Melissa Gilbert looks back on "Little House on the Prairie"

Melissa Gilbert, charmed TV audiences decades ago as the child star of Little House on the Prairie. These days, Mo Rocca tells us that you're likely to find her down on her farm. This is the rooster. This is Dr. Fauci. These days, Melissa Gilbert calls Sullivan County, New York, home. While you're doing that, I'll just be going... It's very rustic. Just look at my hands. I have blisters from shoveling, and there's dirt everywhere constantly, and I've just given up. This is our little house in the Catskills, I guess you could call it. What's really exciting for me is that nothing has died. It's a setting that suits Gilbert well. After all, we first met her gambling through the great outdoors as Laura Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie, based on the beloved series of books and one of the most watched TV shows of the 1970s and early 1980s. It was like a really great summer camp, but I also got to play the ultimate game of dress-up and be in those fantastic clothes and the button-up boots, and I don't remember it ever not being fun. Why do we always have to play Ring Around the Rosie? Because I say so. Little House is still in reruns. In fact, its popularity has recently been spiking. Why are people watching the show now? Oh my gosh. With everything that's going on in the world right now, I think from what I'm hearing from people is that Little House on the Prairie is a reminder of when things were simpler for us in our lives those 45 years ago. When the show debuted in 1974, the country was in the midst of an oil crisis, a recession, and the Watergate scandal. Little House on the Prairie then provided people with a reminder of what we went through when we started this country and how difficult that was, and I think we're at that place again. If we could have done what we did in the 1800s and the 1970s, we can do this. The keys are going to be compassion, community, faith, whatever that faith looks like. Love. That's it. That's all that matters. Some of the episodes seem to have been produced with a vision of 2020. There's one about a plague. Plague is the episode with the rats. Family from here, a family from there, and it's spreading, I don't know why. We can only find the source. Another about a quarantine. You will go straight home and you will not play at one another's homes or farms. This is a quarantine until further notice. Can you answer me something, sir? And this one about race, with actor Todd Bridges playing a child of former slaves who comes through Walnut Grove and is taken in by the Ingalls family. Would you rather be black and live to be 100 or white and live to be 50? The question itself is intense enough, but Michael Landon's reaction, he has no answer. And that's where we are. So please, God, answer me. Melissa, just nine years old when she was cast, starred opposite Michael Landon, who was already famous from his days on Bonanza. Landon didn't just play Charles Ingalls, Laura's pa, he kind of was the show's pa, writing and directing episodes and executive producing the series. Big people have all the fun. You were just a kid with a lot of lines to learn. I had a lot of words, but more than just a lot of words, I did a lot of running. I'll fetch him. I don't think I ever walked anywhere on that show. Even as a young adult, I never walked. I ran everywhere. And did you always know all your lines cold? Only one time did I not know my lines, and it only happened once. I kept forgetting and I kept forgetting, and Michael finally cut, and he said, you don't know your lines, do you? And I just started crying. So he cleared the set, he made everybody go away. You just burst into tears. Just burst into tears because I was busted. He said, just calm down. We're going to do this. You're going to learn your lines. And we did it, and we did it, and we did it. And I finally got it, and I was ready. And I said, thank you so much, and I gave him a hug. And he said, you're so welcome. And then he got down right in front of me, and he said, and that is never happening again, is it? I think you two better get dressed. I don't want you to be late for church. But, Pa... There's no buts about it. Now, you made a mistake, you're going to own up to it. And it never did. Gilbert's off-camera life was more complicated. I tell people I do not have a family tree, I have a family shrub. She was adopted a day after her birth by actors Barbara Crane and Paul Gilbert. When Melissa was 11, she was told her father died of a stroke. I was 45 when I found out that my father had taken his own life. That was a very deeply hidden secret from pretty much everybody in my life. Do you think it was a good thing that it was hidden from you? You know what? I think it's my thing that it was hidden from me. It's not my thing, like my fault. That's what I've been dealt. Would I do something like that with my kids? No. But because I know how damaging those kind of secrets can be. That expression, you're only as sick as your secrets, is absolutely true. Melissa Gilbert is 56 now, a mother and a grandmother, and married to actor Timothy Busfield. She's the woman she is today, she says, because of her upbringing in Walnut Grove. I absorbed so much without even realizing what I was learning. Really important life lessons about family, community, tolerance. Because I was saying all of these things and having to understand all of these things, they became a part of what I learned as well. The show's values, where did they come from? The show's values, I think, were absolutely a reflection of the values of our leader, Michael Landon. He was that man. He believed that people are always really good at heart, and that anyone is redeemable, and that the only way to change things is to do it from a place of love and fairness and understanding. It's unfortunate, for so many reasons, that he passed away when he did, because I think his voice would have been an incredibly important voice to have today. Michael Landon was just 54 when he died from cancer in 1991. The show he helped bring to television has never been off the air. What do you think Michael Landon would think if he knew that people were still embracing the show? Oh, I think Michael Landon would be proud and thrilled. I think that he would be here talking to you instead of me, and I'd gladly yield the chair.