My Turn John Boy | From an October Press

This column by Editor Chris Evans was originally published in October, but its message still resonates today. If you’d like to receive The Crittenden Press each week, a subscription costs less than 62 cents an issue. We would be glad to have you as a reader. The editor’s column appears regularly in the newspaper. Click the subscribe button at the top of this page to get the full edition of The Press each week.

Every Thursday night when I was a boy, I called my grandmother to remind her that The Waltons was about to come on television. I didn’t want her to miss it. 

She had lived through the Great Depression as a young wife and mother, and while she spoke of those years with a certain fondness, I later came to realize the reality was far harsher than her stories let on. 

For her, that show was both reminder and comfort, an idealized reflection of a time that had been bitter in practice, yet sweet in memory. She had lived in a place along the Tennessee River known as the Old 23rd District. I wrote extensively about those days in my book South of the Mouth Sandy.

As a child, I didn’t fully grasp why it meant so much to her. Only later, when I understood the weight of what she had endured, did I see the deeper truth. She needed those familiar voices from Walton’s Mountain to tell her that hardship could coexist with love, dignity and grace.  

I always identified with John Boy Walton. He was a writer with his own newspaper, The Chronicle, forever scribbling down thoughts about people, places and the quiet lessons tucked inside everyday life. He was pragmatic and a little philosophical, and he saw in ordinary moments something worth preserving. Perhaps that’s where I, too, caught the bug – the notion that words on a page could help a community see itself more clearly and even find some redeeming value in the telling. 

The other night, I caught a rerun I hadn’t seen in decades, an episode titled The Pony Cart. The story

revolved around Grandpa’s sister-in-law, who was nearing the end of her life at age 90. 

When the episode opened, I found myself almost mouthing the lines, though I hadn’t seen it since I was probably 10 years old. 

That’s how memory works with the stories that matter. They stay etched somewhere in us, waiting. Pastor Wayne Garvey always used to quip that he had a mind like a steel trap. Once something got in there, he could never get it back out.

What struck me about the Waltons episode wasn’t the sadness but the serenity. The underlying message was that her life had been full, her time had come and she met it without fear or foreboding. It was about finding peace in the leaving, just as much as joy in the living.

So simple are the themes, down-home truths of family, faith and resilience that still bend up the corners of my mouth. 

When I think of John Boy, whose pen carried the weight of his world, I smile. Maybe he’s the reason I’ve spent decades writing for a small-town newspaper, scratching out columns that I hope, in some small way, bring the same kind of meaning my grandmother found in that Thursday night ritual.

Good night, John Boy.

** Chris Evans, a newspaperman since 1979, has been editor of The Press for more than 30 years and is the author of South of the Mouth of Sandy, a true story about crime along the Tennessee River. You can find it on Amazon or wherever books are sold **