and there were reports of accidents on Route 29. My mother was worried and, in the age-old practice, the mother sent the oldest son to look for his father. That is what happened to me that night, and the events of that night became the inspiration for this book." (Hamner's description of The Homecoming, p60-61)

Although The Homecoming is based on this true story of that one Christmas Eve where John Boy searched for his father, there is one key difference that stuck out to me. John Boy in The Homecoming was 15. Earl Hamner was 10. Our modern sensibilities probably could not conceive a boy of 10 going on a man's job, of traveling through icy and snowy conditions at night to search for his father who might have been in a bus accident. It is beyond the imagination. Yet for Earl Hamner, that was reality.

"In The Waltons, the character of writer Earl Hamner Jr. was called John-Boy, and he was the oldest son. No matter what John-Boy experienced in a particular story, each episode was wrapped up nicely in Hamner's own voice, expressing gratitude for his family and the values he was taught growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia during the Depression.
Those tributes were often the most touching parts of the show. Critics called The Waltons saccharine and unrealistic, but the family members weren't portrayed as perfect, and they faced many challenges. They often stumbled along the way, even the adults, but 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)

"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)

"Since The Waltons is autobiographical, I was interested to know how his real family felt about seeing their lives unfold on television. Of course they had already experienced this 'exposure' to a limited degree in the publication of Spencer's Mountain. 'Not shock, but delight at reliving those times,' Hamner told me. 'You know, Thomas Wolfe "couldn't go home again" because of the things he'd written, but I can go home, and do, because I've written with affection about our life together." (Margaret Fife Tanguay's interview with Earl Hamner, p87)

The Waltons experienced various "themes as theft, displacement from one's home, death in wartime, life-endangering injuries, kidnapping at gunpoint, vandalism, arson, miscarriage, and despair; though some episodes also dealt with lighter issues such as handling loneliness; caring for injured animals; and coping with the honest mistakes, misunderstandings, and hardships common to everyday life." (p87-88)

"People used to attack the show for being too sweet, too idealistic. But it honored the lives of ordinary people, and the simple passages of their lives have as much significance on Walton's Mountain as they do in Buckingham Palace. Growing up is growing up. Getting old is getting old. Coming to terms with your children is coming to terms with your children." (Richard Thomas, p88)

Earl Hamner "was able to look at all the different characters and personalities he grew up with and find a way to prize them with their flaws. People sometimes accused the show of being saccharine, and sometimes it probably is saccharine. But there are also moments of human frailty or friction that he also captured, that I think really did resonate with people. And I think that if it was completely saccharine, and we weren't dirty and grubby and barefoot and bickering and noisy and doing all the things real groups of children do, it wouldn't have been as meaningful for people." (Kami Cotler, p88)

So, for all the naysayers who focus on the saccharine image of The Waltons, there is plenty of reality that they dealt with. We can all identify with the struggles the Waltons have been through. That is what makes them classic. People from around the world can identify with this mountain family of the Blue Ridge, who struggled, who endured, who loved.

"There is a view around the world from Walton's Mountain. Watching the program in syndication, some German viewers have declared that they believe the series is set in the Vienna Woods. The series is beloved in India, with Hamner occasionally receiving fan letters from the subcontinent. Families who view the program in Sweden and in Greece identify with it, as do the Irish and Australians. In England, 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)

All of us who grew up watching The Waltons can say that we too grew up in the shadow of Walton's Mountain.

[Koren · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a short bio of Hamner at the beginning of the book, otherwise the rest of the book is about his accomplishments. I was interested in The Walton's, otherwise I skipped most of the rest of the book. If its a bio you want, this is not the book you want. If you are interested in his works, then this is the book for you. At the end there are endless people telling us how wonderful he is. (Ho Hum).

[Leila Kern · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being as the show The Waltons was one of my favorite shows because of the simpler times, I really liked this book. I loved that the author correlated Earl Hamner’s upbringing with the show. No matter the family one grew up in, I think all of us in one way or another would have liked to be a part of the Walton family with their trials, tribulations and good times. This book is a keeper to be reread for its messages.

Earl Hamner seemed like a genuinely good person, a special special and one who will be sorely missed.

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

I count myself very lucky that my copy has actually been signed by Earl Hamner himself. I really enjoyed the start of the book, which talks about his life in Schuyler Virginia, however the majority of the book contains a synopsis about each book or movie he has written, mentioning many actors I have not even heard of in all honestly. I would have liked the book to be more focused on Earl's life and family which he based on The Walton's.

[Darren Sapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a linear biography. That is found at the beginning of the book, and then the following chapters go more in-depth into parts of Hamner's professional life. Readers will notice some repetition in certain aspects due to this style. It's a must-read for Hamner fans. Fans of The Waltons will enjoy this and may even find themselves interested in consuming other parts of Hamner's body of work.

[Joey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book about a wonderful writer!

[Jim Barber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Earl Hamner had a profound influence on my life, so it was definitely sad when he passed away earlier this month. Yet, he lived a very long, rich life and had a tremendous influence on American television. I was anxious to read his biography and, all in all, it was OK. An autobiography might have been better. I think my biggest hang up with "From Waltons Mountain to Tomorrow" was the scholarly nature of the work. So often, the author used other authors to explain Hamner's work and there was repetition in some of this. It made parts of the story seem, well, a bit boring. That said, it was an exhaustive look at Hamner's life and influence and well worth the time I spent to read it. You really have to admire Hamner's positive approach to life and all that is good in it. He saw what TV could be and worked to make it that, and you sense he was disappointed with what the medium evolved into. Above everything else, my big takeaway was confirmation that Hamner's vision -- so profound in "The Waltons" and "Spencer's Mountain" -- shaped my own way of looking at the world. I think Hamner's own words sum it up best: "That we are all human, and that no matter how different we may seem from each other -- by race or color, nationality or religion -- we are all related by common bonds and concerns. We may be ordinary creatures, and fragile, but we are still capable of strength and sacrifice and wonder and love, and, yes, even nobility."

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

The creator of Spencer's Mountain (book and movie)and The Waltons. This is a wonderful in depth look at the creator of my favorite show of all time. Talks about the extensive work he has done in addition to The Waltons.

[Cruse · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was disappointed that this wasn't a true biography so that I could compare the actual story to Spencer's Mountain or the Waltons. However, it was more of a biography concerning his work.