We didn’t watch this show very much when I was a kid, so I don’t remember a whole lot about it, other than the way every episode ended with everyone going to sleep: “Good-night John-Boy”, “Goodnight Grandpa” “Good-night Mary Ellen”, etc. Those two-name “names” was a source of much amusement to my classmates and me, and more often than not we’d use “John-Boy” or “Jim-Bob” as a euphemism for someone who was uneducated, “backward” or (rather unkindly) anyone from the South. Nobody in our area had those types of names. We all had middle names, and some Catholics (those who went through Confirmation, anyway) even had a third name, but you never – and I mean NEVER – heard them uttered together. The only time we’d even acknowledge that a person had more than one name was when their mom was yelling at them because she was angry: “Jonathan Patrick Simpson, why didn’t you clean your room!?!
We – a lot of my classmates and I – couldn’t relate to The Waltons. There were too many kids, for one. They had seven children – seven! The only family we knew of with that many kids was either the Von Trappe Family Singers (from The Sound of Music) or The Brady Bunch, not exactly ideal comparisons. My own family consisted of just four kids, and the limit seemed to be five. Anything past five and you no longer had a family, you had a litter. Having too many children was seen as a throwback to a barbarian past, when people would push out children like puppies because they died so often. Who would do such a thing in modern-day America? There was simply no NEED for that many kids – it’s not like we all worked on a farm and every extra hand was needed.
That’s another thing we couldn’t relate to – location. These people lived in a fairly rural area, the patriarch of the family running a lumber mill. I grew up in suburban Denver, and have never actually been inside a lumber mill. Everybody I knew was in the same situation – we lived in or near a large city, and the kinds of issues that develop in cities are a lot different from those in a small town or rural area. Dealing with a strike at a plant was more common for us than getting all worked up over the latest stranger passing through.
The basic story lines such as finding love or a job or coping with death – those are universal issues that everyone deals with. What was different was the context. It was difficult to relate to characters that had such different prospects for their lives. None of us ever anticipated working as a farmer or a lumberjack; hard physical labor as a method to support oneself was, frankly, inefficient. (I’d bet good money that most of my classmates from the late 70’s have worked in urban offices for a sizeable portion of their life.) We could recognize early-model cars and trucks, but none of us ever spun wool, or (as in the episode I watched) pulled water from a well. And putting food on the table didn’t follow the same process: we didn’t go out hunting for turkey; we’d simply go to the supermarket.
What we did with our spare time was also quite different. Some of the women would spend hours knitting or sewing; I still don’t know anybody who does this. As a hobby, maybe. As a regular occurrence? No way. I once had an aunt ask me why my mother wasn’t darning her socks. If I wasn’t so confused by her even asking me that question I would have laughed at her. Darn socks? Why would anyone do that? The image that brought up was just too funny – it’s not like we make our own wool socks now. Most socks today simply can’t be sewn back together; they wear out because they’re really thin. Got a hole in your sock? Throw it out and get a new one!
If for no other reason than to see how life was lived “back in the day”, The Waltons is good television. But trying to relate the way some of those folks lived to the present day – that’s still hard to do. It was easier to disassociate oneself from another mid-70’s drama, Little House on the Prairie, which took place in the late 19th century. The Waltons, however, was situated in a time period much closer to our own. Electric lights, indoor plumbing – these would have been luxuries in Little House, but they’re standard aspects of life for most of the people in The Waltons, just as it is standard now. That makes watching The Waltons really weird sometimes – it’s not our time, but it’s not far from it. I know it’s just a television show, but while spending an hour in the 19th century is clearly a fantasy, the 1930’s has too much we are already familiar with to dismiss it so casually. It’s weird! Give it another 20 to 30 years and it may be so far outside the realm of what’s familiar that it too will take on the guise of fantasy. I still don’t know anybody named Jim Bob, though.