Waltons 1.16: The Fire

Airdate: 1/11/73

When Miss Hunter teaches the class about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, one student, a very shy girl named Lois May, tells her father, an overprotective, religious zealot bent on wreaking his vengeance on the heathens he sees as the cause. As he drunkenly sets the schoolhouse ablaze, he knocks himself unconscious, and perishes in the inferno. Miss Hunter now must contend with the rebuilding of her school (and temporary relocation of her classroom to Ike’s general store), and the emotional support of now fatherless Lois May. Eventually, the girl is reunited with her long-lost mother and comes out of her shell to attend school with confidence.

Contrary to popular belief, The Waltons didn’t always shy from controversy, as this episode’s exploration of religion/evolution and the then-recent Scopes Monkey Trial demonstrates. Actor Richard Bradford, playing the father, Lutie Bascomb, perhaps overplays his part, but his rage leading up to the fire is as frightening as any exhibited by an aberrant character on W’s Mountan. Some of you may recognize Laurie Prange, who plays Lois May; she later went on to be the guest star on two episodes of another CBS series, The Incredible Hulk: one in which she was an heiress being slowly poisoned by her relatives, and another is which she helped a halfway-transformed Hulk get out of an alien observation facility. She also starred in a excellent, creepy made-for-TV movie, Dark Secret of Harvest Home, starring Bette Davis (a good DVD rental for Halloween).

The best scene of this episode is actually unrelated to the plot: John Walton comes into John-Boy’s room and asks to hear some of what he wrote. I’ve always felt these quiet, “incidental” scenes are really what the show is all about – indeed, isn’t that what life as all about?

Emmy note: this episode was nominated for make-up, no doubt for Prange’s cuts and bruises.