Mayfield is in mourning. Eddie Haskell has died.
A generation of baby boomers has lost yet another cultural icon with the passing of Ken Osmond who played that two-faced, smooth-talking suck-up in six seasons of Leave it To Beaver. Thanks to the endless loop of black and white reruns the rascally teenager became an indelible character in our lives.
Eddie Haskell often maligned as being a bully, was a three-dimensional character in a TV show with one-dimensional adults. He always included just the right dash of snark, adding a tang to this achingly saccharine show.
The Cleavers, the quintessential post-war nuclear family was the perfect balm for an age of nuclear anxiety distracting us from the chilly tensions of the cold war.
That fall of 1957 as Wally and Eddie walked the steps of Mayfield HS, Governor Faubus called in Arkansas National Guard to block the first class of Black students entry into the Central High in Little Rock. Later, President Eisenhower sent in federal troops to escort the Little Rock Nine into school.
In Mayfield, there was no cold war.
There were no fall out shelters, no Communists to worry about, and never ever any racial strife. As though in a cocoon the outside world never seeped into the wholesome day to day life of that family. Politics and international issues that plagued the world were never brought up. The show that ran from 1957- 1963 at the height of the cold war was a placid escape. In the pages of Ward Cleaver’s newspaper that he read at breakfast with the family, there was no mention of Little Rock, no Berlin, no Cuban Missile Crises.
L) Birmingham erupted into chaos in 1963. A 17-year-old civil rights demonstrator being attacked by a police dog during protests ( Bill Hudson AP) (R) Eddie Haskell, Wally, and Beaver Cleaver
The wholesome show stood in sharp contrast to the nightly news which we watched that began to show a very different picture of the world around us.
On the same familiar RCA TV that brought us pleasant fictional towns like Beaver Cleaver’s Mayfield, we began seeing real towns like Selma and Birmingham where real American teenagers were clubbed by police for sitting at a Birmingham Woolworths, and police attacked helpless schoolchildren with fire hoses.
For a show so removed from issues, it is not lost on me that this sitcom debuted on one of the most anxious days of the Cold War.
History changed on October 4, 1957. Along with the debut of Leave it to Beaver, the Soviet Union successfully launched the first satellite named Sputnik into orbit around the earth.
The importance of that event can’t be overestimated. Americans were shaken to the core.
Though no larger than a beachball and sending meaningless signals back to earth it nonetheless sent shockwaves, having a profound effect on the mindset of people and governments around the globe. Russian engineers wanted to make sure that people around the globe could both see and hear it so the shiny steel sphere broadcast a “beep-beep” pattern of signals that could be picked up by amateur radio operators around the world.
Americans were astonished coupled with fear.
All of a sudden there was an enemy satellite streaking across the sky over the U.S. At the time no one knew what it was capable of doing. What our leaders did know was that if the Soviet Union had rockets powerful enough to launch a satellite that had rockets powerful enough to launch a nuclear bomb on the U.S. Military strategists worried that the success of the Sputnik program demonstrated the Soviet potential to launch intercontinental missiles.
To many Americans Sputnik I represented a dark future where Soviets reigned as the world’s dominant superpower. The very thought of Soviet technological supremacy sent off a chain reaction of panic, rising fear levels, and soaring defense spending. We would pay any price, bear any burden to fill any Missile gap.
The space race was on.
So was the missile race.
Unlike Beaver Cleaver who we never once saw hiding under his school desk, the rest of the baby boomers began ducking and covering. Even snarky Eddie Haskell might be afraid.