When someone searches online for the city of Prince George and the celebrity people it has produced, one name is at the top.
"I sometimes look Prince George up, and I see my name there on Wikipedia as one of the notable residents. I get a smile out of that," said Dean Butler.
His name isn't household in the 21st century like it was once upon a time, but there was a stretch from 1979 to 1983 when he was one of the most famous faces on television. Every week, millions of people tuned in to watch Little House On The Prairie, and Butler was one of the principal actors.
In fact, as the man portraying Almanzo Wilder, the man who married Laura Ingalls, he was unquestionably one of television's family-friendly hunks of the prime time era. (Ingalls was both the show's fictional young protagonist and was based on the real life Laurua Ingalls-Wilder who wrote a series of books on her life in the U.S. mid-west in the 1800s.)
Butler is well known to another generation of television viewers as the father of Buffy Summers, the titular hero in the still-popular Buffy The Vampire Slayer series from 1997 to 2002. Before that, he was a two-year cast member of the show The New Gidget, and has a long list of other credits as well.
Part of the humour over Prince George's claim to Butler is the show-biz celebrity having spent so little time in this city, yet he takes full ownership of the trivia. He readily claims the northern Canadian city right back again, despite having been raised for the majority of his life in California.
"My parents moved away from Prince George with me when I was very young, not yet three years old, but I do have impressions from living there, and we've talked about it as a family over the years," Butler told The Citizen. "We lived on Watrous Street, in the basement suite of a pastor's house. For some reason I have this idea, this vague memory, that a church was nearby and he might have been the pastor there."
Butler's father worked for the U.S. military and was stationed for a few years at their installation west of Prince George. While working there, on May 20, 1956, Butler was born. The nature of military life in those days was frequent change, and the Butler family did not remain at the base, and today, Butler wonders whatever became of the Baldy Hughes armed forces facility.
When he was told it is now home to an addictions recovery community, he laughs again at the uncanny lines of coincidence.
"I would love to see it. I would love to know more about that," he said. "I don't know how it would ever happen, but it just seems fitting. Do you know what I do now? What show I work on?"
He is the producer of the hit show Feherty on The Golf Channel, featuring host David Feherty, a former PGA golf star from Northern Ireland who went on, after he hung up the clubs, to write several books, be a golf correspondent for CBS Sports, write a column for Golf Magazine, be a featured voice on the EA Sports-Tiger Woods video golf game, and many other ways of reinventing himself as a post-retirement personality.
The pinnacle of this was earning his own talk show, and Butler is a senior part of the creative team. Part of Feherty's personal story, and it has played a role on the show, is publicly discussing his own longtime struggle with alcoholism, as a learning opportunity and inspiration for others.
Butler's professional focus for the past three or four years has been Feherty, but not exclusively. He and business partner Rick Okie run their own production company Legacy Documentaries. As such, he has produced more than eight hours of additional material used over recent years to commemorate Little House On The Prairie.
This past year was the 40th anniversary of the show and Laura Ingalls-Wilder the author was celebrated this past month for her 148th birthday and the 58th anniversary since her death at the age of 90.
Butler said it was his time on Little House that sparked in him a thirst for rooting into history for true stories. He partially credits the show's legendary father figure Michael Landon for helping that urge. Landon, he said, gave him and others on the set, chances to learn about the filmmaking process as well as the acting process, and he took advantage.
"Michael was very generous that way, and really wanted us all to have the best from this experience, and I definitely watched him and how he approached the work on all sides of the camera," Butler said.
Perhaps because he was intrinsically attached to the character and perhaps because he was now a Little House historian of sorts, one of his most recent works was a documentary entitled Almanzo Wilder: Life Before Laura that digs into the actual family artifacts and into the Ingalls-Wilder book Farmer Boy that chronicled her husband's life.
"It was helpful, and really interesting, that Almanzo Wilder's family home is one of the few places connected to the Little House history that still actually stands today," Butler said.
Since the anniversaries are so prevalent this past year, he and the other cast members have gotten together for public celebration events. Despite all the other things he has accomplished on stage (he is also a seasoned theatre actor) and screen, as a character and as a director, he still pins his personal fortunes thereafter on that show that captured the world's heart and holds it to this day.
"As an actor, it doesn't really matter how big a star you might get to be, you know you're lucky if you have that 'one thing' that carries your career, and you respect that if you are fortunate enough to get that 'one thing.' For all of us, it was Little House and we knew at the time that it was something special we were all a part of," he said.
Butler was cheered to learn that Prince George went on out of its rough milltown youth to become a northern city complete with multiple golf courses and a professional theatre company. He enjoyed the idea of one day playing a part on the Theatre North West stage, as a professional excuse to come back to the city of his birth and reform those impressions he gathered in through toddler eyes.
Perhaps in Prince George's 100th anniversary year, since celebratory dates have been a theme for him lately, the time to visit might be close.
