OUR PARENTS AND ‘THE WALTONS’

A window into the world our parents grew up in...

When I was in my teenage years in the 1970’s, a new television series debuted on CBS on September 14, 1972. It aired on Sunday evenings in Canada on CTV.

The show was called ‘The Waltons’.

Created by Earl Hamner Jr. and based on his own depression-era rural  childhood in Schuyler, Virginia, USA, it is a heartfelt and sentimental show about a large close-knit intergenerational fictional country family who grew up in the fictitious Blue Ridge Mountains area of Virginia during the depression era of the 1930’s and World War Two.

Our Mother grew up in the country and our Father grew up on a farm in different parts of the region in roughly the same approximate time frame the show was set in. And because of their shared rural experience, when they watched the show, they felt a personal kinship with it right away.

When our Mother started watching the show, I remember she fell in love with it immediately. Because she grew up in a large family in the country, many of the show’s rural themes, issues and stories were very relatable to her. The show touched her heart.

Our Father, having grown up on a family farm also in the same approximate time frame the show was set in, watched it as well. While I think our Mother enjoyed it more than he did, he liked the old vehicles and related to the country themes, family issues and rural common sense of the show.    

Admittedly at the time, I did not have the same fondness for the show that our parents did. As a young person in my early-mid teens, I was restless and solely focused on looking to the future. Our parents were ‘country’ and I was ‘rock ‘n roll’, so to speak.  I had no interest whatsoever in looking into the past and at the time thought that ‘The Waltons’ was the corniest show on television. I never said much about it to my parents but occasionally I made my attitude perfectly clear. 

But as I have gotten older my attitude has changed towards many things.

One day when I was much older and now out on my own, I was channel surfing and I finally settled on watching an episode of ‘The Waltons’ because there was nothing else on at the time.

As I watched that episode, I began to reflect on some of the stories that our own parents had told us about their own country childhoods as we were growing up and how relevant they were to what I was watching on the TV screen right then.

And in a moment of personal enlightenment, I began to realize that ‘The Waltons’ was giving me a certain amount of insight into the way my own parents had grown up. While every life journey is different, certain experiences are common to anyone who grew up in a rural environment: The country common sense and honesty, the family bonding and closeness, the hardship and occasional conflict, the hard work, the good neighbours, and the drama and rural humour.

Granted, ‘The Waltons’ is an American show with American references, American viewpoints, and traditional American family values of the highest order, but certain common experiences are universal to farm and country life all over the world and are relevant to any rural person, no matter what part of the world you may have grown up in.   

It was a sad day for ‘Waltons’ fans on June 4, 1981, when the series was finally cancelled. But by that time the children on the show were mostly grown up and beginning to live their own lives and the storyline had run its course.

But people still have a special place in their hearts for the show, indicated by the five successful reunion movies that were made over the years following the series cancellation. And the series will live on forever on television in reruns.

In personal hindsight, watching ‘The Waltons’ was, to a certain extent,  kind of like getting a little personal window into the time period my own parents grew up in. And I suspect it was this way for many other people whose parents grew up in rural families at the same time around the world.

I still watch ‘The Waltons’ to this day and have grown to love and appreciate the show over the years as I have matured.

“Good night, John-Boy!”