Hersha Parady Dies: ‘Little House On The Prairie’ Schoolteacher Was 78

deadline.com:

Hersha Parady, who won the hearts of Little House on the Prairie viewers with her 1977-1980 portrayal of Walnut Grove schoolteacher and Ingalls Family friend Alice Garvey, died yesterday in Norfolk, Virginia, following surgery last month for the brain cancer meningioma.

She was 78. Her death was announced by her son Jonathan Peverall. Parady died in Peverall’s hometown of Norfolk. In a Facebook post last night, co-star and friend Alison Arngrim, who played the troublemaking Nellie Oleson on Little House, wrote, “Our wild, untameable, talented Hersha has left us.

Rest in power.” Although Parady made her TV debut in 1971 on the series Bearcats! and appeared that decade on Mannix, The Waltons and CBS Afternoon Playhouse, she debuted in her signature role of the Little House teacher in 1977, beginning a three-season run that would end with one of the series’ most shocking and well-remembered installments: The February 4, 1980, episode titled “May We Make Them Proud: Part I.” In an era when series regular cast members infrequently were killed off, Parady’s Alice Garvey met just such a fate in a fire that ravaged Walnut Grove’s School for the Blind.

Unintentionally ignited after young Albert Ingalls (Matthew Labyorteaux) surreptitiously discards a lit tobacco pipe in the basement, the fire would claim the lives of several people including teacher Alice and the infant son of Mary Ingalls Kendall (Melissa Sue Anderson).