Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, Highway to Heaven - if it's got Michael Landon, I'm there!

Welcome to anyone checking this blog out for the first time.  I am enthusiastically and shamelessly a lifelong fan of Michael Landon.  The postings here will be dedicated to him and his work, as well as my artwork and writing based on the shows he starred in and created.  To start the blog off I am going to post a piece of writing I did in honor of Michael's 80th birthday.  It says everything I think and feel about this man.

My next post will detail a trip I took this last weekend to Michael Landon's hometown of Collingswood, New Jersey with two friends.  It was bittersweet to say the least to walk in his young footsteps from the house where he grew up and suffered such a nightmare existence, to his hop shop soda parlor hangout and the movie theater where he worked.  I hope you will be blessed by the images and information I share - one warning though, I tend to get a little silly now and then.  LOL

There are people who come into your life and change it.  Michael Landon is one of those people.  For me, the thing that attracts and touches me the most is not his winning smile, his gorgeous green eyes, or even that handsome physique and face.  It is his character.  Michael was born into a situation that would have destroyed many - parents who had irreconcilable differences, a mother who favored a girl over her only boy and was mentally unstable, a father who was silent and stayed for the kids, propelling this beautiful boy into a nightmare world of rejection where the woman who should have nurtured him hurt him and told him she'd prayed for God to end his life.  For some, this would have been reason enough to strike out and destroy.  For Michael, it was the stuff that made him who he was - fiercely determined to see that his life and the lives of his children - and in time to world - were not the same.  

One of the ways Webster's defines 'character' is:  'a person marked by notable or conspicuous traits.'   Michael's conspicuous traits were, as I have said of Pa Ingalls in my fiction, 'a steely determination and a high sense of justice'.  These led to his life being devoted to right, justice, family, love, and God.  As all of us, I am sure Mister Landon fell short of his own goals.  We are all flawed.  But he was and is a shining example of what a man can do when he uses suffering to mold him into something finer and higher and does not let it destroy him, or use it as an excuse to wound others as he was wounded.  

More soon....