"I want to tell you one of our favorite family stories about my mother and father. My mother’s mother, Miss Ora Lee Giannini, was Baptist. And she was about as Baptist as you can get. She disapproved of dancing, swearing, card playing, hand holding, overly long kisses or any public display of affection, and raised voices on the Sabbath.

The last person in the world she would have selected as a suitor for her sixteen year old daughter was our father. He was twenty at the time, a known carouser, a gambler, a drinker, a dancer, a crack shot and benefitting his Welsh ancestry, he was a singer of note. He thought nothing of going hunting on Sunday and even worse, when he defiled the Lord’s day by fishing, he had to go right past the Baptist Church to get to the Rockfish River. In the church they’d be singing "Shall We Gather At the River?" and going past he’d smile and nod in complete agreement.

My Grandmother forbade my mother to see my father, but somehow they managed to have a courtship. My father proposed. My mother accepted, and they sneaked off to Lovingston to get the license. That night, when she was supposed to be at choir practice, my mother met my father and they went to the Baptist Parsonage to ask Preacher Hicks to marry them. Preacher Hicks had a mild stutter which became intense if he was under stress. He was now under stress. He knew that my grandmother would have a fit if he married the two young people. When my father presented him with the license, Preacher Hicks said, ‘I cannot marry you.’ To which my father replied: ‘You’re not the only damn preacher in the country. We’ll find us another one.’

At that point Preacher Hicks said, ‘Under the c...circumstances, I will marry you,’ and so he did.

The Great Depression made the Hamner’s resourceful and frugal and more often than not they passed that quality down to their children. Clothing was handed down from the oldest to the youngest. Sometimes a boy’s shirt landed on one of the girls, and the pants didn’t quite fit that younger brother, but if the children complained, Doris would say, "They’re clean, and you’ll wear them!"

Doris and Earl were also resourceful in feeding the family. They kept pigs and had a cow. Earl says that he is probably the only writer in Hollywood who knows how to milk a cow, not that he gets called on much to use that particular talent. "I dream of the day when my agent calls and says: ‘Twentieth Century Fox is looking for a writer who can milk a cow.’ Won’t happen," says Earl.

The Hamner family had a garden, and during the summer Doris and the grandmothers put up vegetables and berries and fruit. Earl can still remember that wonderful vinegary aroma that permeated the house after the first frost when his mother picked the last of the tomatoes and made green tomato relish. His grandmother Gianinni’s peach preserves were probably the best in the country, and the sausage they made when they slaughtered hogs was so pungent and peppery, it still makes him hungry just to think of it. Daughter Audrey remembers her mother’s special Sunday dinners of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans and chocolate cake from scratch.