WE were sitting on a sofa talking, when there was a lull in the conversation. Then with a twinge of nostalgia and affection in her voice my friend said, You know, Barbara Billingsley died yesterday.
I quickly started thinking in my head where I knew that name from, but I came up blank. It was totally unfamiliar. Judging by her expression, I could tell it was someone whose passing meant something. Remind me who that is again? I asked. June Cleaver, she said. Ahhh, June Cleaver! Now, her I know.
The music was still in my head from a cell phone ring to the Leave it To Beaver theme song I had just heard hours earlier. I see, so that was why.
June Cleaver perfectly coiffed, always in a feminine dress with a strand of pearls and poised in high pumps. Whether she was gardening, dusting or baking warm cookies and serving them with cold milk, she became a piece of Americana, the symbol of Americas mom.
Together with Ward, her perfect American husband, and their mischevious boys Wally and Beaver, or The Beaver (as she often called him), they were there as a place to see the family and life from the perspective of a child, as well as see the devotion and wisdom with which the parents effectively problem-solved and navigated some of the escapades, crises and mostly innocent scrapes their two sons and their troublemaker friends Eddie and Lumpy seemed to be constantly getting into.
IT was all so different from anything that would be found on TV nowadays. Leave it To Beaver, it was pre-reality TV, pre-licentiousness, pre-constant bad language.
It is a show that prized fine manners, respect, good values and morals.
The parents seemed like dream parents. Wally and Beaver, on the other hand, seemed to always have some situation to find their way out of.
How many times does June Cleaver pull her gloves on and perch her hat on her head ready to go out and help straighten things out for her boys, saying, Ill be back before supper, now.
In contrast to todays tough love and many psychological models of parenting that are presented, June Cleaver was always there, no matter what, always supportive, calm, loving and comforting.
Of course, these are basics, and this was, after all, a black-and-white television show, but what a contrast to the more hardened world of today, whether in reality or on television. Indeed, the world is more complicated, but what a nice feeling to think back to the childs world of that time, to go back to those basics. Love and cookies and milk. Seriously.
Even troublemaker Eddie is so perfectly polite, always. Remember good evening Mr. Cleaver, good evening Mrs. Cleaver, every time he entered their home?
BY the time I saw these episodes, they were re-runs. I would watch them whenever I would visit my grandmother. And in my minds eye, whenever I would picture or think of my grandmother as a young mother to my father and my aunt and uncles I always pictured my grandmother Miriam as June Cleaver.
She personified her. When I would see pictures of her as a young housewife and mother, she really always exuded June Cleaver to me. Between the black-and-white version of the show and the pictures of my Grandma, her beauty a beauty to match June Cleavers and the perfect manners and perfectly coiffed aura were a perfect fit.
Whether my grandmother was making us pancakes, serving us cookies and milk, giving us baths or what not, she really was always in a cheery disposition, or at least was calm, and looking impeccably feminine.
Of course, unlike June Cleaver, she was the visiting grandmother and not the parent who had to be there all the time. But that is really beside the point that, most of all, it was the pure and simple unconditional love that June Cleaver always gave to her sons that clinched the similarity for me. As far as I was concerned, to me, my grandmother was June Cleaver.
ON Leave It To Beaver, the safe and insulated world that June Cleaver nurtured for her two sons was ultimately the theme and feeling that permeated the episode. It always came through. The show, to use a child’s words, was make-believe, but that message of unconditional love is not. It is real.
A childs love for a parents is, or should be, different from that of a parents love for a child. And in every episode, June Cleaver softly demonstrates that.
Every time, it was the picture of the perfect two-parent middle class family.
It was the picture of the idealized, spotless, home-cooked dinner on the table every night, blooming garden and cheeriness that, to be a real family, is clearly not always or even most of the time like that. Nor should it be. But every time, besides the educational moral or value conveyed humorously, what also came through on Leave it to Beaver was seeing a situation or a family, from the perspective of the boys, Wally and Beaver, very calm and safe in their orbit of unconditional love.
That is something that touched many viewers. Even, to my surprise, the friend sitting nearby on the sofa, a tough person, whom I never would have thought cared.
So, thanks for the love, Leave it To Beaver.
And good evening, Mrs. Cleaver.
Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News
