A REEL INSP Special Presentation

Original air date: 11/03/1977
Screenplay: Rod Peterson & Claire Whitaker
Director: Ralph Senensky

Mary Ellen’s baby is due soon and everyone on Walton’s Mountain is excited. The Baldwin sisters are planning a baby shower. Elizabeth is choosing a name. Ben and Ike have started a pool at the General Mercantile to see who’ll guess the baby’s due date.

Mary Ellen insists she’ll have the baby at home. John and Grandpa agree, against the better wisdom of Curt and Olivia, who believe she’d be better off at the hospital.

Later Mary Ellen is summoned into a brewing storm to deliver a baby for a young backwoods girl named Cassie. When Mary Ellen enters the cabin she finds Cassie’s baby stillborn.

A very superstitious Cassie simply will not believe that the baby was born too early to survive. Cassie warns Mary Ellen that looking on her dead baby is a bad omen; “Look upon the face of death, never feel your baby’s breath.”

Mary Ellen is unnerved and dashes out of the cabin into the stormy night. As she stumbles down the rain swept road she sees ball lightening dancing along a fence rail … another omen.

After one false labor, family excitement surrounding Jason’s job accompanying the “Vaudeville” show at the movie house, disgust over the baby pool Ben and Ike are running, and an intense labor … Mary Ellen finally delivers the next generation right there on Walton’s Mountain!

But this isn’t the end of the trouble for the Waltons. Olivia leaves Mary Ellen to hang the clothes while she goes in to check on John Curtis. When she enters the room where the baby sleeps, she finds the basinet empty and the curtains billow in the breeze of a wide open window.

Is Cassie’s omen yet to pass? Will they find John Curtis?

Don’t miss this REEL Inspiration presentation of a touching special episode — The Waltons: The Grandchild.