I may not have grown up watching "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet," which ended its 14-year run when I was 9, but I grew into the ritual years later when the Disney Channel came to Crookston about seven years ago. When Harriet Nelson died of congestive heart failure Monday, it was like losing an old friend.

I was familiar with the Nelson family before I started watching the show in reruns — I had enjoyed "Ozzie’s Girls" in the mid-1970s (where Ozzie and Harriet take in two female boarders after their sons leave the nest), but I don’t know if I’d ever seen the original program. I knew who Rick Nelson was, but more from his 1970s hit "Garden Party" than his songs of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. I didn’t know until years later that he wrote "Garden Party" after being booed for singing new material at a concert instead of his old staples.

After I started watching Ozzie and Harriet in reruns, I became attached to the way the characters lived their lives. They cared about each other without making a big production of it. More than any other sitcom, this show made viewers feel like it was real, probably because the Nelsons were a real family. David and Ricky’s wives were the real thing. The house in the credits was theirs, and the show’s sets were patterned after its interior. Ozzie Nelson was the chief producer, director and writer, and much of the episodes drew from the family’s real experiences. How much more real can you get without watching people go to the bathroom or pick fuzz out of their navels?

Over the years, Ozzie and Harriet have remained the most famous of TV parents, both from a positive and negative perspective. They have been applauded as well as criticized for being so darned nice. Today’s sitcoms often refer to the Nelsons with statements such as, "We’re not exactly Ozzie and Harriet." It’s never said in a way that really denigrates the old show, but it still comes across as a criticism of the way the program presented a family’s life, or at least as a belief that families can’t be that way today.

"The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" didn’t tackle issues, it was as sexist as any other show of its era, and it showed little of the bickering that every family goes through. But it served its purpose — it entertained, it made people happy, and it gave viewers an escape from their own lives. That’s what sitcoms are supposed to do, and this one did it well, without offending anyone.

Ozzie and Harriet’s namesake show can be loosely compared to "Seinfeld," which has been billed as "a show about nothing."

"Seinfeld" is certainly more complicated than "Ozzie and Harriet," which didn’t have lesbian weddings, sex on office desks (although Ozzie and Harriet were one of the first TV couples to sleep in the same bed) or peeing in parking lots. But "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" did have two friends who hung out in their kitchen and a goofy neighbor, and the plot was usually quite simple.

When I discovered the show on the Disney Channel, it was shown twice a day, and after a few viewings, that’s how often I was watching it. I probably saw every episode over a span of a few years.

My kids were very small at the time, and I already knew they wouldn’t grow up to be like David and little Ricky. No one’s kids are like that anymore, but I think some were in the 1950s. It was an age in which kids listened to their elders, families went on trips, and you didn’t have to check everyone’s plans if you wanted to make sure you were all at the dinner table at the same time.

I longed for those simple comforts, to the point where I used to wish I had been a teenager instead of a baby in the 1950s. I wanted Harriet Nelson’s kitchen, down to the scalloped cupboards and the pass-through window. I wanted their white painted fence and their covered patio and the Coke machine in their garage.

I loved the Nelson family, and while I watched those old shows years after they were first made, I was often sad that Ozzie and Rick were dead (Ozzie died of cancer in 1975 and Rick in a plane crash in 1985). Now Harriet joins them, and David, a television director, is the one remaining member of the family foursome that left an imprint on society that still remains 28 years after Ozzie and Harriet and the boys went on their last adventure together.

Tracy Nelson, Rick’s daughter, who starred in "The Father Dowling Mysteries," is still in the public eye, as are her twin brothers, Gunnar and Matthew, who form the rock duo Nelson.

Harriet Nelson’s life was not picture-perfect. She had been a widow for almost 20 years, and in every parent’s worst nightmare, had lost a child as well. Yet she always came across with strength and warmth and graceful character — much like the television Harriet.