Golly, Wally! I Have The Beaver’s Autograph

It figures a herd of graying, nostalgia-driven Baby Boomers would line up to meet the star of a TV show that went out of production 10 weeks before John Kennedy got shot.

But teenagers in letter jackets?

Jeepers, Wally! How can kids of the 1990’s possibly relate to “Leave it to Beaver?”

“It’s huge. Huuuuge,” says 16-year-old Central Valley High School student Tyler Zyph. “It keeps me in touch with what life was like back then.”

Zyph was one of hundreds of Beaver boosters drawn Saturday to the A Sign of the Times store in Spokane’s University City. They came for a glimpse of Jerry Mathers, who played the hit show’s impish namesake during its six-year run from 1957 to 1963.

“He’ll always be the Beav,” adds Zyph, who has 24 hours of Beaver episodes videotaped.

For those visitors from the planet Neptune, “Leave it to Beaver” chronicled the Cleavers of fictional Mayfield, USA.

There was Ward, wise patriarch of the Cleaver clan, his doting wife, June, and their two sons: Wally, a handsome athlete, and Theodore, aka The Beaver.

Don’t forget Wally’s best pal, that no good rat fink Eddie Haskell.

“It was a like a medieval morality play,” says Mathers, 48, who credits the reality-based writing for the show’s continued mass appeal.

“Beaver is an every-man character. Wally is like a white knight. Eddie was the villain. All the stories came from life, situations that still happen in the ‘80s and ‘90s.”

A typical episode usually revolved around the Beav getting his head stuck in a fence or doing something equally stupid.

Whatever it was worked. “Leave it to Beaver” reruns have been seen in 80 countries in 40 languages. In Los Angeles, you can spend five hours a day watching the Beav.

Mathers does more marketing than acting these days. He came to Spokane to hawk and autograph collector plates that bear the Beav’s youthful countenance.

It doesn’t seem at all right, however, that these fancy plates come in living color. Why should anyone know that the Beav’s ever-present baseball cap was green? We Boomers who grew up glued to the tube watched the Cleavers in a black-and-white world.

A world we knew intimately: June in her pearls. Ward with his newspaper. Eddy with his oily leer….

And no matter how much trouble the Beav got himself in, there was always milk in the fridge and a plate of cookies for an after-school snack.

That Eisenhower Era innocence is as much the selling point for “Leave it to Beaver” as anything.

“They didn’t have to have violence or smutty things to make a show,” says 19-year-old Nicole Sims, who stood in line to meet the Beav.

Mathers is a rarity among former child stars, so many of whom flamed out via drugs or booze.

He is a hard-working, gracious guy who went on with his life when the show folded in 1963 after 234 episodes.

Mathers finished high school and served six years in the Air National Guard. He earned a college degree and found work as a banker and later selling commercial real estate.

His acting career resurfaced in the 1980s with a made-for-TV movie, “Still the Beaver.” That spawned “The New Leave it to Beaver” series which ran for 108 episodes on the Disney Channel.

Yeah, being forever tagged as the Beav probably limited Mathers’ chances to play Hamlet. But it also made him a pile of dough. He lives in a La Hoya, Calif., beach home Charlie Chaplain built for his mother in 1926.

If there are any regrets percolating inside Jerry Mathers, he isn’t voicing them.

“‘Leave it to Beaver’ is something I’m very proud of,” he says. “There isn’t much I’d change if I had it to do over again. It worked out real, real well.”

, DataTimes