The Valediction

Narrator: [narration as John 'John Boy' Walton, Jr. reading from his journal] Sometimes it seemed as if we'd always been at war. The quiet of our lives on Waltons Mountain was interrupted daily by headlines and bulletins that took us to far off deserts and island outposts with impossible names. Our days swung between hope and despair, but somehow we went forward, meeting the demands of life in a troubled world, proving at home what the war was proving on every front, that a crisis can make leaders of the most ordinary of men.