Little Blog About the Prairie

Sabra and I often catch Little House reruns when we can. By text message, we often alert each other of memorable episodes. Such texts read like this:

Mary gets glasses, but Nellie and Willie call her four-eyes. She hides the glasses until she learns Miss Beadle has a beau. If she can get a beau wearing glasses, so can Mary! She takes the specs out of hiding and Pa cries.

Mr. Edwards comes to visit and finds Half Pint with a fever and tonsillitis. The sick child reminds him of his own family, whom he lost to illness. He mourns them. Pa cries.

Nellie mistreats her horse Bunny and then gets bucked off. Then she pretends to be paralyzed until Laura pushes her wheelchair into the fish pond. The jig is up, and Pa cries.

You get the gist.

Anyway, I recently read a review about Alison Arngrim's (Nellie Oleson's) autobiography, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch. I was intrigued. And since it's summer, I thought it would be an entertaining quick read. Once on Amazon, I realized that Melissa Gilbert and Melissa Sue Anderson also have published autobiographies recently. So over the July 4th weekend, I read a Little House on the Prairie autobiographical trilogy. I'll review them in my sidebar.

I learned a lot about Little House behind the scenes, like why Carrie falls flat on her face in those opening credits, why Pa always walks around shirtless, why the Ingalls family ate so much Dinty Moore beef stew at dinner, that kind of stuff.

But I never learned the answer to the question that's been eating at me for years: Why were the Garvey and the Edwards families never on the same show?

The three Little Actresses wrote much about Victor French, who played the gruff, beloved, Mr. Edwards. But they say nothing about Merlin Olson and Hersha Parady, who played Jonathan and Alice Garvey. How could they ignore Mr. Garvey?

Think about it. Pa frequently falls and breaks ribs (it's always a rib, never an arm or a leg), gets sick or gets beaten up. And when the beat ups come, Mr. Garvey's always the one to step in. Take, for example, the episode "As Long as We're Together," in season 5 when bullies harass blind Mary and her blind beau Adam. Pa steps in, and the bullies beat him up. Mary and Adam run inside for help, and to the rescue come Jonathan Garvey and Nels Oleson. Of course, all Mr. Oleson does is hold Garvey's hat, while Garvey opens up a can of whoop-ass on the two bullies and in so doing gets a job as a bouncer.

If it weren't for Garvey, Pa would be using a walker and eating pudding for the rest of his life.

Garvey may be beefy, but he's got a heart of gold, platinum even. After Albert burns down the blind school, killing Alice Garvey and Mary's baby, Garvey and Mary go a little insane for a while, until guilt-ridden Albert runs away. Pa takes Garvey by the shoulders, shakes him, and cries, "Man up, Garvey. We've got to find my son!" When they do, Garvey's the one to ease Albert's pain: "Don't worry boy. Even though you killed my wife and your own nephew, everybody still loves you. " Pa cried.

Charles Ingalls has the best friends ever: the gruff but lovable Edwards and the beefy but lovable Garvey. Why did Pa never introduced them? Maybe getting the Edwardses and Garveys together would have caused tear duct overload. We'll never know.