Portrait of the Artist as an Appalachian Writer

FEATURED AUTHOR—EARL HAMNER Portrait of the Artist as an Appalachian Writer James E. Person, Jr. Mention the name "Earl Hamner" in a conversation, and you may get a blank look from your listener. But then mention The Waltons, and your listener smiles and knows: Oh, yes. Earl Hamner—and that distinctive voice saying, "When I was a boy growing up on Walton's Mountain. ..." Throughout America and the world, everyone knows of The Waltons and its forever-green backdrop of mountains, and country roads, and kindly people. On one occasion when I was at work writing Earl Hamner: From Walton's Mountain to Tomorrow, I spoke with Hamner by telephone about his being known far and wide as "Mister Walton." In previous conversationsIhad sensedthathe occasionallyseemed alittle frustrated at being remembered for one accomplishment only: the creation of The Waltons, one of the most popular and beloved television series of the 1970s. Indeed, it surprises many of Hamner's admirers to learn that he has accomplishments to his credit other than The Waltons. He first achieved some measure of fame with his novel Spencer's Mountain (1961), a forerunner of the Walton family's story that was adapted into a successful motion picture starring Henry Fonda, Maureen O'Hara, and James MacArthur. Hamner wrote the scripts for eight widely admired episodes of Rod Serling's TV series The Twilight Zone during the early '60s. Several generations of children have enjoyed the 1973 animated version of E. B. White's "Charlotte's Web," for which Hamner wrote the screenplay. And many fans of "Mister Walton" have been a bit shocked to learn that he created the very un-Waltonesque nighttime drama Falcon Crest, a long-running chronicle of greed, betrayal, and lust within a wealthy family of California vintners. During our conversation I learned that while Hamner is proud of his work on The Waltons he yearns for recognition for his many other interests and accomplishments: "I'm fine with being 'Mister Walton'," he said. "But there's more to my career than that. I also want people to think of me as 'Mister Twilight Zone' and 'Mister Charlotte's Web' and any number of other names that reflect my work." 47 It remains to be seen whether Hamner will ever see that particular desire realized. In the meantime, it is worth examining his body of work for threads of commonality that enabled the creator of the heartwarming Walton family to also invent the conniving Giobertis of Falcon Crest. Probing this seeming disconnect, one discovers that Hamner is an intriguing mixture of seeming contradictions. Through his work on The Waltons he is closely associated with the term "family values," yet his favorite comic strip is Garry Trudeau's consistently liberal "Doonesbury," with its scourging of all values and people that stand to the right of center on social and political issues. He is identified with village life and small-town values, yet the place he called home for some 45 years—Studio City, California—is seldom identified in the public mind with those values. He hymns the simple glories of rural, Appalachian Virginia, but is in fact a world traveler who has lived most of his life away from his native state by choice, saying, "If I moved back there I'm afraid people would love me to death." And yet, through all this, Hamner carries Appalachian sunshine with him wherever he is, as evidenced in his easygoing, self-deprecating ways, habitual politeness, and down-home locutions. (Friends of Hamner have admitted to me that during telephone conversations with "Mister Walton" they purposefully steer the conversation in just the right direction so that Hamner will need to say the word house, with his distinctive Scotch-Irish accent which makes the word almost rhyme with rose.) If it is true, as Lincoln said, that we cannot escape the past, then Earl Hamner's upbringing as a hill-man and as a native Virginian of his generation explains much. From personal, unscientific observation, I have discerned that a great many Virginians who were raised during the Depression era exhibit a mixture of socially conservative outlook with a libertarian—and even liberal—let-sleeping...