Little Girls On the Prairie

Nostalgia, Centuries Apart

There are two contagious strains of nostalgia in the air at Walnut Grove.

One is about a longing for the 1870s: Laura Ingalls, age 7, moved to a 172-acre tract about three miles west of Walnut Grove in 1874 with her itinerant family (having fled desolate but cheerfully described failure in Indian Territory, and before that having left the deep forests of Wisconsin). The Ingalls -- Ma, Pa, Mary, Laura, Carrie -- lived at first underground, in a dugout by Plum Creek, then built a real house with real boards, and Pa had a go at wheat farming.

That is, until the grasshoppers came.

Things got worse, and they moved away from Walnut Grove, twice.

But the longing is also about the 1970s: NBC's "Little House on the Prairie" debuted Sept. 11, 1974, and ran for nine seasons, leaving almost all of Wilder's historical narrative in the dust but getting it right in terms of Ingalls family values, manipulation of the heartstrings and lingering shots of Michael Landon's angelically white teeth.

The books, written by Wilder in the 1930s and '40s (she died in 1957 at age 90 in Missouri), sold millions more copies when the TV show became a hit and are still popular, printed in many languages.

To have loved "Little House on the Prairie" in the '70s was to have a Holly Hobbie lunchbox and to have your mother turn to the back of the Country Squire station wagon and tell you to get your nose out of that book and look, wouldja, at the Grand Canyon. To have loved "Little House" was to wear a prairie-style calico-print dress to your big sister's bat mitzvah or as the flower girl in your aunt's wedding. It meant you had to routinely fight your little brother for control of the television on Wednesday nights (and then, with the 1976-77 season, to yearn for it on Monday nights, which ran up against your Pa's devotion to "Monday Night Football"). It was about ordering enough preteen angst paperback novels through the Scholastic Scope book club so you could get the free poster of dreamy Dean "Almanzo Wilder" Butler, wearing suspenders, his brawny arms crossed, leaning against a fence.

It was about wanting to run barefoot through the meadow. Only there were no 1870s meadows in 1970s suburbia, just lawns.

'This Is Now'

She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the fire-light gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting. She thought to herself: 'This is now.'

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because this is now. It can never be a long time ago.

-- from "Little House in the Big Woods"

Here at last are the meadows. Here is the prairie, the sky, the crick, the skeeters. This is now.

Among the conglomerated rows of verdant corn and wheat and soy crops, with the smell of fresh-cut hay and manure in the heavy air last Saturday afternoon, there are 34 Lauras and only seven Nellies entered in Walnut Grove's annual Laura Ingalls/Nellie Oleson look-alike contest, open to girls ages 8 to 12 for a $3 entry fee.

It's typical to have more Lauras than Nellies, says town resident and contest emcee Missie Erbes. "But personally, I'm more partial to the Nellies. Laura's braids you can do pretty easy. And not just anyone can be a Nellie. Not just anyone wants to be a Nellie."