- Narrator: [narration as John 'John Boy' Walton, Jr. reading from his journal] Though the early years of the Depression were difficult on Waltons Mountain, we still felt a sense of security in our isolation from a troubled world. The building turmoil of the times, it seemed, lay beyond the mountains and across a distant ocean. Then, in 1936, we became aware of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy. A war was being fought in Spain. Historic events; yet all of them were overshadowed by my acquisition of an old printing press and the prospect of publishing my own small-town newspaper.