'LEAVE IT TO BEAVER' Actor is proud to be tied to show

Jerry Mathers said he's sorry for actors associated with shows that aren't as good.
By GLENN GARVIN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
MIAMI -- Beaver lives! Despite what you might have read in the papers or even heard on "The Tonight Show," Jerry Mathers, the innocent-faced but trouble-prone ("Boy, Beave, are you gonna get it!") little kid from "Leave it to Beaver," did not come home from Vietnam in a body bag.
Mathers was safely tucked away in an Air National Guard barracks in Texas that day in 1969 when another airman said, "Hey, buddy, look at this" and handed him a newspaper announcing that Mathers had been killed in combat.
"It went out over both the wire services, AP and UPI," says Mathers, who still hears himself pronounced dead with unnerving regularity by disc jockeys and trivia-game hosts. "They had people watching the casualty lists that the Pentagon released, and somebody saw the same name as mine, or a similar name. They yanked out my bio and started putting out the story.
"To make matters worse, Shelley Winters was doing 'The Tonight Show' that night, and she was pretty anti-war. She wanted to sing 'Bring The Boys Home' and she introduced it by saying, 'That war is killing the flower of American youth, even Beaver Cleaver!' I didn't know her and she didn't know me, but there it went."
Still the Beave
But to say that Mathers survived Vietnam doesn't mean that there's life after Beaver. More than four decades after it left the air, the 55-year-old Mathers still finds himself defined by a role that he played when he was 9. And that's just fine by him.
"It's odd, sure, but it's something that, obviously, has happened all my life," he says. "I've adapted to it. I'm sorry for the people who are identified for something not as good. There are a lot of people in Hollywood -- I'm not going to name any because a lot of them are friends of mine -- who are known for a show or character not nearly as good as 'Leave it to Beaver."'
"Leave it to Beaver," which aired from 1957 to 1963 on first CBS and then ABC (it debuted the same day the Russians launched their Sputnik satellite), was in many ways the prototypical television sitcom of the 1950s, set in the anonymous, lily-white suburb of Mayfield.
Ward Cleaver, the wise, kindly dad, wore cardigans and had a job downtown that was always a little vague. Wife June was a homemaker whose neck was adorned with pearls even when she was doing the laundry. And Beaver and his older brother, Wally, went to school and got into mild suburban mischief. When the pensive June told her husband, "Ward, I'm worried about the Beaver" -- as she did approximately 1.6 times per episode -- she was never talking about crack, AIDS or predatory priests.
Based in reality
Even so, Mathers says it's a mistake to dismiss "Leave it to Beaver" as a dopey Eisenhower-era daydream. Some of its comically dated elements had little to do with sociology -- Barbara Billingsley, who played June Cleaver, wore those pearls to cover an odd wrinkle on her throat, not to fulfill some weird Helen Gurley Brown concept of femininity. And for all its suburban white-bread innocence, Mathers argues, "Leave it to Beaver" was actually more realistic in many ways than modern family sitcoms like "Roseanne" or "Malcolm in the Middle."
"All 234 of the 'Leave it to Beaver' episodes were drawn from real life," he says. "Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, the writers [who broke into show business writing for the old 'Amos 'n Andy' radio show], had something like nine kids between them. And everything that happened on 'Leave it to Beaver' was something that they knew about from real life.
"Wally and Beaver may have been composites of a lot of different kids, and some of the stuff may have been exaggerated a little bit. But it was all grounded in reality. These days, sitcom writers sit around a table, somebody suggests a situation, and then they just sit there telling jokes about it. That's how you get these wildly hallucinogenic plots. Literally anything can happen in a sitcom now, whether it's possible in real life or not."