![]() ![]() Interestingly the show Mosher and Connelly had worked on prior to Leave it to Beaver was Amos ‘n’ Andy. I studied and admired the contrasting example of the Cleavers. I grew up in a house where the parenting style could be fairly unhinged, to put it mildly. And he would often confide to his wife, played by Barbara Billingsley, that he’d been guilty of the very same mischief when he was a boy. Usually Ward would sit the troublemaker down in his study and give him a reason-based talking to. I remember being alarmed in an early episode, perhaps the first episode in season one, where father Ward Cleaver ( Hugh Beaumont) chases Beaver up a tree or something, threatening to whup him. Many of the other parents on the series were not as well-balanced as the Cleavers were, and sometimes even the Cleavers lost their cool. ![]() The Cleavers had a library full of books. The kids know what’s wrong, they do wrong anyway, and then they receive instruction from their concerned but understanding parents at the end. And they were structured as these moral homilies. In another, he defies his mother and wears a sweatshirt with a picture of a monster on it to school. Plots I remember: in one episode Beaver sticks his head through a fence and gets stuck there all day. And who wants to be in trouble? And the show’s creators, producers and principal writers Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly drew the situations from real life - it constantly resonated with the kinds of predicaments I could relate to. ![]() As an adult, you watch it and you’re amused at how scared and worried the young people are all the time when they cause relatively minor trouble. As different and idealized as the show was from my own life, I still identified closely with the kids at its center. And it did its job very, very well, I think. It simply wasn’t the business of this particular show. And to take prosperity for granted! But troubled race relations, the nuclear threat and much more were hanging over everyone’s heads then too. Ye Gods how I have PINED over the course of my life for a President like Eisenhower or JFK. Yes, in many ways things were more stable. It’s not as though the world, or America, was untroubled in the ’50s. While the show’s boy hero Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver was constantly in trouble, much like Tom Sawyer or Dennis the Menace, the world’s troubles were outside of his bubble. Leave it to Beaver, which ceased production just two years before I was born, depicted an idyllic alternate universe of manicured lawns and picket fences. The President was a crook who resigned in disgrace. The ’70s were a time of sex, drugs, scandal, the apparent failure of every American social and political institution. The most astounding thing to me then and in retrospect was how close the show came chronologically to my own birth (1965), for it seemed, like all of the ’50s seemed, to have taken place a hundred years earlier, not just a very few. I wasn’t yet born during the original run of Mathers’ great claim to fame, Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963) I began to watch it in syndicated reruns about a decade after the initial broadcasts. Jerry Mathers came into the world on June 2, 1948. ![]()
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