The Waltons may be fictional, but loyal fans don't think so

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Fact and fiction. They blend. A person steps into the sun at high noon and he and his shadow are one. Both exist. Both are seperate entities, but for a moment they merge.

Schuyler, population 400, is fact. It's a tiny town nestled among the mountains in Nelson County, Virginia. Walton's Mountain is but a shadow of Schuyler, a creation of its most famous son, novelist and screen writer Earl Hamner.

Ronnie Clair Edwards is an actress born in Oklahoma. Cora Beth Godsey is a figment, an invented character she portrayed. Mary Ellen Walton a tomboy. Only there is no Mary Ellen Walton.

Mary Ellen and John Boy and Ben and Erin and Jason and Jim Bob and Elizabeth and John and Olivia don't exist. They aren't real. Yet a couple in their 30s, both college professors, flew from Nebraska to Virginia to meet them.

Strangers come up to Elizabeth all the time and say, "I know you. Did I grow up with you? Did I go to school with you?"

Ike Godsey says, "I used to go to Mass on Sunday and people would ask, `What are you doing here?"'

When fact and fiction combine, the shadow becomes the person as it does at high noon; sometimes the combination equals something separate, something bigger and better than either alone.

The Waltons are an example. Most of the cast of the popular show which began Sept. 14, 1972, and continued until Aug. 20, 1981, arrived in the hazy blue mountains of Virgina Thursday evening. They looked as if they had just walked off a set despite the passage of 11 years. They came for the dedication of the Walton Mountain Museum, which the townspeople of Schuyler constructed to honor their most famous citizen, the creator of the Waltons, Earl Hamner.

In the parking lot outside the museum, which is housed in the old brick school Hamner attended as a child, just a stone's throw from his boyhood home, a crowd gathered. The museum was open only to the press Friday so the Waltons lingered outdoors talking to people who had flown and driven miles to see them.

Elizabeth was there with her long red hair and her easy smile, grown up and beautiful and newly married. She just finished her college dissertation. She's studying to be a teacher. Erin is a correspondent for "Entertainment Tonight." She has a husband and a baby girl named Sidney, 4 1/2 months old, who charmed the crowd all day.

Mary Ellen is married to a Canadian actor/director. Together they've written and directed musical comedies. They held hands as they walked along.

Ben, who's grown a moustache, is a business man, vice-president of a Los Angeles courier service. Jason is a country rock singer with his own band and has been married 13 years to Lisa Harrison, who played his girlfriend on the show. Jim Bob is Jim Bob, shy and embarrassed by all the attention.

Ike and Cora Beth strolled down the narrow country road to the site of the original Godsey store, which burned down in 1989. They went inside and said hello to the new owners, a young couple who posed with them for pictures. Earl Hamner signed books fans had brought, and introduced his own brothers and sisters after whom he modeled his fictional family. His wood-smoky familiar-when-I-was-growing-up-on-Walton's-Mountain-voice drifted through the day like a sound track from the show.

The Waltons entered the museum, four old classrooms designed and built by volunteers in the community to look like John Boy's bedroom, the family kitchen, the living room, and Ike Godsey's store.

In the kitchen they squeezed together at a long wooden table like the one Hamner's father made 65 years ago. "Did you really say good night to everyone?" someone asked. "We really did. We still do," the Hamners said. The Waltons, real people with other names, added that they did, too.

Funny how real fiction can be. "I never had a grandfather," the professor from Nebraska said. "Zeb Walton became my grandfather. I learned from him."

Even when it was the No. 1 show on the air, many called the Waltons saccharine. They shouldn't visit the Walton Mountain museum because to them it would seem simple and small and senseless.

But to those who loved the Waltons, who believed that families who care about each other do exist, the museum is proof.

The television show, "The Waltons," was fiction. But there was never anything fake about the people they portrayed. They are real. They exist, not just in Schuyler but in cities and towns all over America - ordinary people living ordinary lives, quietly caring for and loving one another.

They are America's secret and they are America's strength, shadows unseen at noon.