The Waltons weren't poor

[Redflagsabounded]

I'm watching an episode and a neighbour comes by saying he's been living on skimmed milk and wild onions for 2 years. Grandpa sympathises and pipes up that he's lived on the edge of poverty his whole life. The show description says follow the family through the hardships of the Depression. Admittedly, there are episodes where the children walk to and from school with no boots/shoes. Generally speaking it's presented as a poor family.
But

• they had 7 kids (people then did know how babies were made and didn't have to have large families despite lack of contraception, the pull out method is not infallible but been used forever)
• they own a bloody mountain full of timber, and run a sawmill business
• they have livestock, chickens for eggs, and garden for veggies
• they own a truck
• they own a massive house
• everyone's well fed and well clothed, just maybe not always the latest 'smart' outfits when they want one

They were in no way 'poor' for the 1930s.

AIBU?

But that level of poverty wouldn't have made for a hit feelgood show

And this is it exactly. OP if you’re really interested you should read up on Earl Hamner Jr. The Waltons, his stories based on his real life family history, are deliberately VERY sanitised versions of his reality growing up. What he really wanted to convey was the love, support and close family relationships from his time growing up through the depression, rather than the real life grinding poverty, specifically as a message of hope.

I thought you meant that you'd been watching The Waltons when YOUR neighbour popped round to tell you he'd been living off wild onions. 😜 I should get some sleep.

And he made the food of that time and poisoned them both.

I like the Waltons but I could never understand their casual walking about the countryside. Surely there were bears about!

Oh I loved Jim Bob. I had a real fondness for them all really, but he was always my favourite.

It couldn’t have been that hard, they got to see Bobby Bigelow and the Haystack Gang live

This is the fun sponge talking..

Bit off on a tangent here, but if anyone has Tubi (free channel) there’s a film called ‘stalking Laura’ with John Boy and Brooke Shields, it’s a true story and though he tries his utmost to not be ‘John Boy’ with his automatic rifles and rocket launchers he just remains…..’John Boy’ It was just his defining role to me.

That would be a different programme. It's just telling one family's story, in a way that appealed to millions of others across the world at the time.

They were all on (repeated) around the same time as a child in the 1980s.

It’s based on a true story. They were largely self-sufficient but didn’t have a whole lot of cash money. And as noted, it’s just a TV show, not a documentary.

I was going to use Dolly Parton as an example of Appalachian poverty!

The Waltons absolutely soft-soap things — and Virginia was a Jim Crow state, they certainly didn't show that. But most people didn't own land to farm at all. Many miners lived in company towns where they didn't own their homes, and bought their food at high prices from the company store. You wouldn't have been self sufficient. You were tied to local employers in ways that urban slum dwellers were not. Coal companies were strike-breaking up until the 1970s (at that point, it was becoming moot because the industry was shrinking so much).

To this day the poorest places in the USA are Native reservations and central Appalachia. LBJ, who grew up pretty poor himself, was appalled when he visited during his War on Poverty. Here's some photos of what that looked like:

https://time.com/3878609/war-on-poverty-appalachia-portraits-1964/

To this day, West Virginia has the lowest life expectancy in the US, over a decade less than the healthiest states.

Sharecroppers in the Deep South were almost as badly off. There's a famous book called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men about the lives of three tenant families during the Depression.

There are multiple episodes/characters in The Waltons that were much poorer than they were but they were still poor. They had what they needed yes (a house to live in, a business, food, the basics of life, family, love) but rarely any extras.

They also wore 1970s flares etc which is impressive timetravelling fashion sense for the 1930s.
Its a tv show........ best not to over analyse!

@knitnerd90 thats an interesting link, thanks. I think though the Nick Hedges for Shelter photos from the UK 60’s look much worse, sadly

i remember the Glasgow ones. Horrible.

but in the US, a country that hadn’t had its infrastructure destroyed by war, at the time enjoying the greatest prosperity in history, and millions of people still living this way.

They could afford a radio which was a luxury item at the time.

I always wanted to try that recipe the Baldwin sisters made.

As stated earlier, they had a sawmill. It didn’t matter what most people had or didn’t, they weren’t most people. The series is loosely based on writer Earl Hamner’s family. The focus of the show was the strength and love of family and the belief in community. If there’s no conflict, no obstacle, no struggle, there’s no story. The car, the radio, etc. are props to support the narrative. It was never intended to be about the bleak, gritty, hopeless aspects of the Great Depression. It was meant to be cozy, inspiring, and uplifting. It was meant to ENTERTAIN. That’s all.

Exactly. It’s called being “House Poor”. You have a home and land but very little in disposable income. This is a common situation in the Southern United States.

A large family means more people to work on the farm.

I don’t think it’s a particularly large house for the US but they did appear well fed and comfortable unless the storyline required them not to be for that week’s episode.

I have visited Walton’s Mountain and surrounding area and it’s one of the most hostile to outsiders places I have ever visited. Wherever we went, we got stared at and our out-of-state plates on the car made us a target on the roads. When we were driving around admiring the scenery, householders would come onto their porches with guns when they spotted a strange car. We had dinner in a chain restaurant and were stared at for a full hour by locals in there. There is a Walton’s museum there which for no known reason has a “war room” which includes Nazi memorabilia including a massive Swasitika flag proudly on display. We didn’t stick around for the planned length of our stay. Very unlikely they would have been friendly to outsiders back then either.

And the show glosses over the incest that definitely happened.

The Waltons is a sanitised rosy glasses world of rural life in the 30’s in the US.
It is a TV show with underlying moral themes of the goodness of being a Christian and coming from a close family.

It is not a reality of the depression in the US . As someone else has said The Grapes of Wrath is that.

Oh my god! That must have been so unsettling. Why were they grabbing their guns so quickly?

This is what scares me about America - the easy access to guns and the willingness to use them. 😲The Waltons seems very, very sanitised in comparison.

Complaining about poverty is mostly about expectations- there is always someone poorer than you. They are resource and business owners, so not really poor, but as such they could reasonably expect not to send children to school shoeless- so from their perspective they were poor.