A FEW MORE MEMORIES FROM MY EARLY DAYS

GROWING UP A WALTON

Perhaps you remember the TV series The Waltons? The Waltons was an American television series about a family in rural Virginia during the Great Depression and World War II. It was based on the1961 book Spencer's Mountain and the 1963 film of the same name. The series aired from 1972–1981.

The TV series described very closely how I grew up as a child in Rhodelia, Kentucky. Just like the TV series, my grandfather and father operated a sawmill long before it evolved into the building material business that my youngest brother owns today. I used to play at the sawmill exactly like the one pictured below. Going barefoot, I still have a scar on the bottom of my right foot where I stepped on a sharp tin can getting out of a logging truck one day. (Think about that for a minute! Then think about a few copperhead snakes that loved to live under piles of lumber!) 

Just like the Waltons, we lived right next door to the General Store operated by Harold and Verna Vessels who lived above the store. Just like the Waltons, my grandparents were a daily fixture in my life since they lived directly across the road from us and we had full reign of both houses. Just like the Waltons, inside the General Store was the Rhodelia Post Office. In fact, I was born in the house to the right of the store and I used to play with other kids while waiting for the school bus in our yard right behind the gas pumps.  Inside the store was a pot-bellied stove that people would gather around while they waited for the mailman to come. Back then, the mailman brought the school clothes that we had ordered from our yearly Sears and Roebuck Catalogue.  Oddly enough, the mailman even brought live chicks from a hatchery over in Indiana to the farmers in need of multiple chicks to raise for our amazingly fresh cage-free eggs and fried chicken.  

I guess you might say that I am "John Boy" from that TV series. I was the first in my family to graduate from college and like "John Boy" Walton I turned out to be a writer! The Waltons was set during the Great Depression of the early 1930s, however I have always joked that we hadn't heard that the Depression was over in Rhodelia till the 1960s! 

As a teenage seminarian going to high school here in Louisville in 1958, there was a period when I was teased for being a "hick," a "hillbilly" and a "redneck" by my urban classmates. This left me for a period of time "ashamed" of my rural roots. As I got older, I outgrew that youthful "shame!"  Today, I am proud to be from Rhodelia! In fact, I want  to be buried back down there, certainly not up here with the "city slickers" of Louisville! My tombstone sums it up. At the very bottom, it says "Home At Last!"