Harriet’s Happenings

If I Have to Create Stories, Then That’s What I’m Gonna Do; or

I Don’t Care If It’s Not True, I Believe It!

(a recap by Will Kaiser)

Title: Harriet’s Happenings

Airdate: October 30, 1978

Written by John T. Dugan

Directed by William F. Claxton

SUMMARY IN A NUTSHELL: An amoral editor gives Mrs. Oleson a job writing a gossip column, and chaos reigns. Featuring Higgins from Magnum, P.I.

ONE WITH SIGNIFICANCE FOR TODAY.

RECAP: We waste no time getting to the action this time. And there’s a lot to pick through, so let’s start pickin’.

The opening shot shows a group of Grovesters clustered around a building.

Charles and Jonathan Garvey are erecting new signage.

DAGNY: Wait, isn’t this the bank?

WILL: Yeah, but Sprague’s long-gone. It’s just an empty shell now. Just an empty husk.

The installation is being overseen by Harriet Oleson Herself. 

DAGNY: “The Pen and Plow.” Oh, is it Walnut Grove’s first cathouse?

The music is goofy and cheerful, suggesting we’re in for a lightish romp.

Meanwhile, a wagon bearing the same sign approaches, driven by a fussy little man with a Hitler mustache and Himmler spectacles. He’s sure to be a sweetie-pie.

In front of the bank, Mrs. Oleson spots the man and shrieks.

With happiness, though. Shoving some townswomen aside, she cries, “Sterling! Sterling!” and “It’s me, Harriet!”

John T. Dugan is back as writer this time, and Clax is back as director.

John T. wrote “Here Come the Brides,” which was the funniest story of last season, and possibly the funniest Little House of all time that’s really meant to be funny, so we’ll see what we get from him this time.  

“Sterling,” if that is in fact his name, climbs down, watched by Caroline, Doc Baker, and Baby Grace, who sit together on a bench (quite cutely).

Despite Mrs. O practically screaming in his face, Sterling immediately hugs Mrs. Foster, saying, “Harriet! You haven’t changed a bit!” (Not off to a great start in the comedy department, though there may be subtext here about his blindness to reality.)

Mrs. Foster reacts in horror. (Odd, since we know she’s a connoisseur of men’s bodies.)

The Nazi-lookin’ little guy laughs then and hugs the real Harriet. Did he just want to cop a feel of Mrs. F? I’d say probably.

If you grew up in the 1980s, you probably recognized the actor on sight. Certainly you would recognize him when he spoke. His voice had a deep plummy roundness even when he wasn’t doing a fake British accent, as he isn’t doing here.

He is of course John Hillerman, best known as Magnum, P.I.’s Higgins. 

Higgins is the stuffy English majordomo of the mysterious estate where Tom Selleck operates his P.I. business. (Fantasy Island also had a mysterious estate. Mysterious estates were huge in the eighties.)

At first mildly antagonistic, Higgins and Magnum develop an Odd Couple vibe and he helps the detective with many investigations. 

John Hillerman became so associated with this role that most people assumed he really was British, but he was from Texas. (It’s because of people like him that, when I was young, I assumed doing fake accents would make me a great actor; but it doesn’t necessarily and certainly didn’t with me.)

(I’m not the only person to practice the accent method, though.)

Hillerman’s resume includes impressive movies. He worked a number of times with director Peter Bogdanovich, including in the classics The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, and in the not-so-classic At Long Last Love.

He worked with Mel Brooks twice, in Blazing Saddles and History of the World: Part I.

He was in Chinatown and High Plains Drifter.

And he was in a bizarre horror movie called Audrey Rose, in which Anthony Hopkins tells a couple their daughter is his own child reincarnated. Disturbing.

On TV, he was on Love Boat – three times!

He also was on Mannix, Wonder Woman, Hawaii Five-O, Soap, One Day at a Time, Tales of the Gold Monkey, Valerie/Valerie’s Family: The Hogans/The Hogan Family (anybody remember that mess? Jason Bateman was on it), Murder, She Wrote, and A Very Brady Sequel. 

Mrs. Oleson introduces the man to the assembled Grovesters as “my second cousin on my mother’s side, once removed, Sterling Murdock!” 

(This means Sterling is the son of Harriet’s mother’s cousin, right? That would mean Murdock isn’t Mrs. O’s maiden name, but that it might be her mom’s.)

(Then again, if Mrs. Oleson’s mom was Murdock’s mother’s cousin rather than his father’s, it wouldn’t have been. See Oleson Family History.)

(Either way, I wonder if this means we’ll finally meet Mrs. Oleson’s sister Vickie, who’s said to reside locally. Surely she would be interested in seeing Cousin Sterling too. Stay tuned to find out.) 

Anyways, Mrs. O doesn’t say where Murdock comes from, but she says he’s “the new Editor-in-Chief of the Pen and Plow!”

It’s amazing that Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon who as of this writing owns Fox News and is locked in a Succession-style battle for control of his empire, was already being satirized in 1978.

But Murdoch was 47 by then, and was already known as a merry organ-grinder cranking out sensational, ideologically biased trash journalism around the world. 

Junk propaganda “news” had pretty much always existed, of course, but Murdoch’s tabloids perfected its vulgar art. In 1969, he described his aim to turn The Sun, a recently acquired British newspaper, into “a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it” – and he did it. 

The Economist described Murdoch as the inventor of the modern tabloid, and people certainly ate his approach up on both sides of the Atlantic. 

His U.S. publications in 1978 included Star – founded to compete with the Hearst-controlled National Enquirer – and the New York Post, both of which still exist today.

But I don’t want to get ahead of the story.

Harriet leads the Grovesters in a tepid round of applause for (Sterling) Murdock, who responds with a speech.

In the crowd are the French Maitre D’-Looking Grovester and, if I’m not mistaken, Mrs. Lavish, the heavily made-up mom from “Blizzard.” 

Murdock cites Horace Greeley, the founder of the New-York Tribune and a mostly unsuccessful political candidate (he was a Whig), as his inspiration.

Today we would call Greeley a progressive, by Nineteenth-Century standards, anyways. He was instrumental in creating the (then-liberal) Republican Party, and in editorials he pressed his friend Abraham Lincoln to be more aggressive on the issue of slavery.

P.G. Wodehouse once described a character as “rather a mildewed bird of gloomy appearance, almost entirely concealed behind a cascade of white whiskers.” The description also fits Greeley rather well, I think. 

(I mean, I’m no Tab Hunter myself, so no offense to any other mildewed birds out there.)

Murdock quotes Greeley’s famous saying, “Go West, young man.” 

AMELIA [as PET SHOP BOYS, singing]: “Go WEEEEEEEST!”

Progressive though he was overall, Greeley believed in the Manifest Destiny theory, which ascribed to God a sort of “take it! take it all!” mandate for white people. (You may be familiar with the concept from 1999’s Ravenous.)

Greeley also probably didn’t really say “Go West, young man,” since it apparently annoyed him greatly when people attributed the phrase to him.

And, as Amelia noted, in the Twentieth Century, the maxim inspired gay dance anthems by the Village People and Pet Shop Boys, so at least something pleasant came out of Manifest Destiny.

Murdock’s speech is pretentious and pompous; Charles rolls his eyes at it, in fact. 

In it, Mr. Murdock describes Walnut Grove as “the end of the rainbow” for his own ambitions. (Somebody else thought Walnut Grove was the end of the rainbow once, and it didn’t end well for her.)

He goes on and on, and when he’s finally finished Harriet runs up to him crying, “Sterling, Sterling! I have gooseflesh!”

AMELIA: Yuck.

On the bench, Doc leans over to Caroline and whispers, “We’re working on a cure for that.” Ha! Okay, John T’s getting warmed up now.

I often make entertaining side comments myself at public events. Once, at a butchery class, the lady next to me got up and moved.

There weren’t any children in the assembly at the newspaper office, and now we see the school vomiting them out.

Amongst them are Laura, Albert, Nellie, Willie, Andrew Garvey, Carrie, at least one AEK, the Midsommar Kid, the Smallest Nondescript Helen of Them All, the Gelfling Boy, the Latino Kid, and a handful of other Helens.

Also, there’s Ike Eisenmann, a familiar face from Escape to Witch Mountain and from “Centennial” in Season Two. (And a heckuva nice guy, or at least he seemed that way to me on Twitter, back before it became Elon Musk’s personal torture den.)

Addressing him as “Erich” (spelled with a ch in the credits), Laura invites him to come check out the new newspaper office with them.

But young Erich says he has to go home and do chores – always an indicator of a trustworthy kid on this show. Well, no, I suppose that isn’t true. Timothy Farrell was devoted to his family, and he turned out to be the Creeper of Walnut Grove!

At the Pen & Plow, Mr. Murdock greets the kids pleasantly and thanks Charles and Garvey for unloading his stuff.

Then he offers them jobs delivering newspapers. That takes me back. My high-school friend Greg had a paper delivery job, and I used to go along with him on his route. We’d drive around Wisconsin for hours, singing Meat Loaf and Rocky Horror songs at the top of our lungs. Happy times.

We once drove into a ditch in the middle of a snowstorm, and, quite “Blizzard”-ishly in fact, had to seek shelter in the barn of a local dairy farmer. 

He was very suspicious of us. We weren’t so sure about him either. We had both seen Motel Hell. 

It turned out all right, though I’d note he made us stay in the cold barn rather than inviting us in for coffee and pie or anything like that.

Anyways, Murdock says he’ll pay them a rate of $3 a week for this service, or $90 in today’s money. Not bad for a couple hours’ work on a Friday.

I notice behind Mr. Murdock, the printing press bears the name Palmer & Rey, a metal foundry in San Francisco. It’s unclear from the internet when exactly this business existed, but some accounts have it pretty early, so I’ll accept it.

Albert, whose background as a street urchin naturally makes him attuned to financial opportunities, asks Mr. Murdock if there are any jobs for the kids.

Murdock says he actually needs some typesetting assistants, which he describes as “printer’s devils” (a Seventeenth-Century expression).

“I’ve been called worse,” Albert says matter-of-factly, which is quite funny as well.

The rate is 50 cents ($15) a week, and Mr. Murdock hires both Albert and Laura on the spot.

Then he assigns Andrew Garvey to the marketing department.

WILL: Do you think Andy hates Albert? He’s really taken all the “Andy parts” since he appeared.

AMELIA: Yes.

Cut to the Olesons’ dining room, where Murdock has joined his cousins for dinner.

Harriet has moved those damn plates around again.

This time Murdock quotes Albert D. Richardson, a Civil War correspondent who worked for Greeley, saying, “A newspaper is the mother’s milk of an infant town.” (A quotation I wasn’t able to verify.)

I’m not one of those people who gets squeamish about breastfeeding, but as a metaphor it seems needlessly, um, physiological.

AMELIA: Do we actually see his eyes at any point in this story?

DAGNY: Do you think it’s hard for the actor to see through them?

WILL: Probably. When I played the tailor Motel Kamzoil in Fiddler on the Roof in high school, I wore vintage glasses, and I couldn’t see shit.

But Harriet runs with it, saying The Pen & Plow will “suckle Walnut Grove into a robust and mature metropolis.”

Nels looks like he’s about to upchuck at this line of conversation, if I may be permitted an Edwards-ism.

Steering the subject away from mammary function, Nels asks Cousin Sterling how he creates a whole newspaper.

Murdock says most of the paper is printed by a news service in St. Paul, but he’s responsible for the local news on the front and back pages.

“Do you write all that yourself, Uncle Sterling?” asks Nellie. They’re pretty free with the word uncle in this town.

Mr. Murdock says no, he’ll have to hire somebody to be the source of information on local activities, and Harriet instantly volunteers.

She trills laughter, and Nels winces.

Murdock says sure, but he can’t afford to pay much. 

AMELIA: He was handing out fifty-cent salaries like candy to the kids a minute ago.

DAGNY: But he’s getting that labor at cheaper rates than he’d pay adults.

WILL: Yeah. Just like Mrs. Whipple did at her sweatshop when she was living.

But Harriet says don’t worry about it, if he gives the Mercantile free ad space in the paper, she’ll waive her salary requirements.

Harriet and Cousin Sterling adjourn to the other room, talking about all the juicy stories she will uncover. She says Nellie can help, too.

“Why not, she’s got her mother’s nose,” says Nels, who’s made a few other bitchy remarks through this conversation. I think he may be drinking again.

Nellie shoots him a look.

“Ah!” cries Mrs. Oleson. “I have the most perfect name for my column! Harriet’s Happenings!”

Cut to the yellow wheels of the Yellow-Wheeled Buckboard in action.

In the buckboard are the Gelfling Boy, Not-Ellen Taylor, a woman I think we’ve seen a few times who wears a medieval-peasant-type head covering, and an unknown man. (Hugh MacGregor?)

The Gelfling and Not-Ellen must be siblings, which makes sense. They look similar and they’ve been around about the same length of time.

It also explains why Not-Ellen was in the crowd watching the cattle contest, in which the Gelfling Boy was a competitor, last week. 

Unfortunately we never learned their surname, since the Gelfing lost and his name was not announced by the officials.

Inside the Mercantile, Mrs. Oleson is charging Alice Garvey $1.79 (about $55) for something.

Mrs. O, who’s stuck a press card in her hat, gives Alice a hard time about wanting to buy on credit, then says she could make an exception if Mrs. G rigs the upcoming spelling bee in Nellie’s favor.

She then adds she’ll be donating the prize for the bee, a $2 gift certificate to the Mercantile. 

“Oh!” she says then, as if this conversation is both normal and delightful, “then that makes me the chairwoman of the Awards Committee, doesn’t it?”

Alice is speechless. She holds a rictus grin for a moment.

Then says she’ll come back another time to buy her items . . . but now that her snare’s caught its prey, Harriet won’t hear of that.

DAGNY: This is very Mapp and Lucia.

Moving on to other customers, Mrs. Oleson hears Erich’s father ask him to read the label on a canister for him. He has a pronounced German accent. (Hence the ch, I suppose.)

Insinuating herself into the conversation, she says she’d be happy to sell “Mr. Schiller” some reading glasses if he needs them.

I wonder if these people are any relation to “Miz” Schiller, the frightening original cook at the Dakota Hotel in Winoka. But she wasn’t German.

Since these Schillers are nice people, it’s possible their name was a nod to Eighteenth-Century German poet Friedrich Schiller, whose “Ode to Joy” was famously set to music by Ludwig van Beethoven.

Mr. Schiller, a tall, rather serious-looking man, tells “Frau Oleson” he can’t read English.

Erich reads, “The name Blanke’s is synonymous with good-drinking coffee.”

I was pleased to find that Blanke’s was a real coffee company. Based in St. Louis and owned by a Cyrus F. Blanke, it was a popular brand – but it didn’t exist until 1890. 

Mrs. Oleson tells Frau Schiller, a pretty woman who has a familiar look, that the coffee costs 25 cents, or about $7.50 a pound. (Not far off from the average today, which is $6.30 per pound. Blanke’s presumably is a premium brand.)

Frau Schiller turns to her husband and says in German that it’s too expensive, and they leave.

Herr Schiller is Robert “King” Moody (no relation to Ron Moody, whom we discussed in last week’s recap).

He was on episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Bonanza, Dragnet, Get Smart, Bob Newhart, CHiPs, Quantum Leap, and the Timothy Busfield vehicle Thirtysomething.

Despite being American, he apparently was somewhat typecast as German characters.

He was never on Love Boat – but he was close friends with Bernie Kopell, who played Doc on the show.

But Moody was best known as that all-American seller of junk food to kids Ronald McDonald, whom he played in TV commercials for over fifteen years.

As for Frau Schiller, she looks familiar because she also was Ike Eisenmann’s mother in “Centennial,” in which they were Russian immigrants! 

Russian-born herself, the actor was Lisa Pera, the mother of our own Radames.

Nels comes out saying Harriet’s notes for this week’s paper include an ad for 20 percent off on all goods at the Mercantile. 

He says they can’t afford to have a sale like that, but she says of course we can, stupid, we’ll just raise the prices before taking the 20 percent off. A keen woman of business, is Harriet Oleson.

Hilariously, she wanders off muttering, “Dumb – I’ve never seen anyone so dumb.”

Marching music brings us back to the bank/newspaper office, where Laura and Albert are setting type.

Albert notices there’s an item in Harriet’s Happenings about how Nels, Doc, and Charles will be leading church services in Reverend Alden’s absence this month. We know Aldi only comes to town every two weeks, and the parishioners are surely aware who takes the lay minister role when he’s gone; but it is the sort of boring thing you’d expect them to put in the local paper. (I wonder what Nels and Doc’s sermons are like?)

(We don’t have to wonder what Charles’s are like, of course.)

Next there’s an item that says an authoritative source called “A.G.” projects Nellie as the winner of the upcoming spelling bee, which vexes the Ingalls kids.

Then Sterling Murdock shows the kids a dummied-up version of the first edition of The Pen & Plow. 

Undated, unfortunately, it contains articles about a “crop failure” and the creation of a new town social hall. (It doesn’t say for what town – Sleepy Eye? Boswell? Mooney?)

Quite funnily, one headline reads “Hasty Marriage Repented.” Perhaps Murdock interviewed Nellie and decided to write up her annulment after all this time.

But the main headline on the front page is WAR DECLARED; and we cut to an alarmed rush of Grovesters grabbing papers from Willie, who’s now apparently Town Newsy. (A sensible choice.)

But the subhead turns out to be “Oleson’s Mercantile Declares War on High Costs and Shoddy Goods.”

Everyone’s amused by this clever marketing device, and Mrs. Oleson cackles from the window.

After a break, Jonathan Garvey walks through town.

The urban core is fairly bustling with people. The economic recovery must indeed be underway.

Garvey heads straight to Doc’s office and reads him an item from Harriet’s Happenings: “Dr. Hiram Baker lost another patient when Ezra Jenkins died last Wednesday.”

Doc killing another patient hardly seems newsworthy to anyone who watches this show; but Doc is insulted, saying Ezra Jenkins died of old age.

Garvey comments dryly that Mrs. Oleson bills herself as “Walnut Grove’s leading citizen,” and Doc says, “Misleading citizen is more like it.” (Nice, John T.!)

That night, Ma, Pa and Little Bo Peep are having a confab about Harriet’s Happenings.

Ma reads from the column, “Claude Bekins has been spending an awful lot of time at Widow Foster’s house lately. One wonders if Claude’s wife knows about it!” (Given what we’ve seen of Mrs. Foster on this show, this item is surely true.)

Pa says with annoyance, “He’s spending a lot of time on her roof – fixing it, and his wife knows all about it.” 

DAGNY: Sure he is, Chuck.

AMELIA: He is pretty gullible.

WILL: Caroline should start reading an item about herself and the handyman and then “accidentally” throw the paper into the fire.

So perhaps this is the point at which to say this episode was apparently inspired by Michael Landon’s own annoyance at tabloid coverage of his life, which insinuated infidelities and shenanigans from one of TV’s greatest-ever dads. 

Judging by the headlines, this coverage could be sideways and sly.

I read that both Katherine MacGregor and John Hillerman were sympathetic to Landon’s complaints. 

Of course, some of these stories were likely not in the realm of fiction, and Landon did wind up divorcing his second wife to marry a crew member on the show. (I mean she worked on the show, not that they got married on it.)

Ma reads on: “Mrs. Sally Larson has left her husband to return to Chicago. Could there be someone special in Chicago? Could the separation be permanent?”

Ma says everyone knows Sally Larson is visiting her dying father.

DAGNY: Oh – so everybody she writes about is innocent, huh.

WILL: You’re so cynical. I love you.

“Well, if that’s culture I’m Abraham Lincoln!” Charles huffs.

While modern tabloids may have provided the spark for this script, it is true that smalltown papers at this time did have such gossip columns. Often the news they reported was depressing or disturbing rather than salacious, though.

If you’re interested in the topic and you don’t mind the spooky stuff, you may want to check out Wisconsin Death Trip, a nonfiction book from the early 1970s compiled by Michael Lesy.

More gimmicky art project than real scholarship (like a certain blog I could name), Wisconsin Death Trip presents many gossipy clippings from the time of our saga, accompanied by creepy photos taken in the town of Black River Falls in the 1890s. 

The book has a cult following as a classic of nonfiction horror. But in reality, most of the clippings simply reported the events of everyday rural life familiar to any viewer of this show: disease, accidents, fires, deaths of children, madness, domestic abuse, addiction, suicide, racism, etc. 

Most fans of the book will tell you it suggests something weird about Black River Falls, a town about 250 miles from Walnut Grove, and just 80 from the Ingallses’ old home in the Big Woods.

But in fact, only the pictures specifically depict Black River Falls; the news clippings are from all over the state. A number of them are from places near my hometown in the northeast, in fact! 

Wisconsin Death Trip was made into a documentary film in 1999. It doesn’t capture the full effect of the book, but it’s entertaining and often quite funny in its dark way. (Not particularly scary.)

Here’s a link to a clip.

Anyways, then we see Willie, lounging at home and defacing his mother’s image in the paper. Ha!

Others have noticed the copy under the Harriet’s Happenings headline is just generic stuff about city zoning and gold mining.

Nels and Mrs. Oleson come in then. They both show signs of extreme physical exertion.

AMELIA: What have THEY been doing!

But apparently, they’re exhausted because the store was so busy – thanks to Harriet’s big sale.

Mrs. O upsets Nels by saying they’ll have to raise the prices even more to repeat the trick next week.

Then she says the sales of The Pen & Plow are also skyrocketing, “thanks to my writing.” (And the juicy items in Harriet’s Happenings certainly are well-written – which is a little odd, given Harriet was shown in “Little Women” to be a terrible writer.)

But perhaps nonfiction’s her forte. I can’t make up an original story to save my life.

Nels angrily snatches the paper from Willie. He gives Willie a look about the picture, but doesn’t say anything about it.

Then Nels reads, “Seven-month-married Helga Svenson gave birth to her first child, a baby boy. She claims it was premature.”

Nels says Doc Baker himself told him Mrs. Svenson’s “claim” is the truth. (If it wasn’t, would that make the story okay?)

“Well,” Harriet says, “there were rumors.”

“You are supposed to print the facts, Harriet, not rumors!” Nels says.

“Well, it was a fact – that there were rumors,” Harriet said.

AMELIA: Is she gonna say the Svensons also eat cats?

Now, if you’re the type who becomes enraged when I draw obvious parallels between this show and our world today, I gently suggest you go do something else with your time, or (preferably) just skip down to the Landon angel picture.

“Fake news” and “alternative facts” have been part of the public conversation for nearly a decade. With the internet, you can reach huge numbers of people (well, not this blog), and you can exclusively read or watch the things you want to believe. (Or that other people want you to.)

Social media accelerates the whole business, plus it makes us hate each other because we can see each other’s thoughts. In the Twentieth Century, we could only guess.

(If I could destroy the whole damn internet by pushing a button, I probably would. I believe it’s done more harm than good to our world.) 

(I actually met Aughra once, but that’s another story.)

A beloved old teacher of mine is now a slave to conspiracy theories, and when challenged she once said, “I don’t care if it’s not true, I believe it!” It was telling.

So is the admission this month by a politician who, when confronted about spreading lies, said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

It’s sad a line like “It was a fact that there were rumors” is more relevant than ever in 2024. Still more proof Landon was ahead of his time. I wonder what he’d make of things today.

Anyways, at this point Willie pipes up and says his sister is in fact the source of the Svenson rumor, since she has a crush on Helga’s husband Lars and hates his wife. (Pursuing a married man is new for Nellie, but I suppose she’s become fairly jaded about marriage since becoming a divorcee herself.)

Nels is shocked by this.

Willie adds that Nellie is now throwing a tantrum because Erich Schiller won the spelling bee instead of her.

Outraged, Harriet grabs a notepad and starts writing, saying she’s putting Alice and the Schillers on her “little list.” (A reference to The Mikado? Only that didn’t come out till 1885.)

Later, Jonathan Garvey crosses the thoroughfare to the Mercantile as a number of ladies come down the stairs, the Medieval Peasant Woman amongst them.

DAGNY: His bootstraps look like Nyssa’s ears.

AMELIA: Olive would like this shot.

A man drives a buckboard past, but I can’t tell who it is. (My glasses need a new prescription. Not-Paul Rudd as a Middle-Aged Insurance Salesman?)

Inside, Mrs. Lavish is shopping, and Mrs. Foster is ordering a new corset from Mrs. Oleson. I guess she doesn’t care about the salacious gossip about her and poor Claude Bekins. Maybe she thinks it’ll improve her standing among the men of the community. (The gossip, I mean, not the corset, though that might too.)

Caroline has come to sell eggs, and Harriet turns to her and asks excitedly how she liked this week’s column.

DAGNY: Listen to those eggs clunking! What did they use for the sound effect, billiard balls?

Caroline sighs – clearly this is a conversation she’d rather not have – and says, “I thought it was inaccurate, Mrs. Oleson,” pointing out the Bekins and Larson items were lies.

Mrs. O shrugs the criticism off, saying she can always print a retraction in fine print on the back page if there’s enough call for one.

Caroline pushes harder, and Harriet suddenly says, “Mrs. Ingalls, we will not be needing any more eggs in the foreseeable future.” (Egg Wars!)

“Mrs. Oleson, I’m sure the hens will be relieved to hear that,” Caroline replies. 

WILL: Not sure I understand that joke exactly. 

DAGNY: Well, it is Caroline.

As Caroline leaves, Garvey whispers an encouraging word to her.

Then we see Nels finishing up a transaction with Mrs. Lavish, whom he addresses as “Mrs. Lindstrom.” (Whatever.)

He then goes over to chat with Garvey, who’s looking at a plaid dress. He jokes he’s not sure it suits Garvey, as it might be “too small around the chest.”

In the background, Mrs. Oleson snaps her ledger shut, apparently annoyed by Garvey’s presence.

Garvey laughs and says he was thinking the dress might make a good present for Alice. (Might be too small around her chest too.)

Garvey notes their fifteenth wedding anniversary is coming up. (If it’s September of 1882, that means they married in 1867, when Jonathan was 23 and Alice was 18 – a downright geriatric union compared to some relationships we see on this show.)

Garvey asks the cost, and Nels tells him it’s $9.50 ($285).

Nels says they can always charge it, but Harriet appears and shuts down any talk of that.

She says if they give credit to just anyone, “every Tom, Dick and Harry” will want to be next. (A saying that dates to at least the Seventeenth Century.)

Harriet sidles up to Garvey and says if he were buying essentials like food, she’d make an exception. She suggests he consider pork products as an anniversary gift.

When Garvey declines, Mrs. O exits, muttering to herself that he’s an “overgrown ingrate.” 

WILL: She’s never liked him.

Garvey asks Nels to hold the dress and he’ll try to get a loan from the bank in Sleepy Eye to buy it.

Another new edition of The Pen & Plow comes out then. Willie hands them out in town, as we see Herbert Diamond whittling nearby.

The Medieval Peasant Woman takes a paper. She’s really come to the fore in this one.

Back at the Old Sanderson Place, Bandana Alice laughs as she reads the news to her family on the lanai.

The main point of the “news” is that the Mercantile’s goods are superior to those available in “Tracy and Lamberton.”

Tracy, Minnesota, is a real place, about ten miles away from Walnut Grove, and mentioned by Laura Ingalls Wilder in The Long Winter and By the Shores of Silver Lake. 

A railroad hub in the old time, today it hosts Boxcar Days, a train festival.

Tracy has never been mentioned on this show before, though we did theorize that “‘Be My Friend’” was set in its vicinity.

Lamberton is also real. It’s ten miles in the other direction.

We can see the back page of the paper as she reads. It contains another story about a crop failure. Must have been a rough harvest that year.

Alice stops short when she comes to another “happening”: “We have learned with sadness that the Jonathan Garveys are deeply in debt, unable to pay long-overdue bills. Bankruptcy looms, and they may lose their farm.”

Jonathan, who’s been whittling, stops.

AMELIA: Oleson’s gonna get murdered, isn’t she?

WILL: Yeah, and everybody in town is a suspect.

Jonathan reassures Andrew that the item isn’t true, and Alice says it’s just revenge for Erich Schiller winning the spelling bee.

I must also mention that Jonathan has a cobweb connecting his hand and beard in this scene. I’m not sure how that happens.

That night at the Little House, the three kids are studying in the Common Room whilst Ma and Pa chilly down.

The dialogue clarifies for the audience that Erich Schiller’s spelling bee win advances him to regionals. Regional spelling bees, state math competitions, territory-wide football conferences . . . the public school system is a lot more organized than I would have thought for the time period. It’s a well-oiled machine.

Pa says he’s given up on reading the horrible Pen & Plow, so Laura and Albert catch him up on the gossip.

They quote it verbatim, which seems unlikely; but Albert’s Mrs. Oleson impression is pretty good.

The gist is that Mrs. O has publicly congratulated Erich on his win – which she says is even more noteworthy since his family is completely illiterate. 

AMELIA: Oh boy.

Then we switch over to Erich’s house, where they’ve just finished up some Kirschwähe.

Herr Schiller asks Erich to read him some news out of the paper, and they all laugh at the latest trick headline promoting the Mercantile.

“What else is happening by Harriet?” Frau Schiller says, cutely.

DAGNY: They never know what to do with the moms in these stories.

Erich spots the item about himself, and his dad says, “Lesen, lesen!” (“Read, read!”)

Erich begins, but stops in horror when he gets to the second part.

He excuses himself and balls up the paper outside in anguish. 

Then we go cut to the regional spelling bee, which is also being held at the Walnut Grove school. Why on earth would it be held there? We know Boswell, a mere six miles away, is a much larger community. 

To say nothing of Mooney, which we know has grown a lot.

Anyways, the pews are packed with people including the Ingallses, the Olesons, Sterling Murdock, the Schillers, Mrs. Lavish, an AEK, the Midsommar Kid, the Latino Kid, Mr. Penguin Man, and some other people we don’t know – presumably the parents of kids from other districts.

Erich is competing against a brown-haired girl and a blonde, neither of whom we’ve seen before.

The brown-haired girl, “Jenny,” blows the spelling of repetitious.

Erich is up next. But he also blows it, spelling it R-E-P-I-T-I-T-I-O-U-S. 

ONLY NOBODY NOTICES! Alice G cries out “Correct!” and everybody claps. 

AMELIA: WHAT? That isn’t right!

This is a howler of a blooper. Seriously, how could it happen? (And no, it isn’t an archaic Nineteenth-Century spelling; I checked!)

Well, Herr Schiller leans over proudly to Charles and laughs that he brought along his Bible for good luck.

When I was nine years old, I was in a spelling bee, but I blew it on a much easier word than repetitious. It was clockwork, which I spelled as clorkwork. I just choked. 

I’m not really that embarrassed about it. I’ve always been a good speller, but I get very nervous when there’s a lot of attention on me, as myself anyways. I’m much better sideways than straight-on.

(As characters it’s different. I kicked ass as the tailor Motel Kamzoil.)

Then the blonde girl, who has a very cool hairstyle, gets mimosaceous. 

AMELIA: That’s way fucking harder than repetitious! 

WILL: Yeah. I’m surprised Alice knows how to pronounce it. Of course, I don’t know if she pronounced it right.

(Also, if it’s regionals, why is Mrs. G running the event? Where are the county officials and the like?)

Mimosaceous means “of the Mimosaceae.” And Mimosaceae is an outdated term for the Mimosoideae. 

And Mimosoideae is a subfamily of plants that includes “mimosas,” flowers that look a little like fireworks, and after which the cocktail is named.

Cool Hairstyle gets it right. She’s the rightful winner! In fact, why didn’t she object when Erich screwed up? If she can spell mimosaceous, surely she knows how repetitious is spelled.

Then Erich gets xanthophyll – a chemical compound that gives things yellow colors in the natural world. (John T. must have been doing some gardening while he wrote this one.)

(I wonder if xanthophyll is responsible for the yellow wooden wheels of the Yellow-Wheeled Buckboard? Not to say Yellow-Wheeled Buckboards grow on trees. . . .)

[UPDATE: Excellent reader Jens writes that the spelling bee words have a provenance higher than John T. Dugan’s botany books:

Some of the words they used in the spelling bee come from LIW’s Little Town on the Prairie. The whole town of DeSmet participated in that spelling bee. The winner was, of course, Charles Ingalls. And yes, xanthophyll was the final word. By this point in the TV series, hardly anything matches the books, but this is one of the few things that does.

Thank you, Jens!]

In the audience, Mrs. Oleson clicks her teeth obnoxiously with her pencil. Ha!

Distracted by Katherine MacGregor’s mugging, Erich looks like he’s going to vomit.

DAGNY: He’s really struggling. He’s like Erik Menéndez.

WILL: Yeah. Or John Junior.

Well, Erich spells it wrong (again). 

“Aw,” says Mrs. O as Nellie smirks.

Humiliated, Erich runs from the classroom. (They should have played Albert’s “running” theme.)

His parents rush after him, and Pa picks up the German Bible, which they left behind.

Cool Hair wins the contest then, but Pa and Laura don’t even clap. That’s taking your Erich fandom a bit too far, guys.

A little time passes then, and Charles tromps out to the Schiller house with the Bible. (I can’t tell what house it is. It could be the House of Evil, but I’m not sure. It appears to have more support beams on the porch, and I’m not sure the trees are at the proper angle.)

Chuck immediately begins meddling with Erich, saying Alice Garvey told him he quit school. 

AMELIA: Who’s the gossip now, Alice Garvey?

Erich, who looks about as sweaty as anyone we’ve ever seen on this show, and that’s saying a lot, says school is for losers – you know, Albert-style.

AMELIA: He actually quit school over this?

DAGNY: It does seem like an overreaction.

Herr Schiller says Erich has not been himself since the schpelling bee. He’s sweaty too.

Then Charles says, “You know, nobody expected you to win that spelling bee.” 

WILL: Oh my God, Chuck, how is THAT supposed to help?

Charles says he doesn’t see how anybody could do well in a spelling bee after those awful things Mrs. Oleson wrote about his parents in the paper. 

AMELIA: Oh my God, Chuck! Of course he didn’t TELL them! 

Then Charles says, okay, you tell ’em, Erich, then leaves.

WILL/DAGNY/AMELIA: OH MY GOD, CHUCK!

Poor Erich, who’s looked like he’s going to faint from nervousness the entire episode, tells his father the whole story.

But Herr Schiller surprises Erich by not giving a shit about Mrs. O’s opinions. He says it’s a dumb reason for Erich to sabotage his own future by dropping out. 

Then he calls him a “cabbagehead,” which seems harsh.

DAGNY: “Cabbagehead”? Is that like “hooplehead”?

Then, like Yuli Pyatakov before him, Schiller takes a patriotic turn, saying in America, the children of immigrants or illiterates can even grow up to be President.

AMELIA: In America, illiterates THEMSELVES can grow up to be President!

The two hug and say they love each other, Herr Schiller calling Erich “Cabbagehead” again, and Erich runs off happily.

WILL: His pants should split like that kid’s in Willow Prairie.

Okay, so all that remains is for The Pen & Plow to be destroyed. After a commercial, we see Jonathan Garvey returning from Sleepy Eye. He didn’t get the loan, and he’s feelin’ glum. It is a long way to go for nothing.

Garvey tells Charles that Mrs. Oleson’s column about his family being in debt ruined his credit.

He says the banker just “smiled like the cat that ate a canary” (probably anachronistic) as he refused.

Charles goes to confront Sterling Murdock, who just says “this is America,” and adds it’s no crime to come up with an idea that makes your business successful.

Mr. Murdock angrily says, “The subscriptions are still pouring in, and so are the ads,” asking why people keep reading if the paper is so offensive? (A question I have occasionally asked trolling readers of Walnut Groovy.)

DAGNY: How many readers are interested in a Walnut Grove-specific paper? There can’t be more than thirty people total who live there.

WILL: Yeah. And half of them can’t read.

WILL: And who else is advertising in it? The Mill? The Feed & Seed? There aren’t any other businesses.

AMELIA: Don’t forget Doc Baker.

Well, equally angrily, Charles tells Murdock he just lost two printer’s devils.

DAGNY: I notice he didn’t quit his delivery job.

WILL: Oh, no, he’s keeping that. Are you crazy, it’s three dollars a week.

Outside, a strange dog is chasing Mrs. Oleson through the thoroughfare.

She ends up at the Pen & Plow, where Laura and Albert appear to be working. But Pa just quit for them?

Laura tells Mrs. O that Mr. Murdock “went down to telegraph for some new newsprint.” 

(Went down where? As far as we know, Walnut Grove doesn’t have a telegraph yet. “Down” would suggest a southern destination, but there’s not much between Walnut Grove and the Iowa border. I suppose Worthington might have a telegraph, but so does Springfield, which is half the distance away, to the east.)

(But Albert says they’re waiting for him to return with their paychecks, so he can’t have gone out of town.)

Mrs. O has brought in her copy, which includes an item about Nellie having “the highest moral character in the community.”

There’s a poster behind Albert that seems to be a mysterious list. I can’t make heads or tails of it. Is it a coded message or something?

Companion [illegible]

Holiday Gifts Pictorial

Dawn of Working [?] Twilight

[illegible] of Matches [?] Destination [?]

Independent Republic

Female Poets of America

Liberty Shade

Gallery of Paintings

Immortality of the Soul

Instrument Western

Bunker Hill Monument

[illegible] of Light [illegible]

Any ideas what this could mean, readers?

Then Mrs. Oleson reads that many people have remarked how beautiful her picture in the paper is.

DAGNY: This part is also like Mapp and Lucia. They’re always reading news articles about themselves out loud.

When Mrs. O leaves, Gopher Fangs immediately mocks her.

Then Albert suggests they mess up the typesetting of this week’s edition, an idea Laura loves.

Time passes then, and we see a huge wave of Grovesters rushing to the Mercantile.

Mrs. Oleson is excited, and Nels is not.

Neither of them notices there’s a ghost of a woman peering through the window. (When we cut to an outdoor shot, there’s nobody on the porch.)

The Olesons open the store, but are shocked when people just start grabbing things and leaving.

Mrs. Oleson gets Mrs. Foster to tell her this week’s paper said the Mercantile would be having a “one hundred percent off of everything” “sale.”

DAGNY: This is too much.

Everybody leaves, suspiciously suddenly actually, and Nels closes the store at once whilst Albert and Laura giggle outside.

DAGNY: This one feels Canadian.

WILL: Wait, what?

DAGNY: It does. There’s something about the tone of the comedy. It’s like Beachcombers – we’re supposed to take the story kind of seriously, but the comedy shows it’s just light entertainment for kids. It’s like a wink at the audience.

Harriet immediately retires to a couch with a cloth on her head. 

But her rest is disturbed by Nellie, who comes in screaming “I hate you!”

Apparently the kids changed the “moral character” item to say Nellie is undateably ugly.

Then Willie points out an item saying Harriet herself wears a wig and false teeth.

(We know the false teeth bit is true, since Nels confirmed it in “The Election.”)

Later, Mrs. Oleson goes out to the Little House to confront Caroline.

“My dear Harriet,” Caroline says (ha!), “the children are being punished for what they did.”

When asked what their punishment is, Ma says, “They can’t work for the paper anymore.”

Harriet continues screaming and raging and sobbing, and Caroline gently suggests she print a retraction.

Meanwhile, Laura and Albert are hiding upstairs, laughing their heads off.

DAGNY: So Canadian.

Well, the next edition comes out, and Laura and Albert cancel their planned fishing outing to show it to Pa in the barn.

DAGNY: Is that his Pelaton?

Things take a darker turn then. Albert reads: “THE JOKE OF WALNUT GROVE: The whole town is laughing over the fact that Charles Ingalls’ young houseguest, Albert No-Name, calls Charles ‘Pa.’ He even had the audacity to register the boy in Walnut Grove’s school as ‘Albert Ingalls.’”

This is really horrible, and Pa closes his eyes as if in pain.

But it gets worse. Albert reads on, “But who are we to laugh? Perhaps the boy really is Charles’s – in which case the joke is on Caroline Ingalls.”

AMELIA: If Oleson was a man he’d beat the shit out of him.

WILL: This is one of those stories where they have Mrs. O go so far, there should be no hope for being friends with any of these people afterwards. 

DAGNY: I don’t know. Albert did deserve it.

WILL/AMELIA: Oh my God!

Poor Albert then apologizes to Pa, saying “It’s all my fault.”  

AMELIA: Are Albert’s eyes completely black?

DAGNY: They are pretty dark.

He says he’ll tell Mrs. G to correct his name in the records to “just plain Albert” – but Pa says like hell you will.

There’s more to the column, too: a report on Erich Schiller’s defeat at the spelling bee, which proved Mrs. Oleson right.

AMELIA: It did prove her right. He didn’t spell a single word correctly.

Another item is that “Jonathan Garvey is thinking of buying his wife a ham for their fifteenth wedding anniversary.” (Okay, that one’s a little funny.)

Charles vows revenge as cliffhanger music pushes us into the final break.

When we return, Andrew Garvey, who gets very little to do in this one, rings the bell to summon Grovesters to church.

The service is crowded. Pretty much everybody we’ve seen so far in the episode is there, including, strangely, the two girls from out of town who competed in the schpelling bee.

Sad to think Mr. Hanson is gone for good.

This is actually the first episode to depict a service where Reverend Alden is absent. Charles is the lay minister this week, so too bad for those of us who wanted to hear Doc or Nels preach.

WILL: Look at that little girl leaning her head back. That was totally Olive when she was little.

Charles says he forgot his Bible this morning, so he’s borrowed Herr Schiller’s. 

But rather than reading out of it, he says, “I think it only fitting that the outstanding citizen of Walnut Grove read that text for us this morning.”

And he invites Mrs. Oleson up to read Exodus 20:16.

Charles hands her the German Bible, but she takes one look and says, “I can’t read this!”

“Why, are you illiterate?” Charles asks.

Charles lectures her to her face about her hypocrisy, then blasts Murdock for the “half-truths, innuendos, and outright lies” in their newspaper.

WILL: Do you think Aldi would approve of this?

DAGNY: No.

He calls it “yellow journalism” – a term for tabloid sensationalism that wasn’t around till a little later.

WILL: What about Jesus?

DAGNY: No, probably not him either.

Murdock stands up and says this is a really inappropriate topic for a church service.

WILL: He’s right!

DAGNY: Of course he is.

But Charles continues sanctimoniously, saying “Freedom of the Press doesn’t give anyone the right to print lies that blacken a person’s name and cause pain.”

Charles says Exodus 16:20 is “the Eighth Commandment – Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

WILL: Miss Peel should appear in a puff of smoke.

Charles then shames the congregation for buying the stupid paper in the first place.

He goes on and on about the evils of the tabloids. 

DAGNY: The lady doth protest too much. This is kind of ruining the episode.

The camera slowly zooms in and David gives us some of his most Roseworthy music as Charles reaches his rhetorical climax.

DAGNY: Wow, Paul Wellstone much?

DAGNY: Doc’s lips, drier than ever.

Murdock stomps out, but Mrs. Oleson stands her ground, and Charles begins singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” (Lyrics 1855, music 1868.)

Nels whispers to Garvey that he can come to the store after church and pick up the dress for Alice. 

DAGNY: Good old Nels. 

WILL: Do you miss Mary, or no?

DAGNY/AMELIA: No.

DAGNY: Look at that girl, with her hands on her hips. Finally, somebody behaving like a real kid at a church service.

Voiceover Laura informs us that “The Pen and The Plow [sic] went out of business a month later.” (As Oscar Wilde said, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”)

Well, no Aunt Vickie. Bum-Bum-Ba-Dum.

STYLE WATCH:

Mrs. Oleson wears “ladies-cut” Pinky again.

Dagny had some observations on the women’s styles.

DAGNY: Do you think that actress knew she was going to be on Little House? Her makeup is more Love Boat.

DAGNY: This is Alice’s Ani DiFranco look.

[UPDATE: Sharp-eyed reader Leslie points out Nellie wears her Winoka School uniform in the “I hate you!” scene. Stolen, no doubt.]

Charles appears to go commando again.

THE VERDICT: In some ways this is the Citizen Kane of Little House stories, but it has a slightly nasty edge. I love satire, and the script is certainly sharp, but it’s an odd fit for this show. 

Landon’s “righteous revenge” on a personal enemy, whether deserved or not, is un-Little House-y to say the least. His speech in the final scene, as Dags pointed out, is a little much.

Then again, it’s certainly funny, and it features one of MacGregor’s most memorable, if not exactly subtle, performances.

UP NEXT: The Wedding