The actress who played Alice Garvey died

I heard about this the other day. That’s too bad.

I personally thought that she was quite pretty when she was in little house.

I listened to an interview with her that was taken about fifteen years ago where she talked about the infamous episode "May We Make Them Proud." She said there's a false story going around that she asked to be written out of the show so she could spend more time with her family--her family was on the set at the time. She was cut out due to the fickleness of studio politics.

Merlin Olsen was a household name NFL athlete for the LA Rams so naturally he got several cinemas offers and his star status was a way of boosting the tv ratings when he got chosen for the part of Jonathan Garvey. Around Season 6, the ratings were waning, and Landon was desperate to do something big and dramatic to get the audience back so the network wouldn't cancel LHOTP so May We Make Them Proud was written. Because it did so badly with the general reception of the public, it was not shown for reruns.

Merlin Olsen was going to play a celibate priest in Father Murphy and his managers, and the NBC network lords believed it would hurt his public image to play a single guy in one show and a family guy in another show at the same time so they demanded Landon kill Alice Garvey (Hersha Parady) off so he could be single in both shows.

So when you watch one of your favorite series and suddenly major characters disappear or get written out or killed off, just keep in mind the narrative is not naturally flowing this way--there's probably some bullshit going on behind the scenes with management.

Hersha Parady had such a great sense of humor about all this. "I'm a feisty, strong willed, robustly built woman so in real life, I could very easily have broken that window and jumped out. At least they had me go out with a roar instead of a whimper!"

She was a good on the show and an underrated beauty. RIP.