dual personalities

I’m sure you’ve heard that Patty Duke has died. She was 69 and had lived one of those up-and-down Hollywood lives that have become stereotypical. She won an Academy Award as a teenager and three Emmys later in her career. And she starred in a sitcom.

Well, I was one of those kids who loved her TV show in the mid-1960s.

Don’t you love that font?

Her family on the show seemed very normal to me and like people I knew. Remember her annoying brother Ross (with the glasses)? She wore headbands.

Well, it just seems sad to bid her adieu, you know?

Earl Hamner, Jr. also died recently. He was the writer who created The Waltons back in 1971.

This was a show which I was too cool to watch as a teenager when it was first on, but which I enjoyed later in syndication, especially the first two seasons. It was a well done show.

This television show was based on a movie written by Hamner, Spencer’s Mountain (1963) which starred Henry Fonda and Maureen O’Hara as the parents of the same red-headed brood. I saw this movie as a child and was deeply effected by it, especially the part where a huge tree falls on the grandfather, breaking every bone in his body.  That was a terrible scene for my small self. The movie, like the TV show, emphasized the importance of a good education and the lengths to which some people have gone to get one. This seems to be a plot that is no longer popular.

Anyway, I suppose this has reminded me once again that I am no longer a kid. Thankfully these guys are still around.

And ageless.

*John-Boy on The Waltons