“Little House on the Prairie” stars visit Wilder Days

Wendi Lou Lee was a tender 6 months old when she was cast as Laura Ingalls’ sister, Grace, in the “Little House on the Prairie” television show. It was a role she shared with her twin sister, Brenda, for the last four seasons of the series—a role she wouldn’t have received had it not been for her grandmother.
“My grandmother was really good friends with casting director Susan McCray,” Lee explains. “They would play bridge together every weekend. The conversation was always ‘How’s “Little House?” What’s going on?’” This particular week at bridge club, McCray spoke about how they were having trouble finding an actor to play Baby Grace. They had made do up to that point by passing off one of the crew members’ infant boys as Grace, but finding an infant girl with blond hair and blue eyes had proved a challenge. “Back in the day, there weren’t infant twins who had headshots,” says Lee. “Maybe now they do, but that wasn’t the norm.”
One suggestion by her grandmother later, and Lee and sister, Brenda, were brought into the office of “Little House” executive producer, director and writer Michael Landon. “My mom put us on the floor,” Lee recounts, “and he slid around his desk onto the floor and wanted to see what we were going to do. We crawled over him and started interacting with him, and about ten seconds later, he said, ‘These are my girls.’” Their mother had three weeks to gather up the paperwork so they could start filming, and the rest was history.
Needless to say, even as the girls aged into toddlers and eventually preschoolers, they didn’t fully understand just what they had become a part of. “We knew we went to ‘work’ every morning,” says Lee. “We’d wake up and say ‘Mom, are we going to work today?’ I think we kind of saw it as a game. I didn’t watch my first live episode until season eight.”
After the show wrapped up in 1983, Lee and her sister had a role in one commercial that closed out their brief acting careers. “It was so different than being on the set of ‘Little House,’” says Lee. “My mom describes it as the longest day of her life—like, a 10-hour shoot. These people didn’t know what our names were. They didn’t care if we were tired and hungry. It just wasn’t like that with ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ We got home from that commercial and basically told our agent, ‘We’re done.’ That was it. Then we went to Kindergarten.”
Despite her Hollywood career being short-lived, Lee looks back on her ‘Little House’ days with fondness. “Half the cast were kids,” she says. “It had to be a very warm, welcoming, friendly place for children. It was this wonderful family of people that took care of you, swept you up, swung you around and tickled you…it was a like a big family.”
Life was relatively normal for Lee and her sister for the next several decades. Then, around 2004, while Lee was pregnant, they were tracked down and invited to a luncheon with several “Little House” cast members. “We walked in, and the first thing that happens is, Alison [Arngrim, who portrayed Nellie Oleson] stood up and said, ‘Baby Grace is having a baby!’ That was when we got reunited with the cast,” says Lee. While the sisters were leaving, Arngrim suggested they join the cast on the road. “At the beginning, it was once a year, maybe once every other year. Slowly, it became more and more frequent. Last year, we had, like, 16 events!”
Of course, Wilder Days in Mansfield is often among the events that Lee and other cast members attend. Her first visit was several years ago, when the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home and Museum opened the exhibit dedicated to the “Little House” TV show. After the ribbon cutting, she remembers strolling over to Laura’s farmhouse for the first time. “The trees were all blooming. It was a cool day. I was walking along that little sidewalk and didn’t know what to expect. It was kind of this epic moment of ‘Wow. Laura totally changed my life. Thank you, Laura.’”
When she isn’t on the road talking about “Little House,” Lee writes. Her first book, “A Prairie Devotional,” recounts stories from the show coupled with spiritual insights. Her second, “Red Tail Feathers,” is a memoir wherein Lee shares how she found grace in various chapters of her life while also challenging readers to look at their own lives and see how they receive the grace of God shining through, even in hard moments. Her next big writing project is a historical fiction book about Grace Ingalls. “That’s going to take a little bit,” she says. “I haven’t ever written fiction before, so it’s going to be a challenge.”
In addition to the rewarding career that Lee has been able to enjoy, she also continues to carry with her a number of life lessons that the show has imparted to her. One that sticks with her in particular is a scene from the episode “Days of Sunshine, Days of Shadow, Part 2,” when a tornado destroys Laura and husband Almanzo’s home.
In the episode, Laura break down at the sight of the destruction, which is hard for her little sister Grace to bear. “Grace looks up, doesn’t know what to do and just runs away,” says Lee. “That was Brenda. Michael told her, ‘Keep running and don’t look back!’ He’s yelling, ‘Keep running! Keep running!’ She’s just running, running, running. We did it in one take, which was amazing. That kind of anecdote—run, don’t look back—is like life. We are going to have trials. Sometimes you just have to tell yourself, ‘Keep running and don’t look back.’ I feel like that’s something to live by. Life is going to get hard, but it’s okay. Keep running. Don’t look back.” Fans can follow Wendi Lou Lee online at wendiloulee.com, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.