Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 2, 1991                   TAG: 9103020242
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ben Beagle
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SHE'LL BE COMING BACK TO THE MOUNTAIN ONE OF THESE DAYS

I wish I could remember the name of the stuff, but I'm on deadline and can't sit around waiting for some dumb commercial to come on the tube.

We all know that Ms. Learned played the long-suffering Ma Walton for a long time, and this commercial suggested to me that she had run off again from that bunch on Waltons Mountain.

(You remember the first time she ran off to become a nurse, right?)

I Think Ma Walton came down to the spacious kitchen in the Walton home one morning and started making Danish and eggs benedict for breakfast.

I think Pa Walton came into the kitchen with the galluses on his overalls buttoned wrong and was plainly hung over.

"What's this?" he said. "Danish and eggs benedict again? Really, Olivia, when will you learn that there is a Depression on. We should be eating oatmeal and pone on weekdays and fatback and pone on the weekend."

"If you don't stop running up the bill at Ike Godsey's store, we'll never be able to pay the insurance on the four cars."

"Yea," said Grandpa Walton, who had also buttoned his overalls wrong. "The fathers have eaten Danish and the children's arteries are blocked."

"I'll block you, you old fool," Grandma Walton said. "Go put your clothes on right and get decent."

(The ever-obedient, ever-caring Walton children ate their Danish and eggs benedict in silence. Years later, John-Boy would write about how good his mother's Danish and eggs benedict were.)

"All of you people should be on Phil Donahue's show if it had been invented yet," Ma Walton said. "Sometimes I wonder how I married into a bunch of klutzes like you."

Pa Walton got his galluses on right and sweet talked her, and it looked like Ma's sudden outburst was a passing thing.

The next morning, however, she took the nice little roadster with the rumble seat down to the store to buy fatback and cornmeal.

Ike Godsey was too busy being folksy to notice her making a collect call to an agent in California.

That night, after most of the Waltons had exhausted themselves saying good night, she drove the roadster to Charlottesville and caught a train west.

She left a note in the kitchen:

"You cretins want fatback, you got it."

The Waltons missed her, of course, but as Grandma Walton said, "Truth be told, I never could stand that woman's cooking. Didn't know her fatback from her pheasant under glass."