Beaver's House

        I am from the generation who grew up watching Leave It To Beaver.   The show was a family-oriented sitcom, but as a child, I did not really view it as funny.  To me the Cleaver family was the quintessential American family, the standard that everyone else aspired to.  They had it all, good looks, a beautiful home, and an enviable lifestyle.  Of course, they were fiction, but kids don’t necessarily understand that fact.  I knew they were actors playing parts, but somehow I believed that somewhere families like that really existed.  Not that anything was wrong with my own family, but they sure did not resemble the Cleavers.

                First of all, there was Ward Cleaver.  He wore a tie to the dinner table!  I grew up on a farm, and the only men I saw in suits and ties were in church.  Even my male teachers dressed fairly casually. It was never clear from the show what Ward’s job was, but he apparently had authority.  As much as I admired him, Ward Cleaver scared me.  He brought that authoritarian style home and seemed unnecessarily stern.  Wally and Beaver were wary of him, and even June seemed to tiptoe around and defer to him.  He might have looked good, but I would not have really wanted to live with him.

                I could relate a little better to June Cleaver.  Not many of the women I knew were as thin and stylish, but they did at least wear those shirtwaist dresses and sometimes pearls.  June was a housewife like most of the mothers I knew; it is just that like June herself, her house was always perfect.  Speaking of her house, viewers who followed the show from its inception remember when the Cleavers bought a new house and moved.  It was a television event when the Cleavers moved into a beautiful Colonial-style house on Pine Street.

                The house was a large two-story house in a well-manicured neighborhood with sidewalks in front.  It was a symbol of success; the Cleavers had arrived.  Oh how I coveted that house! Now there is a house for sale in our town that looks exactly like the Leave It to Beaver house, at least on the outside.  I can just see myself living there; it would be like a childhood fantasy come true.  I would put on my shirtwaist dress (even though I lack a waist) and my pearls and serve an elegant dinner.  Of course, there would be one hitch in my fantasy---I’m afraid Doug would refuse to wear a tie to dinner.