- Prairie View A&M event leaves 38 students hospitalized due to heat-related illnesses, officials say KTRK-TV
- 38 students sent to hospitals for heat-related emergencies at Prairie View A&M University KBTX
- 38 transported to hospitals after heat-related illnesses at Prairie View A&M activity KPRC Click2Houston
- 38 Prairie A&M students hospitalized for heat-related illnesses after campus event, reports say KSAT San Antonio
- Nearly 40 Prairie View A&M students treated for heat-related illness after orientation event KHOU.com
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Tag Archives: Prairie
The bizarre mystery of “prairie madness”
A new article in Atlas Obscura dives into the mystery of what some have called “prairie madness,” a phenomenon that seemed to afflict American settlers in the mid-1800s to early 1900s as they moved westward and settled into the Great Plains. According to James Gaines, during that time period:
Stories began to emerge of formerly stable people becoming depressed, anxious, irritable, and even violent with “prairie madness.” And there is some evidence in historical accounts or surveys, which suggested a rise in cases of mental illness in the mid-1800’s to early 1900’s, particularly in the Great Plains. “An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new prairie States [sic] among farmers and their wives,” wrote journalist Eugene Smalley in The Atlantic in 1893.
What caused this phenomenon? It’s hard to say, but there are several theories. James Gaines continues:
Both fictional and historical accounts of this time and place often blame “prairie madness” on the isolation and bleak conditions the settlers encountered. But many also mention something unexpected: the sounds of the prairie. Smalley wrote that during winter “the silence of death rests on the vast landscape.” And a character in Manitoba settler Nellie McClung’s story “The Neutral Fuse” writes a poem about the droning soundtrack of the plains, “I hate the wind with its evil spite, and it hates me with a hate as deep, and hisses and jeers when I try to sleep.”
This soundscape theory has new research to support it. SUNY-Oswego paleoanthropologist Alex D. Velez recently published a paper where he describes his new research, which entailed gathering and analyzing sound recordings from plains in Nebraska and Kansas and from cities like Barcelona and Mexico City. He analyzed the recordings, mapping the range of sound frequencies that the human ear can register. He found that city soundscapes are more diverse and act on the human ear like white noise. The prairie soundscapes, however, lack that kind of white noise effect. Because there is no background din, when you do hear noises in the prairie, they stick out more, and are more likely to cause disturbance and aggravation. James Gaines explains that Velez’s research has led him to conclude that the:
Eerie soundscape—the silence and the howling wind—could indeed have contributed to mental illness in settlers. It’s not much of a leap: research with modern subjects has shown that what we hear can exacerbate not only sleep, stress, and mental health problems, but even cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.
There is no way to know for certain if Velez is correct. Some experts caution that modern sound recordings from the plains cannot capture what they would have sounded like in the 19th century when sounds from wolves and bison would have been more prevalent, and when sounds from insects living in the walls of settlers’ houses would have existed in ways, they don’t now. Others point out that it’s very difficult to study how mental illness would have played out in a population living over a century ago, especially given differing social roles and norms. Gaines explains:
It may be impossible to untangle how much any one episode of irritability or depression came from the soundscape and how much it was a reaction to the stress or the isolation, the latter of which may have been particularly jarring. Whereas further East people may have lived in more small, close-knit communities, once out in the plains neighbors were often miles away. The transition may have been hardest for women, who were often tasked with staying home, limiting their already meager prospects for stimulation and socialization. Add on to that the fear of freezing, or crop failure, or monetary ruin inherent in homesteading and it’s little wonder some folks were stressed.
Even given all of these caveats, it’s a really interesting hypothesis and one that resonates deeply with me. I’m someone who is highly sensitive to noise. I can’t sleep in a silent house – I hear every car passing by, every hum each time the refrigerator or air conditioner switches on, every whimper my dog makes if he’s having a bad dream. I drown out the silence and the noises breaking the silence by playing white noise in my earbuds. I also have a fan in my bedroom that blows on high throughout the night. I always said the thing I fear most about the zombie apocalypse is not having access to electricity to charge my phone and thus not being able to use my white noise app at night. I’d die not because zombies ripped my flesh apart while trying to eat me, but from sleep deprivation. And I’d slowly go mad in the meantime. So, yeah, Velez’s hypothesis seems totally plausible to me.
Is the Silence of the Great Plains to Blame for ‘Prairie Madness’?
In the 1800s, as American settlers pushed westward into the Great Plains, stories began to emerge of formerly stable people becoming depressed, anxious, irritable, and even violent with “prairie madness.” And there is some evidence in historical accounts or surveys, which suggested a rise in cases of mental illness in the mid-1800’s to early 1900’s, particularly in the Great Plains. “An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new prairie States [sic] among farmers and their wives,” wrote journalist Eugene Smalley in The Atlantic in 1893.
Both fictional and historical accounts of this time and place often blame “prairie madness” on the isolation and bleak conditions the settlers encountered. But many also mention something unexpected: the sounds of the prairie. Smalley wrote that during winter “the silence of death rests on the vast landscape.” And a character in Manitoba settler Nellie McClung’s story “The Neutral Fuse” writes a poem about the droning soundtrack of the plains, “I hate the wind with its evil spite, and it hates me with a hate as deep, and hisses and jeers when I try to sleep.”
These details caught the imagination of Alex D. Velez, a paleoanthropologist with State University of New York at Oswego who studies the evolution of human hearing, and made him wonder: is there any truth to this idea? Now, a new paper by Velez published in Historical Archaeology suggests this eerie soundscape—the silence and the howling wind—could indeed have contributed to mental illness in settlers. It’s not much of a leap: research with modern subjects has shown that what we hear can exacerbate not only sleep, stress, and mental health problems, but even cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.
Velez wanted to understand if there was anything special about the soundscape of the prairie. He couldn’t go back in time to record, unfortunately, but Velez could gather more recent recordings from the plains in Nebraska and Kansas, which captured noises like the wind and rain, and from urban areas like Barcelona or Mexico City, which featured weather sounds as well as the din of traffic and pedestrians. He ran the recordings into a program that created visual representations of the spectrum of sound frequencies in the recordings and compared the results to each other and a map of sound frequencies that the human ear can pick up and hear.
Velez found that, while all the landscapes contained plenty of sounds humans would naturally be able to hear, the sounds of the city were more diverse, spreading more across the range of human hearing and forming something like white noise. But out on the prairie, there was little to none of that background din. And what sounds there were coincided with a particularly sensitive part of the human hearing range the brain notices more readily.
“The way I can describe it is: it’s very quiet until, suddenly, the noise that you do hear, you can’t hear anything but that,” says Velez.
So one could imagine how a newly arrived settler, used to the sounds of a relatively more urban, small-town, or forested environment, might come to find every chicken cluck that breaks the prairie silence—every frog croak or drip of rainwater—to be as dreadfully distinct (and aggravating) as a clicking pen in a quiet library.
The description of the Great Plains soundscape reminds Adrian KC Lee, an auditory brain scientist at the University of Washington who was not involved in Velez’s study, of sensory deprivation or being in an anechoic chamber—a room designed to stop echoes. In those cases, even the smallest sound, like the rustle of clothing or even your own heartbeat, can become impossible to ignore. As Lee pointed out, the human brain will naturally adapt to its environment, essentially turning up or down the volume to better distinguish what’s going on.
“Being adaptive is really for survival,” says Lee. “Now, if you adapt to a very low-sound environment and all of the sudden there’s a loud sound coming on, of course it’s going to give you trouble.”
Jacob Friefeld, is a research historian at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum who’s written extensively on the Homestead Act, one of the great drivers of westward expansion. He says he has not come across the phenomenon of prairie madness in his own work, but notes that the modern recordings Velez used may be missing some sounds early settlers would have heard, like the howl of wolves or the rumbling of millions-strong herds of American bison. And if settlers were living in sod houses or dugouts, they may have also been treated to the regular sound of insects or other creatures living in the dirt walls.
In addition to the lack of 19th century recordings, studying the symptoms of mental illness in a population of people who lived over 100 years ago is also very difficult. As Velez notes, the specific language or names used for conditions can change, records may be inconsistent, and diagnoses can be affected by societal attitudes—ideas around gender roles or prejudice against certain groups, for example.
Similarly, it may be impossible to untangle how much any one episode of irritability or depression came from the soundscape and how much it was a reaction to the stress or the isolation, the latter of which may have been particularly jarring. Whereas further East people may have lived in more small, close-knit communities, once out in the plains neighbors were often miles away. The transition may have been hardest for women, who were often tasked with staying home, limiting their already meager prospects for stimulation and socialization. Add on to that the fear of freezing, or crop failure, or monetary ruin inherent in homesteading and it’s little wonder some folks were stressed.
In the end, Velez’s work can’t prove how much prairie madness really affected settlers, but it did finally give him an answer to the question that captured his imagination: there may indeed be something in the soundscape of the plains – in Smalley’s silence and McClung’s hateful wind – that may have affected the settler’s minds.
It’s a reminder of how sounds have the power to shape our lives, even today and even outside the Great Plains. Lee said many scientists wonder if the changing soundscapes of the pandemic—due lockdowns and the transition to working from home—had effects on physical and mental well-being.
Pushing even further, he notes that sounds don’t travel as well in the thin atmosphere of Mars as they do on Earth. If the soundscape of the prairie leads to anxiety and depression for some, does that mean that one day, when humans get to Mars, settlers will once again curse the silence?
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AR-15s useful for shooting prairie dogs, ‘varmints,’ Sen. John Thune argues, as gun talks intensify
Thune, the Senate minority whip, also echoed his fellow Republicans in calling for greater focus on guns and mental health issues, saying, “So I just think that the issues that they should be focused on is how do you keep those types of weapons out of the hands of these young — in this case, male — very deranged, young men.”
Sen. John Thune on AR-15s: “In my state, they use them to shoot prairie dogs and, you know, other types of varmints. And so I think there are legitimate reasons why people would want to have them.” pic.twitter.com/BUJkLf3Apv
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 7, 2022
The remarks, which have been viewed millions of time on social media since Tuesday morning, follow arguments from other Republicans in the weeks after the mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, Tex., and Tulsa that Americans needed access to AR-15s — a military-style rifle — to kill feral pigs, hunt hogs and get rid of raccoons. A prairie dog averages 12 to 16 inches in length and weighs 1 to 3 pounds, according to the National Park Service.
Thune’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Wednesday.
The discussion surrounding access to AR-15s comes as senators are calling for patience amid talks on a legislative package that could include the first significant federal gun restrictions in three decades, along with provisions dealing with school security and mental health. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said his chamber would vote on it “in the near future,” while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) noted that it was “way too soon” to predict how many Republicans might ultimately come along.
“We don’t have an agreement yet,” McConnell said, adding, “I personally would prefer to get an outcome, and I hope that we’ll have one sooner rather than later.”
As expectations for a quick deal faded Tuesday, actor Matthew McConaughey, a native of Uvalde, urged lawmakers to act on gun control in impassioned remarks delivered in a surprise appearance on the White House briefing room’s podium. An emotional McConaughey told the stories of the 19 children and two teachers killed by a shooter at an elementary school on May 24.
“Responsible gun owners are fed up with the Second Amendment being abused and hijacked by some deranged individuals,” McConaughey said. “These regulations are not a step back, they’re a step forward for civil society and the Second Amendment.”
A longtime supporter of gun rights, Thune has voted against mandatory background checks at gun shows and longer mandatory waiting periods to buy a firearm, according to the Mitchell Republic, a South Dakota newspaper. He was vocal in his opposition to any gun legislation last year that “could violate the privacy of law-abiding citizens exercising their clear 2nd Amendment rights.” The senator has an A-plus rating with the National Rifle Association, and his campaigns have received more than $638,000 in contributions from the NRA during his career, according to data compiled by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in 2019.
While more than 5 million prairie dogs were estimated to have roamed the American Plains before 1800, the range of prairie dogs has shrunk to 5 percent of its initial size and two of the five species in existence are threatened or endangered, according to the National Park Service. A 2008 outbreak of the sylvatic plague further decimated the population in South Dakota, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says. But the population of prairie dogs, which covers most of the western two-thirds of the state, has become so stable that control measures have been taken to limit the damage the animals cause on some private land, according to South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks.
Hunting prairie dogs is allowed year-round, and there are no restrictions on how many are killed — or what firearms are used.
“There are no restrictions on caliber of rifles and/or handguns,” the Game, Fish and Parks website says.
As Democrats and other critics push to restrict AR-15 sales, some Republicans have argued that the rifles are needed for hunting.
When Vice asked Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) last month why Americans should still have access to an AR-15, he pointed to the feral pig population in Louisiana, which the state estimates at 700,000.
“If you talk to the people that own it,” Cassidy said, “killing feral pigs in the, whatever, the middle of Louisiana, they’ll wonder: ‘Why would you take it away from me?’ ”
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) was asked the same question on Twitter last week. In addition to arguing that AR-15s are necessary for target sport and self-defense, Gaetz said the rifle is needed for “hog hunting.”
The issue came up again at a congressional hearing last week, when Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) said that “blaming the gun for what’s happening in America is small-minded.” Then Buck, who was seen with an AR-15 mounted on his office wall in 2020, pointed to how the rifle was useful in killing raccoons.
“In rural Colorado, an AR-15 is a gun of choice for killing raccoons before they get to our chickens,” he said. “It is a gun of choice for killing a fox, it is a gun that you control predators on your ranch, on your farm, on your property.”
Buck added: “The idea that somehow we’re going to deny access to — I think there are 20 million AR-15s in circulation in this country — it makes absolutely no sense. And it’s unfortunate.”
Rep. Ken Buck: “Blaming the gun for what’s happening in America is small minded … in rural Colorado, an AR-15 is a gun of choice for killing raccoons before the get to our chickens.” pic.twitter.com/nWmcJsqcBp
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 2, 2022
Thune’s prairie dog argument has faced blowback. Tennis legend Andy Roddick pointedly posted a photo of a grown prairie dog.
Jon Thune (R) just said AR-15s are needed in South Dakota to shoot prairie dogs. This is a picture of a grown prairie dog pic.twitter.com/vOvWEtKlHb
— andyroddick (@andyroddick) June 7, 2022
Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter was killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., reminded the Republican what AR-15-style rifles have done in school massacres.
“@SenJohnThune in my state and many others, they use AR 15′s to shoot children,” Guttenberg wrote.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) agreed, again pushing for something — anything — to be done to address the gun violence caused by AR-15s and similar firearms.
“Across the country ‘they use them to shoot’ human beings in schools, grocery stores, hospitals, churches, synagogues, malls, bars, and workplaces,” Beyer tweeted. “If you think shooting ‘varmints’ is more important than preventing mass shootings of children at elementary schools, you’re wrong.”
‘Little House on the Prairie’ star Karen Grassle gets candid on sobriety, making peace with Michael Landon
Karen Grassle, who famously played Caroline “Ma” Ingalls on “Little House on the Prairie,” is getting candid about her journey to sobriety.
The actress recently wrote a memoir titled “Bright Lights, Prairie Dust: Reflections on Life, Loss, and Love from Little House’s Ma.” where she detailed her upbringing and struggles with alcoholism as well as the alleged troubled relationship she had on set with her former co-star and boss Michael Landon. He played her on-screen husband, Charles Ingalls.
Former co-stars didn’t immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment regarding the allegations made in Grassle’s book about Landon.
Despite their ups and downs, Grassle insisted she made peace with the actor before he passed away in 1991 at age 54 from pancreatic cancer.
‘LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE’ STAR CHARLOTTE STEWART RECALLS DAYS WITH JIM MORRISON, ELVIS AND BILL MURRAY
Karen Grassle has written a book titled “Bright Lights, Prairie Dust: Reflections on Life, Loss, and Love from Little House’s Ma.”
(Courtesy of Karen Grassle)
Grassle, 79, spoke to Fox News about writing her book now, and what it was like bringing the beloved series to life, as well as the moment she realized it was time to get sober.
Fox News: What inspired you to write this memoir now?
Karen Grassle: This book has taken years and years. I started after I moved here to the Bay Area. I was semiretired and I didn’t have as many friends as I did in Los Angeles. All of these memories began to surface. So I started writing them down. I thought that maybe one day, my son would be interested to read them.
And I just kept writing. And the truth is, I had to let my guard down. I’m quite a private person. So I had to be willing to share a lot of my vulnerabilities about my family, my alcoholism, the trials that I went through doing “Little House.” A lot of things that I’ve never really discussed publicly. But it felt freeing. And I’m glad that I did it.
Karen Grassle (left) with her mom backstage during a theatrical performance.
(Courtesy of Karen Grassle)
Fox News: It’s been said that you got the role of Caroline Ingalls at a very crucial point in your life. Is that true?
Grassle: Very. I was so broke and so discouraged about my career. I was thinking, “I better go back to school and learn to do something else.” And I couldn’t figure out how in the world I was going to pay to go back to school. I had friends in Los Angeles who were doing television. I saw what they were getting paid. So I thought, “I’ll try to get some TV work.” I thought it could help me pay my way to go back to school. So my agency started sending me on auditions. And I think it was two or three months later when I got the call about this new series called “Little House on the Prairie.”
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Fox News: But you initially weren’t a fan of your character?
Grassle: Oh sure. When I first read the script, I thought, “Oh, she’s kind of a downer. She’s prudish.” I hadn’t read the books, so I had a lot of catching up to do. And there wasn’t the same kind of research about the Ingalls that we have today. So I got the work. But as I started doing the role and interacting with the children, I gained a new perspective for my character. She’s a woman who’s so brave and loyal heading into the wilderness with her little girls. She wanted to create a better life for them. I began to experience the nobility of the character and what she truly represented.
Fox News: Michael Landon, to this day, is still viewed as a beloved father figure.
Grassle: And he earned that image. He was one of the favorites on television and had one of the longest careers. He created this show and we’re still talking about it today, nearly 50 years later. He deserves a tremendous amount of credit for that.
Karen Grassle said she initially wasn’t impressed by the role of Ma.
(Courtesy of Karen Grassle)
Fox News: But you also witnessed a completely different side to him.
Grassle: We all worked really hard. I didn’t think it was all that tough because we were all worker bees. There was nobody on that set who was slacking around. Where it really got tough for me was when it was time for the second season. If you were on a hit series, it was common to renegotiate your contract based on its popularity. Michael did not want to give me a raise. He began to diminish my part, my value.
I was a professional. I had just done a year of Shakespeare in England. I had been on Broadway. I really liked the children and I built a good relationship with them. You don’t get that with everybody. So I felt that I had some value. And I stuck to my guns. This went on for months and months. I think it went on over a year where I didn’t say, “I’m sick and I can’t come in to work.” I made the decision that I would show up to work and do my job every day. But it was tough because people knew he was annoyed with me. And he showed it in many ways. So I had to go through that. But I also didn’t want to give up on myself. I worked hard to become the actress I was.
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Fox News: Why do you think Michael Landon was so hesitant to give you a raise?
Grassle: I don’t know. And to my dying day, I will never really understand why he dug his heels and refused as he did. After a year and a half or so, I did get an excellent contract that was appropriate for the time. It meant a lot to me, but I paid a heavy price for it. I just wanted a fair wage.
Karen Grassle alleged that Michael Landon didn’t want to give her a raise despite the show’s success.
(Courtesy of Karen Grassle)
Fox News: How did that impact your relationship with him on set?
Grassle: It was so hard to go to work and know he was annoyed with you. You could cut the tension with a knife. And you felt he was probably saying things about you behind your back. He had a sense of humor and if he wanted to make fun of you, boy, you were skewered. He was very clever. I didn’t know what was going to happen. But I kept going to work.
Fox News: You worked on stages and sets before the #MeToo era. What was your experience like with sexism in the workplace?
Grassle: I was very lucky in a way because by the time I got to New York, I had already trained in England. I was already a professional. A lot of young women arrived in New York or Los Angeles with very little experience. They became very, very vulnerable. But I did not have a problem with anyone ever assaulting me or anything like that. If somebody made an inappropriate pass, I learned long before how to pretend that I didn’t notice that they were doing it or to laugh it off.
What happened at the “Little House” set was… Mike decided to humiliate me while we were doing the scenes in the bed. This was so awful for me. This was so unbearable and I just tried to get through it. You know, he made these terrible jokes about the female anatomy, made a woman’s body parts sound so disgusting. I just sat there with all these men standing around laughing at his jokes and I couldn’t do anything. We didn’t even have a word for sexual harassment.
‘KUNG FU’ STAR RADAMES PERA EXPLAINS WHY THE SERIES ENDED, WHAT ‘LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE’ WAS LIKE
Karen Grassle was candid about her battle with alcoholism.
(Courtesy of Karen Grassle)
Fox News: You were also very candid about your struggles with alcoholism. When did you first realize that you needed to get help?
Grassle: I resisted help for a long time. I tried to keep everything under control for a long time. I did not realize the extent to which my alcohol problem was playing a negative part in my life, but this is very common… The one thing [alcoholics] don’t want to do is not drink. We think of many rationalizations for why things are going bad in our lives. But we don’t want to look at the key item. That seems to be how the disease works.
My friend Toni, who I’ve known since we were 7 years old, confronted me and told me I needed help. There was no way for me to wriggle out of it. She knew me… I couldn’t fight the truth of what she was saying. After our conversation, it just took one more bad night where I fought with a friend – a very dear friend of mine.
Karen Grassle said her friend Toni helped her realize that she needed to get clean.
(Courtesy of Karen Grassle)
I went home sobbing full of self-pity. I felt everything in my life was wrong and everyone was turning against me. The next morning, I woke up and said, “I must never take another drink, no matter what happens.” I did think that my life would fall apart. I thought I might lose my job. I definitely might lose my boyfriend. I thought I was never going to go to a nice restaurant again. How can you go to a nice restaurant and not drink? How can you go get Mexican food and not have a beer? I thought my life was over. But it was such a blessing.
Fox News: It seems like you were a high-functioning alcoholic.
Grassle: Oh yes. I’m glad you brought that up. My dad was the same too. He went to work every day. He worked hard. He paid his bills. And alcoholism killed him.
‘LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE’ STAR ALISON ARNGRIM SHARES MEMORIES OF CO-STARS STEVE TRACY, MICHAEL LANDON
For me, I got up every day with a terrible hangover. I went to work, I pulled myself together, I worked hard and I concentrated all day long. And when they said, “That’s a wrap,” I either took a drink from the prop table or had one when I got home and started again. I thought I was under control because I was working. I hadn’t lost my job. It gave me even more rationale for continuing the way I was.
Karen Grassle said she got sober in 1977.
(Courtesy of Karen Grassle)
Fox News: When did you get sober?
Grassle: It was 1977 in June. It’s so meaningful because everything changes from that day. I looked at life in an entirely new way. I was able to truly discover who I was and what I wanted in life. And boy, it was a lot of work. And it was all worth it.
Fox News: Do you remember the last time you spoke to Michael Landon?
Grassle: Oh yes, very well. I wrote him a letter just to say hello and catch him up with what was going on in my life. He wrote me back the nicest note. I remember he said, “Give me a call so we can discuss the old times before we forget them.”
So I did give him a call. He told me about his family. We had a nice chat about some of the people we worked with. But we mended fences. And I just felt there was a lot of forgiveness from both sides. We were remembering the better parts of our relationship. And I was so grateful for that because it was a very short time after that Mike was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
‘LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE’ ACTRESS WENDI LOU LEE SAYS SHE RELIED ON GOD TO HELP HER FACE BRAIN TUMOR
Karen Grassle said she made peace with Michael Landon before his death.
(Courtesy of Karen Grassle)
Fox News: It’s good to hear that the both of you made peace before he passed away.
Grassle: You know, we established a very nice working relationship in the first year. And after the contract got settled, we had a lot of good days, too. Lots of laughs. Lots of scenes where we played together and enjoyed each other’s talents… He was perhaps more human. He was very complicated and came from a difficult childhood. So I think for a person who comes to the table with a lot of issues and somehow be able to turn that into a creation that serves other people deserves a lot of credit.
Fox News: Today you’re recognized as one of TV’s most beloved moms. How do you feel about that title?
Grassle: I feel honored. I based the character mostly on my mother. And I didn’t realize until later how much people truly love this character. I initially didn’t understand the depths of people’s affections for her. But people still reach out to me and express how much they love her. It’s been very gratifying. And I’m awfully lucky.