Television

Hey Beav! What’s up?

By Glenn Garvin
Knight Ridder Newspapers
04-27-2004

MIAMI — Beaver lives! Despite what you might have read in the papers or even heard on The Tonight Show, Jerry Mathers, the innocent-faced but trouble-prone ("Boy, Beave, are you gonna get it!") little kid from Leave it to Beaver, did not come home from Vietnam in a body bag. Mathers was safely tucked away in an Air National Guard barracks in Texas that day in 1969 when another airman said, "Hey, buddy, look at this" and handed him a newspaper announcing that Mathers had been killed in combat. "It went out over both the wire services, AP and UPI," says Mathers, who still hears himself pronounced dead with unnerving regularity by disc jockeys and trivia-game hosts. "They had people watching the casualty lists that the Pentagon released, and somebody saw the same name as mine, or a similar name. They yanked out my bio and started putting out the story. ‘To make matters worse, Shelley Winters was doing The Tonight Show that night, and she was pretty anti-war. She wanted to sing ‘Bring The Boys Home’ and she introduced it by saying, ‘That war is killing the flower of American youth, even Beaver Cleaver!’ I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me, but there it went." But to say that Mathers survived Vietnam doesn’t mean that there’s life after Beaver. More than four decades after it left the air, the 55-year-old Mathers still finds himself defined by a role that he played when he was 9. And that’s just fine by him. "It’s odd, sure, but it’s something that, obviously, has happened all my life," he says. "I’ve adapted to it. I’m sorry for the people who are identified for something not as good. There are a lot of people in Hollywood — I’m not going to name any because a lot of them are friends of mine — who are known for a show or character not nearly as good as Leave it to Beaver."’ Leave it to Beaver, which aired from 1957 to 1963 first on CBS and then ABC, was in many ways the prototypical television sitcom of the 1950s, set in the anonymous, lilywhite suburb of Mayfield. Ward Cleaver, the wise, kindly dad, wore cardigans and had a job downtown that was always a little vague. Wife June was a homemaker whose neck was adorned with pearls even when she was doing the laundry. And Beaver and his older brother Wally went to school and got into mild suburban mischief. Even so, Mathers says it’s a mistake to dismiss Leave it to Beaver as a dopey Eisenhower-era daydream. For all its suburban white-bread innocence, Mathers argues, Leave it to Beaver was actually more realistic in many ways than modern family sitcoms like Roseanne or Malcolm in the Middle. "Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, the writers (who broke into show business writing for the old Amos ’n Andy radio show), had something like nine kids between them," Mathers says. "And everything that happened on Leave it to Beaver was something that they knew about from real life." Leave it to Beaver, in fact, broke ground. Decades before The Wonder Years or Party of Five, it was the first family series told from the point of view of the kids and not the parents. "It’s not just the scripts," Mathers says. "The whole show is shot from a child’s point of view. When Beaver meets a policeman, the scene is shot not from a high angle looking down at Beaver, but a low angle looking up at the policeman . "That’s what the show is about — the innocence of a child and his progression into the adult world." Beaver is innocent, even naive. ... Wally is sort of a transitional character; he knows the world is not perfect. And Ward and June, the parents, are sort of do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do types." Mathers now works as a spokesman for foundations looking for cures for psoriasis and diabetes and makes endless appearances before groups who want to hear about Beaver.