My first memory of Michael Landon was when I fell hopelessly in love with him as Little Joe Cartwright. In the days before videos and DVDs it was torture to have to wait a whole week between episodes. My whole family enjoyed the show with the exception of one episode when it clashed with an important televised football match. My dad had worked out something that I still haven’t really because Michael was always so believable in his parts, and that was that Little Joe Cartwright would survive to the next episode whether I (and millions of other fans world-wide) sat on the sofa willing him to do so or not. Anyway I won and Little Joe was ok for another week anyway!

I remember too the first day I moved to London, the accommodation was large and impersonal. I didn’t know anyone. I walked around feeling a bit lost when I heard some familiar music coming from the TV room, it was the Bonanza theme. As I went in people looked up and smiled, none of us knew each other, we all came from different parts of the country or different countries and we all sat and watched the Cartwrights and it broke the ice.

Another time, many years later on holiday in Greece, I went back to the little hotel we were staying at. The family and some other guests were in the reception area all watching TV; it was Highway to Heaven. I didn’t speak much Greek and they didn’t speak much English but we all sat and enjoyed a drink and watched the show together.

Both are lovely memories. Michael’s shows made you feel like that.

Little Joe paid me back for my years of worry that he’d marry the wrong girl, or get beaten up by the bad guy, by getting me through quite a few feared trips to the dentist. I used to think, ‘hey be like Joe, he wouldn’t be scared!’, although if I’d truly thought that one through I’d have remembered Little Joe Cartwright had been scared of one particular dentist, Doc Holliday! So maybe he was fallible after all.

Nowadays thanks to the wonders of DVD we can enjoy Joe, Charles or Jonathan whenever we want to and feel better for knowing each one of them and Michael was the heart behind them all. Thanks to his endeavour, vision and strength of character they will always be real to us.

I know I would have loved the series Michael had just finished working on, US; it was a wonderful pilot full of stories I wanted to see more of. He never lost his touch.

But Michael Landon was so much more than his characters. He made great TV that could uplift you, make you feel, make you laugh, make you cry but mostly make you think about the world and feel better about it too. That’s what Michael Landon still does for me; he affected my life in a positive way. He sounds like he was a complex, generous, intelligent and fun human being who never shirked a challenge. He didn’t waste his life and he truly cared about everything he did.

If some people expected him to be an impossible embodiment of Joe Cartwright, Charles Ingalls and Jonathan Smith then that was their problem. For me he was better than that because he was a real person who made a big, positive and lasting impact on millions of people.

He highlighted causes that might not have been trendy or designed to win lots of fans, for instance teenage bedwetting, but he talked about them because he knew someone out there would be helped because he understood and he’d highlighted their problem too. He gave generously of his time even though he must have been a very busy man.

A quote of his that always sticks in my head is when he said, “I think you can do a great deal in this world to pay back good fortune.”

He certainly did that over and over.

He also once jokingly said that, “Television is an invention where you are entertained in your living room by people you wouldn’t have in your house.”

Well I think an awful lot of us would have loved to have invited Michael into our homes but that’s ok, we’ll settle for keeping him in our hearts.

If all the love that is felt for him world-wide could have been translated to longer on this earth then he would have been with us forever. But in lots of ways he still is.

Thank you Michael, you meant a lot. You will always mean a lot.

Sue H.

England

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