Story by Chris Graham 

John-Boy was in the hospital - his life in jeopardy, his chance at sitting for the college-scholarship exam all but lost.

It was also Thanksgiving - though nobody on Walton’s Mountain seemed to be thinking too much about the turkey and stuffing and potatoes and the rest.

I happened upon a replay of “The Thanksgiving Story,” an episode from the second season of the nine-year run of “The Waltons,” one morning late last year on The Hallmark Channel.

I had just interviewed Earl Hamner for a story on his latest book, Generous Women: An Appreciation, and wanted to reacquaint myself with the Nelson County native’s creative works.

It didn’t take long for me to be drawn in - to the story of John-Boy’s near-fatal head injury, his teacher’s battle to get him a second chance to take the scholarship exam, the adventures of his younger brother, Ben, in trying to bag his first Thanksgiving turkey.

I had grown up watching “The Waltons,” in part because of the novelty of the fact that there was a TV series based on life in Nelson County, where I often spent hot summer days swimming at a local lake south of Nellysford with two of my cousins, in part because, well, I saw myself as another John-Boy - a kid growing up in rural Virginia, poor as dirt, but sharp as a tack, dreaming that one day I, too, might be able to pass my own scholarship exam and head off to college and then the world beyond the mountains.

I asked Hamner about that - about whether or not he realized that as he went on telling the stories of the fictional Waltons, based on his real-life experiences as a child and teen in Schuyler, to the world at large that he might also be reaching out to thousands of other John-Boys.

“I’m not sure that I was aware of that,” Hamner said to me, prompting a followup question from me on the influences that he had growing up in Western Virginia in the Depression.

“You didn’t come across the kind of stimulation in those days as you do in today’s environment. The horizons were sort of sewn in,” Hamner said. “I don’t remember being given that much encouragement to look beyond the edge of the next mountain. But somehow through reading and those teachers who encouraged me to read enlarged my own horizon and gave me the vision to see that there was a life beyond the next mountain.”

That in turn was what inspired Hamner, who now lives in California and is still very much active in the literary and television worlds at the age of 83, to want to pen Generous Women - to pay homage to the people in his life who encouraged him to think beyond the Blue Ridge.

“One of my favorite columnists is Anna Quindlen in Newsweek - and she wrote a column not long ago in which she talked about the status of women in the world today, and one of her sentences struck me as interesting. It said, ‘We have ridden on the shoulders of all those women who have gone before us.’ And I thought, Well, I’m not a woman, but that certainly sums up what I was trying to say with Generous Women - that women had given me such gifts as inspiration, as sustenance, as support, as love, as sympathy, as humor, as fun. And I wanted to point out the variety of gifts that women can give unselfishly,” Hamner said.

Among the stories that stuck out to me from the book is the one about his mother, Doris Giannini Hamner. The chapter about her is entitled “The Gift of Life” - summing up well Earl Hamner’s thoughts about how important his mother was to who he was to become.

“I think few of us ever think of life as a gift - but it certainly is, and is valuable and something to be treasured,” said Hamner, who can credit his mother for, among other things, the development of his writing career.

“We had a cow, which was a mainstay during the Depression - because she supplied us with butter and milk and buttermilk. That was a wonderful advantage to have for a family with very little income during a difficult time. So my mother would pick up a little change by selling buttermilk - and I was the delivery man,” Hamner said.

“I would carry these quarts of buttermilk all over the village - and I think that was a great contribution to my becoming a writer, because I would pick up all the gossip. I would be standing in somebody’s kitchen and overhear news about who was ill, or somebody who was pregnant, or somebody who was having domestic problems. And then I would go to the next kitchen, and the next lady would question me about what was happening in the community. I was a walking newspaper,” Hamner said.

Doris Hamner’s aunt, Olive Giannini, was Earl Hamner’s sixth-grade teacher. She would also play a key role in broadening young Earl’s outlook.

“In those days, and I don’t know if they still do it in school, but we used to have autograph books, and we used to write autographs to each other, smart-aleky things like, Up the oak, down the tree, or saucy things,” Hamner said. “Mrs. Giannini, in my autograph book, wrote a quote from Longfellow - ‘The heights of great men, reached and kept, were not attained by sudden flight. They, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.’

“I don’t know if she saw some spark of possible career for me - or whether she just thought I was a deserving kid who could take that quote to heart,” Hamner said. “But at any rate, in the years that followed, in order to catch up, and when you’re born poor in the Depression, you’re always trying to catch up, I would work two jobs at a time. The whole time I was in college, I had a full-time job at night. And sometimes you get discouraged - and I would always remember that quote.

“And I remember this one time particularly when I was sitting on a park bench after I’d finished my night job at the Brooks Transportation Co. in Richmond, and sitting on a park bench waiting for the streetcar, and it was close to midnight, and it was raining, and I thought of that quote.

“That one quote was very sustaining and thoughtful and powerful,” Hamner said.

Hamner spent his college years in Richmond attending the University of Richmond - living not on campus, as his budget wouldn’t allow for that extravagance, but rather with three aunts, Nora Spencer Hamner, Margaret Hamner Myers and Lottie Hamner Dover.

“I was such a country boy - and I dressed like a country boy, and I had a country-boy-sort of shy way,” Hamner said. “It was a tremendous culture shock to go from Schuyler to Richmond - from Schuyler High School to the University of Richmond. They talk about the Joe College way that the college boy dresses - I was dressed in one of my uncle’s hand-me-down suits. I must have been a ridiculous-looking Ichabod Crane-kind of person, with long arms and wrists sticking out from under that blue suit.

“They realized that I had to adapt to city ways,” Hamner said of his aunts, who not only took him in, but gave themselves the mission of teaching Earl good manners and getting him to see the sights in the capital city.

“I remember that one of my aunts had an office near the Valentine Museum and also the museum that had been the capital during the Confederacy. So I would spend a lot of time there. And I remember being taken to the Edgar Allen Poe home - it’s called the Allen Home, but it’s where Poe had been adopted into the Allen family,” Hamner said.

“I had some kind of in-grown personality about seeing things. I remember I had never been to an opera. I had read about opera, and I spent some hard-earned money to go to The Mosque, and I saw Der Rosenkavalier - and I thought, God, Jesus, that’s wonderful. That was quite a switch from the Carter Family,” Hamner said.

Hamner came of age in the 1940s - and like many in his generation, heeded the call to arms of World War II, where he ended up in France after D-Day.

He almost didn’t make it back.

“It was exciting to go to Europe on one of the great luxury liners - I forget which one now - but it had been turned into a troop ship, and to land in Southampton during World War II. I remember having a great sense of coming home because I had the fantasy that my people might have sailed off Southampton when they came to America,” Hamner said.

“And then spending some time in England - mainly up near Liverpool. And again, it was an eye-opening experience - meeting foreign people on their own soil, getting acquainted with them. And then getting to Paris, which was just totally magical. The city is just full of incredibly lovely buildings and monuments and parks and the Seine and the cathedrals and also the literary tradition.”

Hamner soon fell in love with a French girl - he called her Jeanine in the book, but said he didn’t want to give her real name because he hopes that she is still alive, “married to some nice old Frenchman, possibly a grandmother, and I doubt that she has told her husband that she once had a romance with an American soldier.”

“I thought that probably I would like to stay there - because by then I knew firmly that I was going to be a writer, and it was a fantasy that I would stay in Paris, and I would live in a garret, and I would wear a beret,” Hamner said.

“I remember going to a movie - it was called ‘State Fair.’ It was a Rodgers and Hammerstein movie, and it was full of sunshine and Iowa and farm animals and good old American settings. And I remember when I came out of the movie, Paris was very gray, and it was dark - and people were still recovering from the misery of the German occupation. And suddenly, I became unbearably homesick - and I went back to my quarters and canceled my application to stay in Paris, and the next thing you know, I was back home.”

Hamner still had what he called his “Paris fantasy” squarely in mind for nearly a decade after his return - until he met a certain Jane Martin.

“I had no plans to marry. I thought, Well, I’ll just be a bachelor. I’ll have lady friends, but the important thing in my life will be my books,” Hamner said.

“And then one night when I was working at NBC, I ran into a girl from NBC named Sue Salter, who said, I’d like you to meet my roommate, Jane Martin - and I looked at her, and I knew that I was not going back to Paris, I was going to get married. I was head over heels in love,” Hamner said.

And they still are - the couple celebrated their 52nd wedding anniversary in October.

Earl Hamner foresees many more to come - because even as he approaches his mid-80s, he doesn’t feel like he’s close to putting away the notebook and pen just yet, not by a longshot.

“A lot of people my age are sitting on the porch and looking off into space and wondering when they’re going to die. I have so many more books and plays and television things that I want to write that it will take me 150 years to just make a dent on them,” Hamner said.

“So I think as far as having achieved or having reached a high point in my life, the high point in my life is still somewhere down the road. And I thank God that I’m in good health and probably will have a few more years to live. I love life.”

And though he doesn’t get back to Nelson County as much as he would like to be able to do these days, he still loves his homeland.

“I have been lucky that I have been able to travel all over the world - to Japan and Europe, and recently we were in Canada in the mountains, the Canadian Rockies. And in the Canadian Rockies or in France in the villages connected by little country roads, I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as that road from Route 29 along the river to Rockfish,” Hamner said.

“It’s right below Hickory Creek on Route 29. There’s a little sign that says Rockfish. You cut out there, and the next thing you know, you’re along the Rockfish River. Oh, my heart wants to be there,” Hamner said.

Just as John-Boy’s heart wanted to be at the dinner table with his brothers and sisters and parents and other family members that Thanksgiving.

I knew it was going to happen this way, but it still made me tear up. As the family sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, John Walton Sr. heard a sound at the door. He dismissed it as being a relative who had called to say that he was coming late, but it was actually John-Boy, his head still bandaged, determined to spend the day not in the hospital, but back home.

Filed under: 8-January 2007 Issue