Tribute To A Friend

      Happy New Year! 2013! Wow! What a fine feeling! All those sweet old Christmas songs packed away to mellow for another year. All the New Year’s bells have rung and that ball successfully made its traditional descent in Times Square. The tree ornaments are back on the shelf. The new Christmas corduroys have been tailored to fit. The fruit cake just a dream and the now empty champagne jug in the waste can. All the thank you notes are written, and we have almost visited the scales to see how much weight all that good food has added. Well, I won’t go that far, but we are giving it some thought.

     I have special reason to be thankful to see 2013. In the first place it’s been quite a stretch from 1923 when I first came to this party. And secondly each year about this time I come down with the flu. This year was no exception and for three weeks my doctor was treating me with the elixirs and magic potions that traditionally got me well again.

     This time it didn’t work so he ordered a cat scan and discovered that I had been walking around with raging pneumonia! The next thing I knew I was in Room 1408 in the North Tower at Cedars of Lebanon being stuffed with antibiotics and steroids, having blood drawn, my wheezing chest listened to just about every time I drifted off to sleep, my vitals taken every six hours, and round the clock attention by some of the most attentive and considerate nurses I could imagine.

     I am home now, a little out of breath, dizzy in the head and weak in the knees and more flighty than usual in the brain, but I am definitely on the mend.

     All this has brought me to a realization that is long overdue; one I suppose more rational folks already live with at this advanced age. All these years I have gone merrily along my way, whistling in the dark, living as if there were no tomorrow, always assured that I am young in spirit, destined to live forever, and not subject to the wear and tear that go with "the golden years."
         WRONG!

     There in Room 1408 in the North Tower of Cedars of Lebanon the awful realization dawned on me that I am mortal, that in spite of the lies I keep telling mysef, it’s December at the party, not April any more. The reminder came in a line from a poem that kept repeating itself over and over in my mind.

                          "Then child, don heavy armor
                            Against the heart’s wild pain;
                            Try as I may, I cannot bring
                            Fair April back again."

      Listen to him! Carrying on like he is about to put on his funeral suit, order the casket and call Forest Lawn! Actually it was a good thing! Forced him to slow down. Smell the roses, and enjoy that extra glass of chardonnay even though you aren’t supposed to take it along with cumadin.

     The refrain that kept repeating itself in my mind was a stanza from a poem written by my late friend the poet, Muriel Miller Dressler and she will be the subject of this blog if I ever get around to it.

      In the meantime I introduce the following medical bulletin to your attention because it gives me an opportunity to boast.

      As you know from my previous blogs, last year I received a very high honor from the Library of Virginia. This year their generosity has brought another very great honor. On the 17th of January I was scheduled to attend a meeting of the Virginia Legislature where a proclamation was to have been read saying that I was a proud Virginia boy and that my writing had brought pleasure and pride to my fellow Virginians. There was then to have been a lunch at the Governor’s mansion and a reception that evening!

      Even though I was recovering from the pneumonia I was tempted to make the trip, but my doctor said it would be foolhardy to risk another respiratory event this early by getting on a plane and trying to attend all those fabulous functions that were planned in Richmond.

      As close to tears as a tough old rooster should come, I let the folks at the Library know. What incredible people! Somehow they have been able to reschedule most of the events and my family and I are already anticipating a visit home to Virginia on April 3rd! Some of these April events will be open to the public so if any of you in the Richmond area would be interested I will let you know as soon as I have all the facts.

    So finally we come to the end of this long winded introduction to my new blog. It tells of how I came to know a woman I still revere, the gifted West Virginia poet, Muriel Miller Dressler.

     When I was growing up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge during the great Depression of the Twenties and Thirties, the possibility that I might someday meet a real poet seemed remote, if not impossible. We were people of the back woods, and our daily lives were taken up with the business of living through harsh and hostile times.

     Yet, poetry was at hand. I recognized it first in the King James version of The Bible. Sometimes it was a passage I was obliged to memorize in Sunday school in order to receive a Gold
Star. Sometimes it was shouted at me by revival preachers set on persuading me to give up my sinful ways and to be saved. No matter how it was presented, I recognized the poetry in The Bible And I WAS saved.

     Later, a dedicated teacher at our local school introduced me to Edgar Allen Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, Steven Vincent Benet, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. We were required to memorize great hunks of "Thanatopsis," "The First Snowfall," and "Song of Myself," and I still remember them today.

     While their words became a part of my being, the poets themselves seemed remote. I fancied them to be God-like creatures, removed from the human race, quite possibly living in Grecian temples close by the Mediterranean where they wrote when inspiration moved them and subsisted on a little fruit and a lot of wine.

     But the Great Depression passed, and my life changed. I won a scholarship to the University of Richmond, I went to Europe and fought in a war, I came home to Virginia and then to the University of Cincinnati and finally to make a career and a new life in New York City.

     It was there I met my first "real" poet. I had written a book called "Fifty Roads to Town," and I desperately needed permission from a poet named Muriel Rukeyser to use two lines from a remarkable poem of hers called "Effort at Speech Between Two People." But how did one get in touch with a poet? I asked my editor at Random House, Belle Becker, and Belle replied, "Why don’t you look in the phone book?" I did and to my astonishment Miss Rukeyser lived only two blocks from my apartment, and most graciously consented to my using the lines I needed. I learned that poets were not only considerate, but that not all of them were off there by the Mediterranean sipping wine.

     Miss Rukeyser’s gift prepared me for generosity and graciousness. What I had not been prepared for was the knowledge that a poet could spring from the same earth I knew. And on a visit to Morris Harvey College (Now The University of Charleston) I met Muriel Miller Dressler, a fellow citizen of Appalachia.

     Muriel Dressler was born in Kanawha County, West Virginia on July 4th. 1918. Her family went back several generations in the area. She did not finish high school and her love of literature came, as she was fond of saying, "at the heels of my mother as we planted or hoed the garden."

     I met her in 1975 and with her permission used one of her poems as the theme for an episode of my series "Morning Star, Evening Star."

     William Plumley, the professor who introduced us, describes her as "Short, curvy, vain and hyperactive."  Dressler remained a popular speaker on the college circuit until the mid-1980’s when she suffered a massive heart attack. She spent much of the rest of her life away from the public spotlight.

     Using the same clay some of us have shaped into novels, Muriel made poems.

     Muriel spoke with first hand knowledge of the land of our birth. She knew and articulated the sounds of whippoorwills at night, the thud of earth coming to rest on a miner’s coffin, the restless love that calls a widow from her bed for dialogue at Midnight with spirits that are less dead than they seem.

     This is not to suggest that Muriel wrote of the macabre. On the contrary she could be witty and gay, raucous and gossipy, but always filled with the exaltation of living. Sometimes she would be wicked, as in her wry appraisal of "Old Iry Pleasants" who decided he was "jest retard" after "he’s been out of work his entire life."

     Much of Muriel Dressler’s work is in dialect, a dangerous form of expression. In unskilled hands it could reach a comic strip level, but Muriel knew what she was doing, and the sounds of Appalachian speech fell on her ear with accuracy and recognition. She’d been there. She knew what she was doing.

     Her signature work is a collection of poems titled "Appalachia." You can track it down on the Intenet and I recommend you look for it.

     What it all boils down to, I think, is that Muriel Dressler had heard the same sounds we all hear, known the same pain we each feel, watched the same sun cross the sky and set beyond some hilly horizon, but out of her own genius she produced work that while regional in character, is universal in its appeal and meaning.

     I know because one of her poems haunts me still.

                                  ELEGY FOR JODY    

                    O, wear a crimson shawl, my child
                    Put on a scarlet hood,
                    And make a point of being brave
                    When you explore the wood.

                    But when harsh winds denude the trees,
                    Fall leaves on cryptic ground
                   Will write your childhood’s prophecy
                    In syllables of brown.

                   When dark clouds scud against the sky
                   And greening trees are gone,
                   I’ll weave for you an ebon rug
                   For you to walk upon.

                  Then child, don heavy armor
                  Against the heart’s wild pain,
                  Try as I may, I cannot bring
                   Fair April back again.

                                 ---
Poem published with permission of Jacob Wither, Executor of the Estate of William Plumley.

A New York Memory

     I had not thought of 44 West Twelfth Street in Greenwich Village in a very long time.  It was an apartment we had lived in many years ago, and then last Sunday morning from the deck of our home in Laguna Beach, I was reading the Sunday Edition of The Los Angeles Times. The day was soft and the ocean was beautifully lit with that sunshine which illuminates the tip of every breaking wave.   From the deck we can actually see Catalina, even on a not so clear day.  The cerulean blue water stretched to the horizon, broken in the distance by a single sailing ship, while on the rocks below a seal was taking a sunbath. And then the item in the Calendar Section of The Los Angeles Times brought back a myriad of images of a long forgotten time and place.

     The year was 1959.  Jane and I had been married in 1954, parents now of a son and a daughter.  We had lived in two other places, but there was an apartment we coveted.  We knew the landlord and he had promised it was ours if it ever became available.

    The apartment was located half way between Sixth Avenue and Fifth Avenue at 44 West 12th Street.  The former occupant was a composer, a man named Harry Wood, and he told us that his song, “When the Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin Along” had been written in the apartment. It was a fact we mentioned to everyone who visited hoping they were as impressed as we were to be in touch with such greatness.

     The apartment was on the ground floor.  Once when one of Jane’s aunts from Davenport, Iowa, visited us, she said with ill-conceived pity, as she entered the vestibule, “Oh, you live in the basement!”  Word probably went back to Davenport, Iowa that Jane had made an unfortunate marriage, but it didn’t matter to us. We loved the apartment and felt ourselves most fortunate. 

    Like most ground floor apartments the layout was typical.  The bedroom faced West 12th Street.  We assured ourselves that the racket that went on each morning when the garbage was collected was simply “The Manhattan Melody.”  It was one of the many fibs we told ourselves in order to live there.

    The bedroom was reached by a long hallway off the living room and past the bath and a closet.  The living room was spacious, and boasted a fireplace.  The first night we moved in we built an enormous fire only to find out that the flue was stopped up and that we had nearly asphyxiated all of our neighbors on the upper floors.  The kitchen was miniscule but what made the apartment so unique was that beyond the living room was a room enclosed on all sides, top to bottom, by glass!  In winter we would wake on mornings after a snowfall to find ourselves in a scene reminiscent of the dacha in Dr. Zhivago. And wonder of wonders, from that room you stepped out into a garden.

   It was a rectangular space with raised flowerbeds, paved with flagstone, several shade trees, and a view of adjacent gardens.  It was a safe place for the children to play.  For the children we installed a jungle gym, a sand box and a swing. For the family we bought a charcold grill, and for me, ever the country boy, the opportunity to fill the flower beds with wild iris, trillium, ivy and impatiens, just a few of the trophies I found on hunting expeditions in upper Westchester County.
 
     In his book “Here Is New York” E.B. White describes what it was like to live on the New York Island, in the same town with ”giants” and the excitation of the nearness of them. The giants he celebrates are the writers of his day such as Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and Stephen Vincent Benet.

     Many of my neighbors too were people of distinction.  My editor at Random House, Belle Becker, lived right across the street with her husband, Abner Sideman, an editor at Look Magazine.  The distinguished director Eve Legalienne and her companion, the legendary actress Margaret Webster, lived down the block. There was a plaque on the side of one of the brownstones marking where Edna St. Vincent Milay had lived.  The actress Estelle Parsons and her twin daughters were just down the street, and it was not unusual to encounter humorist and writer S. J. Pearlman, on one of his strolls through the village.    The cook and author, James Beard, was often seen hurrying along the street, trailed by his disciples, all wearing tall white chef’s hats and carrying trays of food or cooking utensils on their way to some event. I even spotted William Faulkner at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 12th Street and successfully managed to keep from engulfing him with the awe his very presence inspired in me. And only a few blocks away was The White Horse, the bar where writers such as Vance Bourjally, James Jones, Norman Mailer and Joe Heller congregated to drink and fight and boast.

    I gradually became aware of another celebrity neighbor.  Facing our garden from the next brownstone and on the third floor lived a man and a woman.  From time to time they would engage in loud discussion which would eventually evolve into heated quarrels.  In these encounters the woman would yell, “You may be America’s greatest living poet, but you are one vile son of a bitch!”  He would respond with “Go ---- yourself, you stupid whore.”

     Curious that “America’s greatest living poet” might be living in such close proximity, I stopped in the vestibule of the building and checked the register of the inhabitants. The occupant of that particular apartment was listed as a woman. There was no mention of a man, much less America’s Greatest Living Poet.

     The closest I ever came to the contact with The Poet was one summer evening when I was grilling steaks in the garden. A sudden rainstorm came out of nowhere.  The steaks were only half cooked so rather than serving them half done I decided to continue grilling.  I ran inside, grabbed an umbrella and went back to my chore.

    And that was when America’s Greatest Living Poet called to his lady friend and said, “Come see what this damn fool is doing now!”

     I looked up at their widow, but they had withdrawn and had gone back to their quarrel.  The steaks were delicious, but I carry grudges.  How dare that son of a bitch call me a “damn fool” simply because I was keeping the rain off my steaks!
 
     The relationship between the couple seemed to go from bad to worse. The name calling, the loud quarrels, the screams and sometimes the crashing of furniture or the breaking dishes would echo from their window down into our garden.

      One morning soon thereafter I stepped out on 12th Street to walk our cocker spaniels, Clemmentine and Chloe. In front of the building next door was a stack of household effects: Furniture, notebooks, food containers, bookshelves, a desk, clothing on hangers, cardboard boxes marked photos, waste baskets. All evidence suggested that the owner of the stuff had been evicted. We learned later that it was The World’s Greatest Living Poet who had done the evicting.  While his lady friend was out of town he had thrown her every possession into the street.

    When I came back from walking the dogs, I spotted passersby stopping, examining the stuff, and almost every person picking up some item, an end table, some dishes, books, a drawer containing silver or clothing and taking off with it.

    And by the time I left for work later that morning there was little left of the woman’s effects but scraps and a desk that must have been too heavy to steal.  I can only imagine her dismay when she returned.

    In time I encountered a neighbor we met while walking the dogs, we knew her as Miss Horty. She lived on the ground floor of the next door brownstone and I asked her if she knew either of her upstairs neighbors who had moved out.

    “I never met the girl,” she said, “But the man who lived with her was Delmore Schwartz, the poet.”  “She used to call him America’s Greatest Living Poet,” I said. “Oh, he was,” said Horty “He’s in all the anthologies.”

      I always meant to look up Mr. Schwartz and read his work, but somehow I never got around to it.  In time we moved away from New York to follow the television industry to Los Angeles. I had hardly ever thought of him until last Sunday when I was reading the Los Angeles Times down at the beach house.

     The article was about a singer, and guitar player who had been a student at Syracuse University where he had been a disciple of Delmore Schwartz’.  There was that name again after all those many years. I had never really read any of his work so I looked up the man and found that he was indeed a genius. He was the earliest recipient of the esteemed Bollengen Prize awarded by Yale University for excellence in poetry, and he was praised by such literary figures as T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound.

     I learned too that as time went by drugs and alcohol took their toll and he died insane in a seedy Times Square hotel, but when I read his poems, in view of the violent rants that had spilled from his window down into my garden, I was surprised at the tenderness and depth of feeling he had celebrated in his work.

      Still, even after all these years I can’t forgive him for calling me a damn fool just because I wanted my steak well done and wouldn’t let a little rain stop me.
  

Party Time!

                                     
          As you may already know, in September we will celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the premiere of "The Waltons." When I was a boy growing up in the backwoods of Virginia during The Great Depression I could never have dreamed that　those days, those times, that little village and the events we experienced as a family, would become material for stories to be broadcast, over something we had never heard of called television, all over the world.

　　Not long ago I looked through some of the early reviews of the series when it first went on the air over CBS. I thought it might be interesting to see how we were first perceived 40 years ago.

　　In The New York Times, a writer named Anne Roiphe wrote the following:

　　"A bobwhite cry breaks the quiet of night among the firs and pines of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia "Goodnight Ma." "Goodnight John-Boy" "Goodnight Pa" and the lights of the Walton house on Walton’s Mountain somewhere in the early nineteen-thirties dim, and a million viewers turn away from their television sets, eyes wet, souls heavy with false memory and hopeless longing. C.B.S has filled another Thursday night with nostalgia, bathos, soap opera, formula plot, tear-jerking junk, and I and all those other viewers share a moment of tender shame at having been so painfully touched by such obvious commercial exploitation."

　   Commercial exploitation! Bathos! Tear-jerking junk! At this point I was so offended I was ready to cancel my subscription to The New York Times and write a scathing note to the lady. And then I read on:
      "Since every Thursday night I am reduced to ridiculous tears, I had to ask these questions and explore the program’s skill at piercing touch hides, revealing sentimental ooze that can no more be than controlled than the shift of dreams that sill wake us screaming every now and then."

　　Sentimental ooze! Come on, Miz Roiphe? 

      You keep on this away I am liable to forget that I am a　Virginia gentleman　and say something I might regret!

　　A few lines later she continues, "The Waltons" may be romantic nonsense, may bear only superficial and misleading resemblance to real life, but it is very good magic. It is a good, workable dance to scare away the evil spirits of loneliness, isolations, divorce, alcoholism, troubled children, abandoned elders, - the real companions of American family life, the real demons of the living room."

　          Romantic nonsense, Miz Roiphe?

       There was nothing the least romantic about the Great Depression of the 20’s and 30’s and we never portrayed it that way. It was a time when we were tested as a people, and we came through with courage, persistence, and faith in our country and our leaders. Poverty was just one of our challenges. It was a time when prejudice still stained many areas of the country, some racial and some religious, and we examined those issues too. The threat of Nazi Germany was becoming clear to many of us and one of our finest episodes dealt with that sport so beloved to the Nazis’ - book burning.

      But more than that, we told stories about two people who loved each other and were dedicated to raising a family. We told stories that were dedicated to the strength of the American people that brought us back from the brink of ruin.

　         Romantic nonsense! Nonsense!

　   To make matters worse the writer illustrated her piece with photographs by Walker Evans showing emaciated children, haggard women, defeated men, people in rags, filthy shacks, which prompted my sister Marion Hawks (Mary Ellen Walton) to write an outraged letter to The Times" pointing out that the photographs only added to the inaccurate portrayal of our family. I think she was even a little threatening, but you know Mary Ellen.

       After The New York Times piece it was a relief to find a review that I could relate to. It was written by critic Val Adams and his review goes as follows:

       "Circumstances surrounding the Waltons provide one of the more interesting situations of this fall’s television series. It is different from any other show on the air which does not necessarily make it good. "The Waltons" has no excitement and no glamour. It is a story about simple people – a large family of three generations living at the foot of The Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia during the Depression of the 1930."

       A little more favorable, but still it fell in the category of many other reviews which asked "Who will want to watch a series about poor people eating possum, swilling moonshine, and scratching out a living in the backwoods of Virginia during The Great Depression?"

      The answer? Huge number of viewers. You – the audience. You found the series, liked it enough to come back the following week, liked it enough to tell your friends, liked it enough to write letters of support to CBS, and by the end of the season the series had risen to the Number One position in the ratings.

      We went on the air in September. Most of the TV critics predicted a quick cancellation. Who, they continued to ask would watch a sprawling poverty-stricken backwoods family, swilling moonshine, feuding, and fighting, marrying each other and singing old Baptist hymns? Who would watch?

                  THE PEOPLE WATCHED!

      And by December we were the Number One show in the ratings and we stayed there for several years.

      Beginning in 1972 the series was seen on Thursday nights on CBS by an average of fifty million viewers in the United States. It was also seen in Canada and Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Fiji and in Ecuador, to mention only a few of the countries where it became popular.

       The series was awarded six Emmy awards, six Christopher Awards, The Golden Globe Award from the Foreign Press Association, The People’s Choice Award, and the highest award given in broadcast journalism: The coveted Peabody Award from the University of Georgia. The series received commendations from the Council of Christians and Jews, The Society of Southern Baptists, The Religious Public Relations Council of the United Methodist Church, and the Church o0f Latter-Day Saints. One Sunday we went beyond my wildest expectations. In a magazine called "Twin Circle," which is the voice of the National Catholic Press, a picture of the cast of The Waltons was given equal space with a picture of the Pope. At that point I began to worry that we had gone too far

        For each of us who were involved in the series it has changed our lives. The series became the building block for a brand new production company called Lorimar which went on to produce such memorable series as Dallas, The Blue Knight, and Eight is Enough and another of my long running series, Falcon Crest. For the actors, writers, directors and crew it meant more than ten years of steady employment, dependable income in an industry where such good fortune comes to few people. And even though the series caused some of the actors to be type cast, known only for their Walton roles, it did opoen doors, bring them to prominence in the industry and made their names and faces known wherever in the world there was a television set.

        The show also provided a special kind of relationship to those of us involved. Because of kind of stories we told and because we were all portraying members of a family, we came together as "family" – a relationship that continues right down to today. We attend each other’s wedding, anniversaries, birthdays, funerals, christenings, bar mitzvahs. And so it was that we mourned as a family when we had to say goodbye to such special members of the cast, such beloved actors as Ellen Corby and Will Geer.

　   None of us had thought ahead to the effect the show would have on my family. Because the series was based on the character and structure of my own family it was important that I be true to the way my family members they were portrayed. This required my being in my office near the set all during the day attending casting sessions, network meetings, screenings, story meeting, and then at night writing or rewriting scripts to insure that they gave a honest representation of my family members. This became a burden on my own family when I realized that I was devoting more attention to a television family than my own and that I had not been home for dinner in months. It was a sober and shocking revelation. Believe me I was home for dinner from then on.

         It was a bit of a family affair. Both my daughter, Caroline and my son, Scott were extras in "The Homecoming." And then my son, Scott, a writer, came aboard as a regular contributor to the series. His script, "The Reunion," became the last scheduled episode when we finished our first run.

         To the audience The Waltons brought an hour of television each week that supplied a very personal and intimate experience to a vast number of people here at home and in every country of the world. Even today, forty years after the original first run, the series is being shown on three different cable channels, Hallmark, INSP, and GMA. I receive mountains of mail, sadly more than I can ever answer, and most of the letters say either "Your stories remind me of my own life." Or "This is how I wish my own life had been."

        Change also came to my own family back in Virginia. Because the character were based on my mother and father, my brothers and sisters, they became known by their television names - my brother Cliff as Jason, my Sister Audrey as Erin, Brother Jim became Jim-Bob and so on.

        And my hometown became a tourist destination! Fans from other countries and many other states came looking for the locations we had mentioned on the show such as Rockfish, The Dew Drop Inn, Drusilla’s Pond, the Baldwin residence and The Baptist Church and The Walton Museum.

       The Hamner home is today listed on the Register of Historic Homes in Virginia and is owned by a local family. The house was a "company house" built in the 20’s and needed repair. Pam Rutherford, the present owner, renovated it and refurnished it and today there is a tour of it for a modest fee.

       One of my favorite memories came one day after the series has become a hit. I often phoned my mother on Thursday nights right after the show to see how she felt about what she had seen, and her responses were always favorable. And then one day when I called, she spoke with me for a moment and then said, "I can’t talk long. There’s this nice young couple here. They’ve come all the way from Ireland and they just love the show!"

        There’s even a Walton Mountain B and B directly in front of the old home place, an excellent home away from home if you are staying overnight in Schuyler. It is attractive and comfortably furnished, the food is great and an extensive collection of Walton memorabilia is available (including autographed copies of "Good Night John Boy"

　   There are two celebrations of the 40th Anniversary coming up in September. On Friday, September 28th there will be the traditional reunion of the Walton International Fan Club, hosted by President Carolyn Grinnell. As usual many cast members will be in attendance giving fan and actors an opportunity to mingle and Carolyn has promised a surprise or two. The party will be held at:

                    6:oo pm at The Holiday Inn
                       Burbank Media Center,
                    The South Pacific Ballroom
                    150 East Angeleno Avenue
                         Burbank, Ca. 91502

        The dinner is sold out, but occasionally there are cancellations. To see if any spaces do become available call Carolyn at 336-993-2752 or her e-mail at
thewaltonsinternationalfanclub@mail.com

         The following evening, Saturday September 29th there will be another celebration of our 40th Anniversary. Celebrating Family and Education, the proceeds will go to Kami Colter’s Environmental Charter School. Hosted by William Keck, Senior Editor at "TV Guide," the event will be held at The Wilshire Eubell Theater beginning at 6 o’clock.

     For ticket or further information visit the event’s website
                      www.waltons40th.com      　

      So come and join us at either or both of these celebrations. Some of you have already made arrangement to be with us. People are have already made plans to travel from Australia, Canada, Germany and England as well as many of our own states. Many cast members will appear at both parties. I will attend both of these events and look forward to seeing you.
　
Warm Walton Wishes
Earl Hamner

Twinkle Twinkle Movie Star!

                                                  Part One

            In 1939 an unlikely event came to our part of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Hollywood visited the Spencer’s Mountain area and for the first time we back country folks came face to face with the rich, the famous, with movie stars whose faces and names were known all over the world!

           I was fifteen years old. Paramount Studios was making a film called "Virginia," a highly romantic and utterly unreal picture of rural life in our area in the late thirties. The location filming was being shot about six miles from my hometown in a village named Howardsville. I knew Howardsville pretty well. It was the meeting place of the James and the Rockfish River and the bridge at the edge of town led to Buckingham County where my father’s people, as tobacco planters, had settled originally and where cousins to the second and third degree still lived. We often spent our Sundays over there visiting relatives and always stopped in Howardsville to see a novelty – an albino squirrel which was kept in a big wire cage in the yard of a home along the main street.

         Another family coincidence was that at the top of the mountain above the town was an area called Mount Alto. My Uncle Curtis Gianinni, my mother’s oldest brother, had a farm there which was destined to be immortalized in the film "Virginia."

         Once news that the filming was underway, a whole pack of us youngsters hitchhiked down the Rockfish River Road to see what was going on. What was going on was HOLLYWOOD! And there were STARS!

         An encampment had been set up consisting of private dressing rooms for the cast, limousines to deliver them from the Farmington Country Club in Charlottesville where they were housed, camera trucks, costume trucks, food trucks, make up trailers.

        And - Oh the stars! In that part of the country we were just coming out of the tail end of The Great Depression. It had been a grim time and our day-to-day lives had seldom encountered such glamour and luster as the movies had celebrated. And suddenly right there in front of us were stars and they were giving off a glow. We country folks were in awe of such beautiful people. When they were not on camera they took it easy sitting in directors chairs, chatting among themselves, studying their scripts, giving autographs or going back and forth to their individual dressing rooms. There was an air about them. They moved with ease and grace. They were dressed in fashionable clothing. The ladies were gorgeous, the men were handsome. To those of us Blue Ridge folk they could have been gods and goddesses.

       Madeleine Carol, a stunningly beautiful actress was being filmed supposedly arriving by train from New York.

      Miss Carol was of British birth. In her time she was one of the highest paid female actors in the business. At one point, after the death of her sister during a German air raid, she gave up acting to entertain troops in the European Theater of Operations.

      In the movie "Virginia" she was portraying a member of an aristocratic family returning to the old plantation to dispose of it. She had planned to make quick work of it until she fell in love with a local gentleman farmer, Fred MacMurray.

     MacMurray in his career starred in over one hundred films, the most famous being "Double Indemnity" in which he starred with Barbara Stanwick. He is best known today as the father in the long running television series "My Three Sons."

      In "Virginia" soon after falling for Fred MacMurray, Miss Carol meets a rich northerner, Sterling Hayden. She wavers between the two men, as one reviewer notes, "while the audience settles in for a good long nap."

    In real life Madeleine Carol was to marry Sterling Hayden, according to studio publicist known as "The most beautiful man in the movies."

      A man of action, he was always in love with the sea and ran away from home at seventeen to join the navy. He distinguished himself for his military service during World War Two.

      Day after day we country folk flocked to Howardsville to watch the filming. At one point my Uncle Curtis and some of the local men were hired to work as extras, portraying farmer types sitting on a bench outside a county store. Curtis also made another extra couple of bucks by allowing the crew to film a sow in his pigpen that had just given birth to eighteen piglets.

     When the film premiered in Charlottesville we all were there. Sadly the shot of Uncle Curtis had been edited out of the movie, but there was still occasion for elation. When the shot of Curtis’s pig came on screen, we rose in a body and shouted, "There’s Curtis’ pig!"


                       TWINKLE TWINKLE MOVIE STAR!

                                                 Part Two

      During my early years at NBC radio I worked with a good many stars, especially on the showcase NBC THEATER OF THE AIR where we adapted classic stage plays to a radio format. Most of the stars of our shows tended to be actors from the New York stage, often not well known except to the theater going public. But when I came to Hollywood I became exposed to a good many film stars.

      Fred MacMurry, Sterling Hayden and Madeleine Carroll, the first movie stars I ever laid eyes on, were stars of the old school. It was a lifetime later before I came into meaningful, personal contact with Hollywood stars.

     During the filming of "Spencer’s Mountain" I was introduced to Henry Fonda and Maureen O"Hara but I cannot say we actually worked together. I would run into Fonda at Delbert and Ann Mann’s Christmas Party each year. Later when we were casting "The Waltons" I offered him the role of John Walton, but he rightfully pointed out that the star of the series was John-Boy and in his words "I’m too old to play second fiddle to a fifteen year old boy."

     One star I later came to know well was Patricia Neal. She was a joy to know and to work with, and there is a story about her in the archives of this blog that you might enjoy.

     On "The Waltons" each and every actor was a star, but they were and are still young people and I am talking here about a special group of actors. Most of them tended to have some special quality that set them apart, a kind of luminous quality that the camera liked. Most of them were under contract to one of the major studios, their lives and reputations closely attended and guarded, their careers carefully crafted. The studios groomed them to be stars, paid them outrageous salaries, nurtured, and exploited them all the while their image was being carefully built by publicity agents. Bette Davis had that star quality, so did Barbara Stanwick, Katherine Hepburn, Lana Turner, Dame Judith Evans, Joan Crawford, Jane Wyman and Ingrid Bergman, to name just a few. John Wayne had it and so did Jimmy Stewart, Ronald Regan, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and Lawrence Olivier.

      It was when we cast Miss Jane Wyman as Angela Channing, the owner of Falcon Crest, a prosperous vineyard in the Napa Valley that I came to know a star from that special galaxy. And from her I learned a little bit about stardom, what it is like to be a star, what makes them shine and how they guard that luminous quality.

      Miss Wyman was born Sarah Jane Mayfield in St. Joseph Missouri on January 5, 1917. Raised by foster parents she dropped out of high school at age 15 and came to Hollywood where she found work as a manicurist and switchboard operator before she started obtaining small parts in films. Small roles led to more important ones and her big break came in 1945 when she appeared in "The Lost Weekend" with Ray Milland. A year later she was nominated for an Academy Award for her work in  "The Yearling." She was now able to choose her own films and was finally on her way to true stardom in such films as "Johnny Belinda", "The Glass Menagerie" "Magnificent Obsession" and "The Blue Veil" to mention only a few.

      Miss Wyman married Ronald Regan in 1940 and they became the darlings of the press with every minute of their lives documented by the reigning queens of show biz gossip, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. They were divorced in 1949 due to what has been suggested as "political differences."

      Miss Wyman was our first choice when it came to casting the matriarch, Angela Gioberti, owner of Falcon Crest Winery. I was already on location in the Napa Valley, but a day or so before we were to start filming, I went to the Sacramento Airport to met her and bring her to the valley.

     To meet her in a manner commensurate with her stardom I had rented the longest, most impressive limo I could find. She smiled a greeting, stepped inside the limo, and after a few moments she launched into a discussion of her character that was right on target. Her remarks about the script were knowledgeable, informed and useful. Stars know what they’re doing! At one moment a gorgeous Napa Valley vineyard caught my eye and, I happened to look out of the window of the limo. She touched me on my arm and said, "Don’t look away when Mother’s talking. You might miss something!" From that moment on I knew she expected my undivided attention.

      On the way to Napa I told her we had made arrangements for her to stay at the local country club. She said, "No, I want to stay where the crew stays." I rearranged her living accommodations so she lived at the Holiday Inn with the rest of us. It was a sound move. It put her in touch with the technicians, drivers, make-up people and costume people who would be looking after her. They liked her for being so democratic. That she was, but she in no time knew the name of every person on the crew and they adored her. It was a sincere gesture, but it was also a smart one.

     Someone once asked why an actor of her standing, a woman who had once been married to Ronald Regan, someone who had no financial worries, would want to come out of retirement and take on the heavy burden of starring in a television series. For one thing Jane’s friends Barbara Stanwick and Loretta Young had already made such a move and it had not been professionally harmful. My own contention was that she was lonesome for the world she had known and probably bored with sitting alone in her luxurious apartment in Santa Monica gazing out to sea.

      After the location filming was finished we returned to Los Angeles for the interior scenes, which we filmed at the CBS Studios in Studio City. Shortly I was to have a revelation about stardom.

      I needed a private conversation with the lady so I called her and said that we needed to have a chat, and that I had made reservations at Jimmy’s, a restaurant in Beverly Hills.

      "Good," she said, "They know me there."

      I added, "And I asked for a table in the back so we could talk without interruption."

     "Call them back and tell them to give us my usual table," she said. "I never sit in the back of the room." Star talk. Hollywood royalty.

      At the dinner we were seated at the Number One table and managed not a word of the discussion we were supposed to have because of the friends and fans that stopped by to say hello or to ask for autographs. We discussed many things, but essentially Miss Wyman was a private person. Once when we were having dinner and I had more wine that then was wise, I asked "What was it like being married to a President of the United States." She answered, "I never discuss the gentleman."

      "Falcon Crest" was fun and our cast was rich with great actors. Jane was without doubt THE star, but we also had such exceptional stars as Susan Sullivan and Robert Foxworth, David Selby, Ana-Alicia, and Lorenzo Lamas, Margaret Ladd, Abby Dalton and Chao-Le Chi. There was a feeling of camaraderie on the set, no professional jealousy over who gets the best lines, at least that I was aware of, and a sense of mutual respect for their fellow actors and members of the crew.

      Excellent guest stars were attracted to the series. We were a hit, but big stars also came because Jane was our star and they knew certain standards would be set. Mel Ferrar became a running character, as did Caeser Romero. It became "the thing to do" for stars to take guest starring roles. Gina Lollobrigiga came over from Italy for a series of episodes. Kim Novak left her hide-away in Big Sur long enough to lend her enchanting presence.

      One of the most controversial stars to join us was Lana Turner. Lana was a legendary actor in her time, first discovered at a soda fountain by the owner of The Hollywood Reporter. After his recommendation to a producer she soon became cast in a film. Known at first as "the sweater girl" she quickly became a major star playing opposite such male stars as Clark Gable and John Garfield. She was a skilled actress but she was equally known for her eight marriages and a messy affair in later life with a gangster name Johnny Stampano.

     When Jane learned that I had cast Lana she said, "I wish you had mentioned you were casting her."

     "Why?" I asked. "She’ll be good for the ratings. What’s wrong with casting her?"

     "She’s not a lady," Jane replied.

      Jane was polite, but distant when Lana came aboard. At one point the CBS photographer asked if he could take a shot of the two of them together.

     Jane was in her chair on one side of the sound stage waiting for the next scene to be shot. Lana was seated clear across the stage some distance away. I explain to Jane what the photographer wanted and Jane said, "Sure, bring her over."

      Trying a bit of hillbilly diplomacy, I next went to Lana and explained that the photographer wanted a shot of her with Jane.

       "Sure," replied Lana obligingly, "Bring her over."

       In the end the photographer got his picture. He took it just as the scene between the two of the ladies was ending and they were walking off the sound stage in chilly silence.

       Although I enjoyed "The Waltons" it had been a demanding series. During its long run, in addition to Falcon Crest I had also created and produced two other series, "Boone" and "Apple’s Way" which had limited runs. I was tired and so I left "Falcon Crest" at the end of the fifth season.

       Jane and I remained friends. I would stop and see her occasionally on the set, and we always visited at Harry and Pattie Harris’ Christmas party which was a tradition and which Jane always attended with her daughter, Maureen Regan. Toward the end of the series health problems made it necessary for her to miss some filming. It must have been painful for her because she had always been a "trooper," and dedicated to her work. When the series was over she moved to Rancho Mirage, and while we spoke occasionally by phone I was never to see her again. When I received the news that she had died I felt, not only that a star had fallen, but also that I had lost a friend.

A Poem called "Earl"

Amigos!

　
Not long ago a friend sent me a copy of a poem that pleased me from the first moment I laid eyes on it. The title? "Earl" Well, how could I possibly not love it no matter what came after the title!

I was even more moved when I read the body of the poem. Many of us have seen the National Geographic documentary in which killer whales prowl the northern ocean shores hunting for seals.　It a chilling thing to witness, even on film, especially if the seal is a baby and is often endlessly tossed into the air, flipped over and over as if for sport before it is consumed.

In accepting the Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1950 William Faulkner said, in part, "I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure; that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock overhanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will be one more sound’ that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.

The poet Louis Jenkins has articulated this same concept, in even fewer words, and what delights this old geezer especially is that his poem is called "Earl."

                                                                 Earl

                                                A poem by Louis Jenkins

                                                       From His Book

                                                 "North of the Cities"

　

In Sitka, because they are fond of them,

People have named the seals. Every seal

is named Earl because they are killed one

after another by the Orcas, the killer

whale; seal bodies are tossed left and right

into the air. "At least he didn’t get

Earl," someone says. And sure enough

after a time, that same friendly

bewhiskered face bobs to the surface.

It’s Earl again. Well, how else are you

to live except by denial, by some

palatable fiction, some little song to

sing while the inevitable, the black and

white blindsiding fact, comes hurtling

toward you out of the deep?

　
Mr. Jenkins graciously gave me permission to reprint the poem here. I hope it will encourage you to read more of his work for he is an exceptional man. He is a prose poet from Enid, Oklahoma and has lived in Deluth, Minnesota for over thirty years with his wife, Ann. His work has been published in many literary magazines and anthologies. If you were lucky you might have even heard him reading one of his poems on A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION. The poem "Earl" is from his book "North of the Cities" and is available from Amazon.com.

 Until next time when this bewhiskered face bobs to the surface It’s Old Earl!

Paradise On Five Dollars a Day

April 30, 2012

Amigos!

      Sorry to have been out of touch for a bit but I have had several distractions. There were some short stories that wouldn’t let me alone until I got them down on paper. I attempted a huge writing project but I got in over my head and had to face the fact that I wasn’t man enough for the job. One other, a more pleasant chore, was to gather and organize “my papers” which the Library of Virginia has consented to house and to nurture and to make available to one and all. There is pride!

So back to BETWEEN YOU, ME AND THE LAMP POST. I’m calling this entry:

”PARADISE ON FIVE DOLLARS A DAY!”

       Every writer yearns for an inexpensive place were he can enjoy privacy and where he can write without interruption. Aware of that need, at this time of year, writer’s magazines arrive, not only with helpful tips on how to find an agent, how to conquer writer’s block, or the surest pathway to publication, but also with advertisements for writers retreats. Descriptions of such havens tend to sound more like poetry than invitations to a place to get some serious work done.

      Recent ads that I came across were: “Private room on the banks of the river Seine, only an hour from Paris!” “ Come to our mountain cottage for silence, solitude, and the sight of deer grazing in the meadow!” Or my favorite - “Old Virginia farmhouse on the James River in the Blue Ridge foothills, explore nearby vineyards and local history.”

      I once rented such a retreat. Following my graduation from the University of Cincinnati I had the good luck to land a job as a radio writer at WLW, the major radio station in the state.

     It was a terrific time in my life, a transition from student to professional writer, a time of growth, of learning, of forming friendships that would last a lifetime. Cincinnati was home to some of the most beautiful girls in the country and I fell in love with each and every one of them.

     WLW paid handsomely, and I led a frugal life that allowed me to save a sizeable nest egg.

     I once had the good fortune to interview Katherine Anne Porter. When I asked her to describe her writing process, she said, “Somewhere out of experience, out of travel, life, the past, or just imagination, an idea seizes me and won’t let go. I don’t act on it immediately but put it away to cook. After a while faces, language, customs, traits, colors, events, all come together around that idea like iron filings around a magnet. Even then I don’t begin writing, until one day the book tells me it is ready to be written and that is when I begin.”

    I knew what she was telling me. I had reached that point. The novel I had dreamed for years was clamoring somewhere in my brain - demanding to be written.

    I quit my job at WLW and rented a small cottage I found advertised in the “Writer’s Digest” column called “Paradise on Five Dollars a Day.”

    I rented “Paradise” sight unseen through the mail from the owner, a lady named B. B. Caverly. The ad described a small stone cottage at the foot of Rich Mountain in the heart of the Ouchita Mountains of Arkansas. The ad went on to mention that the cottage had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. To compensate for the lack of such amenities, Miss Caverly informed me that food has a special flavor when cooked over an open fire and there were fish in the stream nearby for the price of a worm.

   I traveled by bus to the small town of Mena, Arkansas, and spent the first night in a charming old hotel called The Antlers. Miss Caverly, my new landlady, called for me there the next morning. There was a Texas twang in her speech and her dark hair and chinquapin eyes made me think she might be partly American Indian. Many folks in that part of the country do have Indian ancestry and will quickly and proudly boast of what percentage of Osage or Cherokee or Comanche blood runs in their veins.

   After a stop for groceries, Miss Caverly drove a distance out of town until we came to a deserted stretch of highway. She parked her pickup truck on the roadside and led the way down a narrow path through some underbrush. I carried my duffel bag and the groceries. She carried my portable typewriter. We crossed an abandoned railroad track where weeds grew up to our knees between the rusted rails and the rotting wooden ties.

   Past the railroad tracks she led me to a fallen tree trunk. It turned out to be the only access to the other side of a small creek. I wobbled across the log after her and made it successfully to the other side where a six foot long black snake reared up in the path ahead.

   I recoiled, ready to abandon “Paradise” and rush back to civilization, but the lady said, “Don’t be scared. It’s a good snake. They eat the poisonous ones! Practically wiped out the water moccasins!”

   Slightly reassured I followed her up the mountain to the cottage. It really was as charming as promised. There was a wide veranda across the front that afforded a fine view facing Rich Mountain. There was a kitchen, a living room with fireplace and a bedroom. A suitable distance out in the woods was an outhouse and in the side yard was the cooking facility – a barbeque grill made of the same native stone as the house.

   Before she left, Miss Caverly suggested that I not go out after dark, or if I did to carry a strong flashlight. She then went on to say that the cottage was in the middle of something called “a snake run.” She explained that the snake population at the top of the mountain had no water supply, and they came down to the creek whenever they got thirsty, and that the cottage happened to be right smack in the middle of their path.

   At that point it crossed my mind that I might be sacrificing my life in order to write my book, but I bravely decided to risk a week or two before returning to civilization.

   Being an old country boy I was accustomed to the shrill and creepy sounds that come to life as soon as the sun goes down. But I had usually snuggled under the covers with the comfort of being surrounded by a sprawling family of brothers and sister, a protective mother and father. Now I was alone in strange country and the sounds were not familiar like the old hoot owl from back home, or the sleepy lowing of a cow. Out here in nowhere the night sounds reached a crescendo of screams, screeches, and howls. On top of that I was convinced there was a water moccasin under the bed. I slept not a wink.

   Gradually I grew used to being a hermit and facing the challenges of my paradise. I received my mail by tetter-tottering across that cursed log to get to a mail box on the highway. I hiked the four miles into town once in a while when supplies ran low. No matter how many times I made the trip I was never comfortable walking across the fallen log and the risk of falling into the moccasin-infested water.

   As primitive as my cottage was, it provided a perfect atmosphere in which to write. I had no human visitors. Occasionally a deer would wander across the property or a cottontail would hop by going about its business. There was no telephone, no radio and the only sounds were the songs from a variety of birds that came and went.

   By the end of that summer I had finished more than half of a manuscript that I had first conceived in the hedgerows of Normandy. It was to become my first published book and to this day I have to thank Miss Caverly for placing an ad in “The Writer’s Digest” titled “Paradise on Five Dollars A Day.”

A BACKWARD LOOK

My roots in the Virginia earth are deep. My mother’s people came here from the walled city of Lucca in the Tuscany region of Italy. They came as indentured servants to Thomas Jefferson who intended to start a wine industry in Virginia. They brought cuttings from their vines but the grapes did not adapt to the Virginia soil, and withered away.

Not so the Gianinni clan. On land granted to them by Mr. Jefferson they became farmers in the shadow of Monticello Mountain. They prospered in Albemarle County and intermarried with a group of footwashing Baptists.

At the same time my father’s people had emigrated from Wales, leaving their village of Hanmer near the northern border of Wales and England. They had acquired land along the James River and were raising tobacco. They tended to be tall and thin, a sentimental crew, who loved their families, and their wine, and who had to be goaded by their wives to attend church, but once there they could out sing the clearest and loudest voice in the choir.

Somehow descendants of these two clans, in the Great American Melting Pot tradition, found each other, married, and their descendants, the families of my mother and my father, early in the new century moved to a small village in Nelson County to work in the soapstone quarries and mill. When my Grandfather Hamner developed polio, and was no longer able to take care of his family, my own father, at twelve years of age quit school, and took a job toting water to workers in the soapstone quarries at Schuyler. My mother graduated from high school but, as she used to claim, she went through high school eight more times while coaching each of her children through to graduation.

Of their eight children seven of them were normal, but one was strange. That was me.

I was an odd looking boy, leaping to six feet tall when I was fourteen, all long, skinny wrists, unruly red hair, shoulders slumped in an attempt to lean closer to my companions.


Earl and friends at Schuyler High School. 1939.

We were in the midst of the Great Depression of the Twenties and Thirties. Like our neighbors we were self-sufficient but cash money was almost non-existent. And I had a secret, strange and impossible dream.

Years later, when I was writing the screenplay for my television movie “The Homecoming” I tried to put into words some of those alien, confused, and mysterious yearnings.

In the play, Olivia, John-Boy’s mother has just discovered a tablet the boy has hidden under his mattress. She demands to know what is in it. He replies:
“You know what’s in this tablet, Mama? All my secret thoughts- how I feel, and what I think about. Things I never told anybody ‘till now. What it’s like late at night to hear a whippoorwill call and its mate call back, the rumble of the midnight train crossen the trestle at Rockfish, watchen water go by in the creek and knowen that some day it’ll reach the ocean and wonderen if I’ll ever see the ocean. Sometimes I hike over to Route 29 and watch the people in their cars and wagons go by and I wonder what their lives are like. Things stay in my mind, Mama. I can’t forget anything. It all gets bottled up and sometimes I feel like a crazy man. Can’t sleep or rest till I rush off up here and write it in that tablet.

“I do vow,” replied Olivia.

“If things had been different, Mama, I think I could have done somethen with my life. What I would have liked, Mama, was to have tried . . .to be .. a writer!
“If that’s what you want, couldn’t you still try? “ Asked Olivia.

“It wouldn’t be right,” he answered. “Not in these times. It takes a college education to be a writer and even if we had the money it wouldn’t be right to risk it all on me. And anyway I can’t disappoint my daddy. He’s got his heart set on me taking up a trade.”

Olivia replied, “He just want you to know how to make a living.”
“I could sure never do that scribblen things down in a tablet.”

But time would prove me wrong. Through the intervention of Laura Horsley, the wife of our company doctor I received a scholarship to the University of Richmond. But that was only half the battle. The scholarship paid for tuition only. There was still food and board, textbooks to be bought, fees of several kinds. Through the generosity of three of my father’s sisters I was taken into their home in Richmond and given food and lodging. Our local Baptist minister gave me a crash course in Latin, one of the requirements the University needed before I could qualify to accept the scholarship. My father ruefully parted with the white shirt he had planned to be buried in, and my mother spent the money she earned from selling eggs and buttermilk to buy me a suit from Sears and Roebuck. She showed a picture of it to me in the catalogue before it arrived – “the fabric is of green herringbone, with vest to match and an extra pair of trousers.” And it cost nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents. Took every cent of my mother’s buttermilk money!

I entered the University of Richmond in the autumn of 1940. I was unsure of myself, in an alien world, among other boys who were obviously more sophisticated in their manner and dress. The largest city I had visited until now was Charlottesville, usually on a Saturday morning when country people clogged Main Street in their horse and buggies. I had never ridden a streetcar, driven a car, or talked on a telephone.

But I was on time for my first class, and the strangeness gradually went away. The tall boy with the red hair wearing the green herringbone suit was on his way! A writer was in the making!

That was the autumn of 1940. And just recently, decades later, I received the following stunning announcement.”

LIBRARY OF VIRGINIA ANNOUNCEMENT

Earl Hamner to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award

Nelson County native Earl Hamner, writer of novels, television shows, and movies and the force behind the semiautobiographical television series The Waltons, will receive the 2011 Literary Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Virginia at the 14th Annual Literary Awards Celebration on October 15, 2011.

Hamner grew up in Schuyler, Virginia, with seven brothers and sisters. From an early age he exhibited a love of words and writing. When he was six his poem, “My Dog” was published on the Children’s Page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. His potential was recognized and he received encouragement from his teachers and members of the tight-knit community.

Hamner received a scholarship to the University of Richmond, but midway through his sophomore year Hamner was drafted. He spent time learning to drive tanks and diffuse mines, but his ability to type landed him in the Quartermaster Corps. While in the U.S. Army Hamner began to submit stories for publication.

After his discharge in March 1946 he returned to Richmond and briefly worked for local radio station WMBG. In the fall of 1946 Hamner enrolled in the school of broadcasting at the University of Cincinnati and graduated in 1948.

Shortly after graduation Hamner went to New York City and found work as a radio writer for NBC. His first book, Fifty Roads to Town, was published by Random House in 1953 and in 1961 his novel Spencer’s Mountain was published by Dial Press.

He began writing scripts for episodes of the Twilight Zone and CBS Playhouse. The film rights to Spencer’s Mountain were purchased by Warner Bros. and Hamner was on his way as a success in Hollywood. In 1970 The Homecoming was published by Random House and became a CBS special starring Patricia Neal and later was the basis of the long-running and hugely popular television series The Waltons. Hamner garnered additional fame as a writer for Falcon Crest, a prime time soap opera, which aired on CBS from 1981 to 1990.

Hamner has received numerous honors including:

TV-Radio Writers Award (1967)

George Foster Peabody Award for Distinguished Journalism (1972)

Virginian of the Year Award from Virginia Press Association (1973)

An Emmy for Best Drama Series for The Waltons (1974)

National Association of Television Executives Man of the Year Award (1974)

Virginian Association of Broadcasters Award (1975)

Frederic Ziv Award from the University of Cincinnati for Outstanding Achievement in Telecommunication

P.S. I know I'm shameless, but I couldn't resist adding that my new book ODETTE, A GOOSE OF TOULOUSE, has just been published and is selling briskly on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.

And I just received word that a new short story, 'The Woods Colt," has been selected for inclusion in an anthology of mystery and fantasy to be published in the fall.
Warm Virginia greetings by way of California!

Earl