ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604290060
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Below
HUNDREDS lined up to meet ``Waltons'' cast members Saturday and pay homage to a simpler, more innocent era.
Anybody who think the words "family" and "values" have been ground down to meaninglessness should watch when people meet the creator and former cast members of "The Waltons."
Old-timey kinship was no mere political buzz-phrase when more than 200 people waited for hours at Vinton's Dogwood Festival to get autographs from writer Earl Hamner Jr. and the grown-up actors who once played Walton kids Elizabeth, Jason, Erin, Ben and Toni.
"You just don't find many shows like that these days on TV," said Roanoker Tommy Stump, standing in the autograph line Saturday with his wife and sons.
"It's decent," said his wife, Debbie.
Added her husband, "It makes you feel good that families were like that."
Were was the operative word.
"I think more and more people need the reassurance of looking back to when the family really was a source of security," said the Virginia-born Hamner, now in his early 70s and living in California.
With the shattering of so many families, "What we've done is to break the things that civilize us and are handed down from one generation to another," Hamner said as he penned greetings on Walton memorabilia at the Vinton War Memorial.
Like the innocent Southern small-towners on the "Andy Griffith Show," the sprawling rural tribe of Waltons comforts people. "It's either the family they had," Hamner said, "or the family they wish they had."
Just then, Everett Reed of Vinton showed him 1940s portraits of Reed's Rockbridge County kin, a large, handsome family that grew up in the same years as the fictional Waltons and who, like them, struggled through the Great Depression and heard World War II break out over the radio in their Blue Ridge Mountain farmhouse.
The Walton cast members agreed to be grand marshals in Vinton's festival parade after Roanoke Times marketer and festival president Mike Gilmore and his Walton-loving son, Jake, 18, met them at the Walton Mountain museum in the Nelson County village of Schuyler.
The Gilmores know Earl Hamner through Hamner's sister, Audrey Hamner, an American Red Cross bloodmobile promoter who lives in Vinton. "Then," Audrey Hamner said, "it turned out Earl could come." Their sister, Nancy Jamerson of Richmond, came too, as did brother Jim Hamner of the family stomping grounds at Schuyler, and a Hamner nephew.
Earl Hamner patterned the Waltons after all of them and their Blue Ridge childhoods.
The best-known Waltons weren't there, such as actor Richard Thomas, who played John Boy, an Earl Hamner-like young writer. Nor was Grandma Esther Walton. Ellen Corby, the feisty veteran actress who held that role for many years, was at home in California recovering from a stroke. Will Geer, who played Grandpa Zeb Walton, died in 1978.
Still, Saturday was a Walton feast for fans like Carolyn Grinnell, president of the Waltons International Fan Club. She squired two reporters from the BBC around Vinton. They were doing a feature for the many British fans of the 1972-81 CBS show, which is broadcast in several countries and on the Family channel in this country twice each weekday.
"I've been in Grandma Walton's house in California!'' gushed Grinnell, who runs a day-care operation out of her Kernersville, N.C., home and has made friends with Ellen Corby.
It all began, Grinnell said, while satisfying her daily craving of Walton shows. "I found myself wishing I could have a cup of coffee with Mom Walton." Watching the lovable clan daily, she said, "has almost a cleansing effect. ... They have such high morals."
She spent her 1994 birthday having not only a cup of coffee but dinner at Sardi's in New York with Michael Learned, the actress who played mother Olivia Walton.
The Walton actors get together for birthdays, baby showers and other major life events. Here's an update on the ones who were in Vinton:
* Jon Walmsley (John Boy's little brother Jason) shuttles between Los Angeles and Nashville as a guitarist and songwriter. He was 16 when he went on "The Waltons" and says he appreciates the show more now than he did as a rebellious teen-ager.
Being an icon of wholesome Americana is "a big responsibility. I have to say it's a lot easier now that I'm 40. Now I'm in a position to be thinking about what my daughter is watching on television."
People still recognize Walmsley, with his trademark red hair and freckles, but have trouble figuring out why. "Sometimes they're not sure if they went to high school with me."
* Lisa Harrison Walmsley, who played Jason's fiancee, Toni, in 1981, is still a performer. She married Jon Walmsley, and they have a daughter, 21/2-year-old Brighton.
* Kami Cotler teaches in a Central Virginia high school and is married to an artist and comic writer. Where in Central Virginia? "Central Virginia," she said again, not angrily but determined to protect her privacy. At 30, she has long auburn hair and still looks like Elizabeth, the littlest Walton with the long red pigtails.
* Eric Scott, who portrayed one of the younger Walton boys, Ben, is vice president of a messenger company in California's San Fernando Valley. He's 37 and married.
* Mary McDonough, who played middle daughter Erin, is starring in an art-house movie titled "One of Those Nights" and through the Screen Actors Guild counsels parents of child actors on how to give their children normal lives and proper educations. She is 34 and has a daughter.
Vinton accountant Bob Holden had all the actors and the Hamners sign a 1970 paperback copy of Hamner's novel "The Homecoming," which was the genesis of the Walton saga.
"You don't see television like that anymore," said Holden, waiting in line Saturday afternoon. "It had drama. It had humor. It had everything."
LENGTH: Long : 114 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS/Staff. 1. Fans move through theby CNBline to get autographs from "Waltons" actors and creator Earl Hamner
Jr. (right). 2. Jon Walmsley, who played Jason, and Lisa Harrison
Walmsley, his real-life wife and pretend fiancee on the show, only
sang for each other on Saturday. 3. Michelle Biggs, 15, of North
Carolina tries out the product before starting work at the Vinton
Dogwood Festival. color.