In this weekend's media there were many tributes to Barbara Billingsley, noting the passing of America's mom, June Cleaver as played by Barbara Billingsley, who passed away on Saturday morning at the age of 94.
I like that show. I really like it. Why? Because it is funny. It it easy to take. It is the ideal. The ideal is forever simple and filling too. The show is entertaining, not in a foolish way. It's been called Tom Sawyerish. June Cleaver has been called the mom who everybody want their mom to be.
I just watched on-line the Today show interview Jerry Mathers who played the Beaver.
Jerry Mathers from the Interview said of Barbara Billingsley --
"She was just a wonderful person. She was as nice as she was on the screen and you think she would be, she was even better than that. She was a mentor to me and I'm just so sad at her passing. She was just the most gracious, wonderful person. to me. She was like a mentor. She was always very helpful. She always looked out for me. One of her things was, she loved manners and she was always telling me the proper way to eat, the things -- the way to set up the silverware, put your napkin on your lap, and just little things like that to help a boy that, as I say, had -- was there with her. I had my own mother, my own family, but Barbara was just the most wonderful person I ever knew. like your most favorite teacher except I got to be in that same class for six years and know her my whole life. I'm just deeply saddened."
Why is the passing of the actress who played a mom on a TV show so important, even a classic tv show? Jerry Mathers has an opinion on that:
"Leave It To Beaver the "longest running show, scripted show, in television history." has "never been off the air in 52 years. It shows all over the world. it shows in about 40 languages and has shown in i think it's 170 countries. when " Leave It to Beaver" was on, a lot of people -- television was new. television really only came in in the '50s. people in other countries had an idea that either Americans were cowboys or Indians or gangsters because that's what a lot of our tv shows, cops and robbers and westerns. " Leave It Io Beaver" presented the American family to a lot of foreign countries and I think it may have changed how they thought about how we lived."
Well said.
See the video.