How Many Family Members Left in Earl Hamners Family
Earl Hamner Jr., Who Created 'The Waltons,' Dies at 92
Earl Hamner Jr., who drew on warm memories of his Depression babyhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to create the enormously popular 1970s tv serial "The Waltons," died on Th in Los Angeles. He was 92.
The crusade was bladder cancer, his daughter, Caroline Hamner, said.
Mr. Hamner was a novelist and television writer with 8 episodes of "The Twilight Zone" to his credit when, in 1971, he took an incident from his novel of a decade earlier, "Spencer's Mountain," and rewrote it as a television receiver special.
"The Homecoming: A Christmas Story," most a close-knit mountain family waiting for the arrival of their father on Christmas Eve in 1933, drew strong ratings, and CBS picked it upwardly as a serial, "The Waltons," with Mr. Hamner credited as creator and executive producer.
Because it was scheduled in the same fourth dimension slot as "The Flip Wilson Bear witness" on NBC, many CBS executives predicted a quick death, but viewers loved the association — John-Boy, played by Richard Thomas, was based on Mr. Hamner — and its simple values of difficult piece of work and family unit unity. Mr. Hamner wrote merely a few episodes of the series but was closely involved in creative decisions and provided the voice-over narration that began and ended each show.
"The Waltons," offset broadcast in September 1972, won six Emmy Awards for its offset flavour. It ran for nine years and more than 200 episodes, conveying the family unit's story frontwards from 1933 to 1946. Information technology lived on for decades thereafter in several specials that reassembled most of the original cast, including "A Walton Wedding" (1995) and "A Walton Easter" (1997).
Earl Henry Hamner Jr. was born on July 10, 1923, in Schuyler, Va., the oldest of viii children. The family unit home had no phone and only two books: a Bible and a beekeeping manual.
Earl Sr. worked for a company that mined and milled soapstone. When it failed during the Depression, he took a chore at a DuPont factory forty miles abroad. Every weekend, he walked six miles from the nearest coach station, in Hickory Creek, to see his family, a trek that inspired the Christmas Eve episode in "Spencer'south Mountain."
Mr. Hamner'south mother, the former Doris Giannini, was descended from Italian immigrants who arrived in the area in the 19th century.
When Earl Jr. was half-dozen, The Richmond Times-Dispatch published his verse form "My Canis familiaris." This, he later said, set him on the path to becoming a writer.
After the outbreak of World State of war 2, he was drafted into the Ground forces in his sophomore twelvemonth at the University of Richmond, which he had been attending on a scholarship. Trained to defuse country mines, he was sent to France afterwards the Normandy invasion. There, a superior officeholder found out that he could type and assigned him to the Quartermaster Corps.
While stationed in Paris, Mr. Hamner, inspired past his discovery of Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner and other American novelists, began writing fiction, including the start pages of what would become "Spencer's Mountain," nigh a human being who dreams of building his wife a business firm on family land. The novel was published in 1961 with an admiring blurb from Harper Lee. A film version, with Henry Fonda and Maureen O'Hara, was later released.
Mr. Hamner earned a degree in broadcast communications from the University of Cincinnati in 1948 and began working at the Cincinnati radio station WLW, a job he soon quit to work on his beginning published novel, "Fifty Roads to Town," near a revival preacher whose inflow in a modest Appalachian town creates havoc. Information technology was published in 1953, by which fourth dimension Mr. Hamner had moved to New York and constitute work writing radio and telly scripts for NBC.
In 1954, he married Jane Martin, an editor at Harper'south Bazaar, who survives him. In addition to his girl, he is also survived past a son, Scott; a brother, Paul; and two sisters, Audrey Hamner and Nancy Jameson.
Mr. Hamner moved to California in 1962 and got his outset interruption when "The Twilight Zone" accepted 2 of his story ideas. His eight scripts for the serial included "The Chase," about a human who is dead merely does not realize it until his hunting domestic dog prevents him from wandering into hell, and "Stopover in a Tranquillity Town," in which the main characters plow out to be pets on an alien planet.
"My mother in law found them downright weird," Mr. Hamner said of his "Twilight Zone" scripts in a 2008 start address at the Academy of Cincinnati. "After she had watched four or five of my stories, she wrote my wife a note saying, 'I practise hope that Earl is not smoking any of that atrocious green stuff.'"
Mr. Hamner turned his manus to a diversity of projects. Before hitting information technology big with "The Waltons," he wrote episodes for "Carriage Train," "Gentle Ben" and "Nanny and the Professor" likewise as the 1968 television version of "Heidi" and the 1963 movie "Palm Springs Weekend," with Troy Donahue and Connie Stevens.
While working on "The Waltons," he wrote scripts for the animated flick "Charlotte's Spider web" (1973), adapted from the children'due south book by Eastward. B. White, and for "Where the Lilies Flower" (1974), a film based on Vera and Bill Cleaver's immature-adult novel about a family unit of orphans in Appalachia.
"I feel like, as a professional writer, I can write anything," Mr. Hamner told the magazine Virginia Living in 2013. "I once said, 'In my career, I have written everything but matchbook covers.'"
Later on "The Waltons" was canceled, he developed the series "Falcon Crest," a soap opera set up in California wine country that ran from 1981 to 1990. He left after the 5th flavor and formed a television set production visitor with Don Sipes, a suspense writer with whom he wrote the novel "Murder in Tinseltown."
"What has inspired my piece of work has always been the family and neighbors I grew upwardly with back in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia during the Great Low of the 1930s," Mr. Hamner said in his first address. "They were decent, God-fearing, patriotic people. Like nigh Appalachian folk, they were frugal, proud and self-reliant.
"To write almost such people, information technology was inevitable that such stories deal with love and award, compassion and pride, compassion and cede. And then much of my writing became a commemoration of those traditional American values."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/arts/television/earl-hamner-jr-who-created-the-waltons-dies-at-92.html
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