Exactly 68 years ago this month, Americans were introduced to an everyday kid. While TV viewers loved Lucy and trusted Father to know best, they also embraced the unassuming, impish Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver.
From the minute he first appeared in family rooms on fuzzy black and white TV screens at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 4, 1957, folks couldn’t get enough of the boy’s antics. (In Episode #1, “Beaver Gets Spelled,” he mistakenly thinks the note his teacher instructs him to take home to his parents is expelling him from school. Spoiler alert: he wasn’t.)
Over the next six seasons, Beaver’s voice deepens as he enters adolescence, getting in one hilarious mess after another along the way, with his patient parents wisely intoning important life lessons at the end of each episode. By the time the series wrapped up in June 1963, Americans had a genuine fondness for Ward and June, Wally and the Beave, Larry Mondello, and even annoyingly obnoxious neighbor Eddie Haskell and not-too-bright Clarence “Lumpy” Rutherford.
(The original program never explained how Theodore Cleaver managed to acquire his eponymous nickname. Although a later version of the series lamely explained it was the result of young Wally’s inability to pronounce his brother’s Christian name, it strains credibility to think that anyone could have “Theodore” come out sounding like “Beaver.” But we digress.)
The show also had an odd distinction. For a program so widely beloved, a large number of urban myths grew up about its cast.
The biggest and longest-lasting of all by far claimed that Jerry Mathers, who played the title character, was killed in the Vietnam War.
Not so. As of this writing, Mathers is still very much alive at age 77 (and also the show’s last surviving star). He did serve in the California Air National Guard during the Vietnam era, from 1966 to 1969, but his entire duty was spent stateside. It’s thought the story might have originated from a mix-up with a soldier killed in combat who had a similar name. When actress Shelley Winters, who was an anti-war activist, “announced” Mather’s death to host Johnny Carson on the “Tonight Show,” it took wings and spread like wildfire. And it wasn’t true.
Speaking of showbiz enabling tall tales, there’s an alleged double entendre where, according to different versions of this urban myth, Ward is told by either wife June or son Wally that he was “awfully hard on the Beaver last night.” That potentially provocative line was never spoken on the sitcom. It originated in a Saturday Night Live sketch in the 1970s and took on a life of its own.
The origin of yet another widespread Beaver-related urban myth is easier to pinpoint. For years, word circulated around the country that the delightfully two-faced Eddie Haskell had been played by a young Alice Cooper, the notoriously raucous rock star.
It started when Cooper said in an interview with a college newspaper that as a youth, “I was obnoxious, disgusting, a real Eddie Haskell.” And so the paper mistakenly reported that Cooper actually was Eddie Haskell. “It was the biggest rumor that ever came out about me,” he said years later. “Finally, I got a T-shirt that said, ‘No, I am not Eddie Haskell.’ But people still believed it.”
The Haskell character was played by Ken Osmond, who had to contend with an urban legend of his own. That one claimed that he went on to become the infamous porn movie star John Holmes. Matters weren’t helped when a local adult theatre proclaimed on its marquee in big, bold letters, “Eddie Haskell of TV in ‘Behind the Green Door’—X-Rated.” Osmond was a Los Angeles police officer by then, and he personally demanded that the theatre’s owner take it down.
Still, rumors persisted until, as Osmond revealed years later, in 1971, he was summoned to internal affairs and ordered to disrobe to disprove the wild story.
The most ironic part of all this is that while several of the urban myths were salacious in nature, “Leave It To Beaver” is still fondly recalled as one of the most wholesome hits from the Golden Age of Television.
Of course, those myths were popularized in a time long before social media platforms like Twitter/X. Today, a star would blast a tweet authoritatively denying a wild claim, and that would be that. Not so in the 1960s and 70s.
A final note: Although the series was cancelled in 1963, the old sitcom warhorse is alive and doing well today in the Digital Age, streaming daily on platforms ranging from Peacock to Apple TV.
And that’s a fact you can take to the bank.
