When will Willie Oleson write his autobiography?

I stumbled across this tome in the bookstore today. Confessions of a Prairie Bitch, by Alison Arngrim. Great title, good cover and as a Little House on the Prairie acolyte, I was tempted to buy it, though I did hold off.

Arngrim portrayed one of the all-time TV villains on Little House, the detestable Nellie Oleson, the blond...uh, bitch (her word) who constantly tormented little Laura Ingalls and children with stuttering problems.

According to the book's description, Arngrim writes about Michael Landon's "unsaintly habit of not wearing underwear; how she and Melissa Gilbert (who played her TV nemesis, Laura Ingalls) became best friends and accidentally got drunk on rum cakes at 7-Eleven; and the only time she and Katherine MacGregor (who played Nellie's mom) appeared in public in costume, provoking a posse of elementary schoolgirls to attack them."

Sounds like a great book. Rum cakes! It seems odd that it took Arngrim this long to have a book come out - I think the world has been clamoring for years to know more about the lady behind Nellie. But her effort is just the most recent in an explosion of Little House books to hit stores. Three decades after the good, God-fearing townsfolk of Walnut Grove blew up their entire town to keep it out of the hands of evil land barons, the stars continue to reveal stories about themselves and the prairie.

Melissa Gilbert had Prairie Tales: A Memoir. Gilbert, Half-Pint, wrote about her affairs and struggles and the book is filled with sex talk, the type of thing that stunned many reviewers on Amazon who were apparently only looking for insight on what it was like taking a trip to Sleepy Eye or Mankato; every woman in my cubicle area who read the book finished it in about two days and couldn't wait to talk about all the dirty details.

Half-Pint's blind sister, Mary, had her own memoir. Melissa Anderson wrote The Way I See It: A Look Back at My Life on Little House. Mary was the good sister and this book is apparently much less interesting than Laura's/Melissa's. She did get nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of Mary - who can ever forget, "I can see, I can see," when, in reality, she couldn't - but this line, in the book's description, doesn't exactly inspire people to drop 25 bucks:

"And she relates stories of her guest appearances on iconic programs such as The Love Boat and The Brady Bunch." Yeah, but did she lust after Andrew Garvey?

Little House characters pop up often in all forms of media, occasionally in unexpected places. A few nights ago while watching TV at about 2 in the morning, a commercial for Premier Bathrooms came on and a familiar, friendly face extolled their virtues.



It's Ma Ingalls, Karen Grassle. It looks like a great product, surely a lifesaver for many people. But I do wonder how Caroline Ingalls ended up as the primary spokeswoman. According to IMDB, she hasn't appeared in a movie or TV show since 1994. How did Premier Bathrooms find her? Any why? According to a grammatically confounding sentence on Grassle's Wikipedia page, she "agreed to sign up as the promotional face for Premier Bathrooms, a supplier of bathing products for the elderly and infirm due to her association with the character of Caroline Ingalls' extolling care and family values."

So, apparently, the plan is that people still associate Caroline Ingalls with love and understanding and that makes her the perfect person to pitch a bathroom, even though indoor toilets didn't even exist when Caroline was alive. This is 30 years since Little House's prime. Still, that's the power of Little House on the Prairie.

There's probably not much of a market for a memoir by Karen Grassle; she had a fairly thankless role on the show and didn't even have a plot twist that can be used as a pun for a catchy title, like blind Mary. But there are other Little House memoirs I'd like to see. They can be written by the actor, of course, but I would want dirt on the characters. I'd want show secrets and insight.

Dean Butler can pen the fake story of Almanzo Wilder and reveal if it'd be possible for a male character to date an underage girl 10 years his junior on TV today. Matthew Laborteaux needs to write a book explaining that his character, the enigmatic, troubled, athletic, mischievous Albert, did not actually die from his morphine addiction and that viewers never did actually see him succumb to leukemia. Maybe he did make it to medical school.

Charlotte Stewart needs to write a 300-page explanation for why she sent the kids home from the one-room schoolhouse in one of those classic Minnesota blizzards. What lessons did she learn from that tragedy? It can be called Teaching Miss Beadle. Harriet Oleson, otherwise known as Katherine MacGregor, seems like the perfect candidate for a parenting book. Something about the best way to raise a serial killer. On the book's cover, she can be holding Nels Oleson's testicles in a bag from the Mercantile.

Little House on the Prairie went off the air in the early 1980s. Star Michael Landon has been dead for 19 years. Yet the show lives on, in DVDs, reruns and the memories of fans and tourists who travel through southwestern Minnesota searching for the mountain Laura ran away to in one memorable, if utterly implausible, episode. But the show also lives on in literature. Or at least in the bizarre world of celebrity tell-alls.

The worst teacher in Walnut Grove history

I mentioned this Little House on the Prairie episode in a previous post on the epic, enjoyable, not-always-faithful-to-the-geography-of-southern-Minnesota show.

This shows Charles Ingalls at his finest. I couldn't find the episode before, but now we can see this man of morals standing up for what's right on the prairie.

Miss Beadle, the blond bombshell, finds herself unable to control the unruly children, including Willie Oleson at his most annoying, a poster child for corporal punishment in the classrooms. The shrill Harriet Oleson reminds Miss B. that "when harvest ends" there will be even larger misbehaving boys for her to handle.

Enter Mr. Applewood, the substitute teacher from every child's nightmares. Throw a spitball at this guy, and it's likely to end up shoved down your mouth.

Poor half-pint. Laura immediately stumbles into trouble because she gets stuck with a note disparaging the new teacher, although the insult is simply a cliched play on the guy's name: Crab-Apple. Walnut Grove children could be brutal, if not witty. He takes out his trusty weapon - a wooden ruler - and whacks her on the hand, seemingly enjoying it a bit too much. Then a juvenile ink prank torments Applewood, leading to more punishment for Laura. In fact, the ultimate punishment: expulsion. The guy might have been a hard-ass but his detective skills were severely lacking. Not only did he ignore the back entrance to the school, but he seems unaware of the likely suspects. Just look into Willie Oleson's eyes and you see the definition of a troublemaker and future delinquent.

One of the odd things in this episode is the three brutes in the background, the terrible trio Miss Beadle was apparently unable to handle. I understand the school was for kids of all grades. But these guys appear to be closer to 30 than 15. If they haven't learned to read at this point and haven't yet figured out how to spell Lincoln, it's time to let them stay in the fields.

Finally, just past the six-minute mark, Charles enters to shut down Applewood's reign of domestic terror. When he walks in on Applewood preparing to hammer Laura again - this time with a much, much larger and more lethal weapon - Walnut Grove's conscience steps in. Charles breaks the instrument, and Applewood's control of the school.

Miss Beadle returns, this time with a better understanding of how to control her middle-aged problem children.

Later, she'd send some of these same children to their death in a classic Minnesota snowstorm. But today was her day to shine.

Mountain life on Little House on the Prairie

The New Yorker might be the best magazine in the country, but it also requires devotion. Many people bemoan how their New Yorkers begin to stack up in a corner, unread, like the unopened bills of a person struggling with debt who's too afraid to look at the mail. I usually read each new issue the week it arrives, but there are times when a small pile forms on a bedside table, requiring me to work through them in a single night. Over the weekend I finally got to the August 10 issue. One of the more fascinating articles is a look at the career of Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose literary career is well-known, even if the face people picture when hearing her name is that of Melissa Gilbert.


She's the author of the Little House stories, the books that eventually were adapted into a 70s TV show and a staple of '80s reruns. Wilder published her first book at the age of 65. Charles and Caroline were her parents, just like on the show. She had sisters named Mary, Carrie and Grace. She married a man named Almanzo. What I didn't realize until reading the New Yorker story is that Wilder's daughter, Rose, is thought by some scholars to be the true artist behind the works. A writer herself, Rose contributed her skills to the series, though there's debate about exactly how much she added. The story's worth a read.

But as famous as the books are, it's the TV show that fascinated me as a kid, for a couple of reasons. First, they had good stories. Also, they were set in southern Minnesota, where I lived. Hey, the Ingalls clan is traveling to Mankato in a covered wagon to get some supplies. We live 15 miles from there! Sleepy Eye, Walnut Grove, all familiar towns.

Not that everything made sense on the show.



For instance, in a famous episode, Laura runs away from home because she blames herself for the death of her baby brother. It's an emotional episode. Heartwarming. Ernest Borgnine plays an old mountain man - possibly homeless, definitely disheveled - who helps Laura find her way through the darkness. Oh, yeah, and he's God. Or simply an angel sent down to Earth, following in the footsteps of Clarence from It's a Wonderful Life. But that's not even the biggest stretch on the episode. Laura runs away...to the mountains! In southern Minnesota. Minnesota's famous for many things, foremost among them its lakes. There's great fishing, perfect farmland. Some hills, woods, forests, plains. Prairies, if you will. But no mountains. Having Laura scale a mountain in southern Minnesota makes as much sense as having a character on Gossip Girl run away to a mountain in Midtown Manhattan.

At the end of the episode, she breathlessly tells Pa about the man who helped her, Jonathan. Except Jonathan's now disappeared. We can only assume he's ascended back up to heaven for a bath and shave. Or perhaps he's running away from the law, finally aware that he wasn't supposed to be within 100 yards of children.

Still, during the final minutes, when Charles finds Laura - with the help of the bearded and ever-present Mr. Edwards - I feel a lump in my throat.

By the way, here's the real Charles Ingalls.


I'm sure it was a tough call, but producers made the right choice by not having Michael Landon look like the real Charles, who had a John-Brown-after-the-slave-revolt look that wouldn't have translated to television.

Charles - on the show - is one of my favorite characters ever on TV. Combining Ali-like fighting skills, the bravery of William Wallace and the moral sense of Ghandi with the parenting skills of Dr. Spock, he was a superman disguised as an everyman.



Even in this episode, Charles cared for his opponent following the fight, an aging boxer taken advantage of by his sleazy promoter.

The guy battled bullies, such as the new male teacher in town who enjoyed slapping kids with a ruler. Charles ended that practice. The guy even confronted Frank and Jesse James, in one of the coolest if ridiculous episodes. The James boys take over a house and hold Mary hostage. The ludicrousness comes from the fact one of the characters on the show is a kid named Ford who, you guessed it, just happens to be the guy who shoots Jesse James years later. At least they didn't hide out in the mountains.

While Charles and Laura often carried the show, Little House also featured superb supporting characters. Some good, some evil.

Nels Oleson was an enigma. A caring, sensitive man who doubled as a valued town leader, the lean, angular merchant has to be docked for marrying the conniving, gossiping Harriet, a nightmare of a woman. During their courting days Harriet must have displayed similar signs, yet Nels forged ahead with the wedding. Together they produced Nellie and Willie, one of the more evil girls anyone's ever seen and a bratty, unattractive, undersized boy who struggled with school and basic logic, as if Harriet dropped him on his head on the mercantile's floor. To top it off, they adopted a little girl named Nancy, a blond brat who filled the evil girl role after Nellie grew up and matured into a nice woman. It seemed to prove that it was nurture, not nature, that screwed up the Oleson children, leading me to believe Nels spent too much time in the store and not enough time with the kids.

Nellie. What a perfect character. Whether taunting a stuttering girl or faking paralysis for sympathy, Nellie proved the perfect foil to Laura. If Nellie existed on TV today she'd be the one ridiculing the 115-pound girl and calling her fat, leading to the gal developing a dangerous eating disorder.

Willie Oleson displayed moments of humanity, despite having the characteristics of the bumbling, dim-witted henchmen on the old Batman shows. In one episode, the kindly, caring teacher, Miss Beadle, sends the children home early on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, a snowstorm blows through the prairie - and over the mountains, I guess - trapping many of the kids. The school turns into a triage center. Children die. A devastated Miss Beadle weeps, blaming herself, as do some townsfolk. The normally delinquent Willie consoles the teacher and strokes her hair.

Little House dealt head-on with numerous tragedies, whether it was that epic snowstorm, the Ingalls' baby boy dying, or Albert's descent into morphine addiction and subsequent sickness (he didn't actually die on the show but it's implied he's well on his way). One of the sadder storylines involved oldest sister Mary's blindness. Who can forget when she told Charles and the doctor (she went to the eye doctor in Mankato - so did I! Another connection), "I can see," when really she couldn't? She gets sent to a school for the blind, where she eventually thrives and has a son. But following through on the apparent anti-baby theme that permeated Little House, the baby boy dies in a horrific fire at the school, set by Albert and a buddy who were smoking. Alice Garvey - wife of football-star-turned-burly-actor Merlin Olsen - dies with the kid, despite smashing windows while clutching the child. These types of scenes resonate with an 8-year-old latch key kid when he watches them at 4 in the afternoon.

One of my favorite episodes involved the first "human forward pass." Albert's football team battles a squad sporting a big, dumb doofus who dominates the field. An unpopular, struggling blind boy plays for Albert's team. In the final scene, Albert steps on the kid's hand as he propels Albert over the angry ogre - Walter Payton-like - for the winning touchdown. Even in the 1800s the play was probably illegal, but it showed a genius and creativity not seen again on a field until Bill Walsh took over in San Francisco.

The show ended in explosive fashion. It's sort of a convoluted storyline, but the bottom line is a greedy tycoon owns the land Walnut Grove sits on and is going to take it over, by force or otherwise. The townsfolk - who have battled everything from Jesse James to typhus - refuse to go away quietly. That Minnesota spirit - and knowledge of illegal explosives - shines through. So everyone places dynamite in each building, blowing everything up as the land grabber looks on in horror.



Little House probably held on a few years too long. People moved to Mankato, the Olesons worked in a casino, Laura became a teacher, various adoptees came and went. But it was a good show. And one of the few shows or movies that was better than the books. Just wish they hadn't put Laura on that mountain.