Word: cleaver
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gabled windows sit atop the pseudo-colonial façade. A sturdy elm offers shade for a manicured lawn. A flagstone path leads up to a hospitable front door. But 211 Pine Street, Mayfield, U.S.A., is not just any house. It is the home of Theodore Cleaver, infinitely better known as the Beaver...
What accounts for the show's resurgent popularity? The Cleaver household is quintessentially suburban, the prime-time equivalent of John Cheever's sunlit lawns and the immediate ancestor of Steven Spielberg's split-levels. June forever emerges from the kitchen flawlessly coiffed and groomed, carrying a tray of freshly baked cookies. Ward, like all TV dads, disappears between 9 and 5 to a nameless job, but his real occupation is mowing the lawn and having heart-to-hearts with the boys. Wally, earnest and rather thick, is a slightly more amiable and less somnambulant Rick Nelson...
Beaver twitted the values of his parents without actually undermining them. In the secular Cleaver household, cleanliness was a substitute for godliness, yet Beaver only washed up to his wrists because hidden dirt didn't matter. Despite the show's recurring theme of honesty, Beaver's behavior routinely triggered layers of good-natured deceit. Ward secretly helped Beaver with his homework; June stealthily took over his paper route; Beaver kept...
...homes designed for the city's permanent residents are so cozily American as to suggest habitats for Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, or maybe the Cleaver family of TV sitcom fame. Typical of the more lavish structures are three-bedroom ranchettes done in a kind of Arabic Southern California motif, with central air conditioning, parquet floors, and General Electric ranges and Kitchenaid pot-scrubber dishwashers in the kitchen. Prices can range as high as $300,000 each for the dwellings, though much more modest accommodations, including town houses and four-story apartment buildings, are also going...
DIED. Hugh Beaumont, 73, journeyman Hollywood actor whose name was etched into the public consciousness through the longevity of a TV hit series, when for 234 half-hour performances in the 1950s and '60s he was Ward Cleaver, the All-American suburban father on the still repeated Leave It to Beaver; of an apparent heart attack; during a visit to Munich, West Germany...