I like The Waltons very much. But when I watched this episode on DVD recently, I was mildly disappointed. Still pretty good, but it didn't seem entirely logical. John-Boy is determined to buy an old printing press, so he gets what he describes as a "full time job" to pay for it. This is while he is still going to college. And in order to save time driving home, he gets a room in a boarding house as well.
John -Boy says at the beginning that he has to make a down payment of $50 in 3 weeks. After that it will be monthly payments that he thinks he can manage, as he expects to make a profit from his newspaper which he will found once he gets the press. So that implies that this scenario of working full time and living away from home should only last for 3 weeks.
However, the family makes a big deal about John-Boy moving out as though he is leaving home permanently. Their behavior seemed out of proportion to what John-Boy was doing.
Granted, I know from later episodes that John-Boy is in fact living at home again and has his newspaper operation there at the family home. Maybe my knowledge of that interfered with my enjoyment of this episode. But even as a self-contained episode, the premise didn't quite make sense.
But I still give the episode a 7.0 because a) it has a lovely ending that makes it all worth it, and b) there's almost no such a thing as a bad episode of The Waltons from seasons 1 through 5. (But for later seasons, that's a different story!)
