Word: cleaver
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ideal American couple, circa 1960. Mommy (Holly Cate) spends her days shopping or meeting with her women's auxilliary club, while Daddy (Donal Logue) spends his reading the paper in his easy chair. Mommy wears a bright pink party dress, the kind that domestic ex-prom queens like June Cleaver and Donna Reed wore on TV sitcoms in the 1950s and early 1960s. In fact, TV-sitcom theme songs play in the background to drive home the point of Mommy and Daddy's TV-perfect lifestyle...
While he had been a terrific player for ten years, known as a lethal base runner and horrible loser, Robinson was considered a little volatile. One famous night at a diner, he showed a pistol to a quarrelsome cook who was directing Robinson's attention to a meat cleaver. The lithe outfielder -- marked down as "an old 30" by Cincinnati management -- was dispatched to Baltimore, where that watershed summer he hit .316 with 122 runs batted in and 49 homers, not including the one that won the Orioles' first World Series. Over the five prosperous seasons that followed, his competitive...
...relieve the tedium of his stereotypical plot by creating exaggerated characters who often seem more ridiculous than humorous. Mallon's penchant for defying convention, if even in the most conventional of ways, is evident in his intentional mangling of the names of Harvard buildings. Sever Hall is reincarnated as Cleaver, and Warren House is transposed to Warble House...
...years old. The baby-boom generation, not only in America but in much of the rest of the world, grew up not merely in the shadow of the Bomb but also in an envelope of common experiences. Television gave them a collective memory -- of Howdy Doody and Beaver Cleaver, of public events (most vividly and traumatically, the assassination of President John Kennedy). Then, in the mid- and later '60s, the young endlessly enriched and elaborated their culture, through music mainly and through drugs and costume and linguistic style (groovy, far-out, rip-off, bummer, bread, acid head, pigs, narcs...
That anxiety has become a standard rite of passage for American parents. Beaver's family, with Ward Cleaver off to work in his suit and June in her apron in the kitchen, is a vanishing breed. Less than a fifth of American families now fit that model, down from a third 15 years ago. Today more than 60% of mothers with children under 14 are in the labor force. Even more striking: about half of American women are making the same painful decision as McPherson and returning to work before their child's first birthday. Most do so because they...