June: The Mother We Thought We Knew by Cris Mazza

June Cleaver didn’t keep her house in perfect order. The prop man did it.  —Barbara Billingsly

An enchantment and virtual bonding with June Cleaver grew over the span of roughly 93 weeks in 2015-16 when, with 6 a.m. coffee, I watched 15 minutes of Leave it to Beaver. That the 18+ months to briefly inhabit 23 episodes lay in the middle of three years when my parents languished and passed, both over 90-years-old, is not insignificant to both why the ritual was created, and its impact, including the theme song becoming an ear worm that has lasted, now, going on two years. Not just the theme per-se, and not the jazz version that replaced the original when the kids got older, but the slow string rendition that always played at the epiphany and catharsis.

Leave it to Beaver aired from 1957 to 1963, depicting a family of four living in a lawn-and-sidewalk neighborhood in Mayfield, a fictional town in no particular state. Fittingly, my parents moved their growing family of 6 from living on the grounds of a private academy on the Palos Verde Peninsula to a 1950s housing tract in San Diego where “Each house would have a lawn and a tree.”[1] Development of this tract began in 1955, my family arrived there in 1961, and we left (for what was then semi-rural San Diego County) in 1963 — a pretty fair parallel to the life of Mayfield.

Plans for grid neighborhoods were being drawn before WWII, the earliest tracts began development in earnest in the mid 1940s, but the designation of first “mass produced” housing development is always given to the notorious Levittown, breaking ground in 1947. “Mass produced” means one developer building all the houses and then selling them. So, presumably, earlier tract developments sold the plotted sites and individuals had their own houses built.

Levittown was not infamous for mass-producing the houses, but for racial discrimination written into the ownership agreement of each sale. This became illegal after a pair of 1947 and 1948 Supreme Court rulings that prohibited local governments from enforcing racially restrictive covenants that had regularly been a clause in property deeds. “Ignoring the law of the land, however, Levitt continued adhering to its racial bar.”[2] It is unclear how Levittown persisted, but it seems likely the secret was not well kept. As for neighborhood tracts in California, they also were forced to drop contractual racial discrimination in 1948 but reportedly continued a process whereby sales people warned minority buyers it was not in their best interest to move into these neighborhoods. Urban legend has it that a development in Los Angeles County, five years older than the one my parents chose in San Diego, asked buyers of Italian descent to prove they were not Mexican.

Meanwhile in Hollywood, the fabricating of fictious 1957 Mayfield and the family living there included a few subtle instances of moderately progressive ideas, including a fleeting view of the top of a toilet tank (not the seat) in 1957, the first view of a toilet on television; a 1958 story involving a Spanish-speaking friend named Chuey (note: not Mexican, the boy’s father was a diplomat from South America; one wonders why a diplomat would be located in Mayfield); and a 1960 episode that will come into play later.

Beaver seemed about 5 or 6 years old in the first season, but the show itself clarified he was 7 going on 8. Either I am not good at estimating a child’s age or the show wrote Beaver’s earliest childhood scenes to stay babyish longer. I, however, was 1-year-old and not, in any stretch, Beaver’s age. And by the time I first watched the show in re-runs, I might have been 10 or 11, so while his constant attire in blue jeans attracted my fashion sensibility, he was not ever an emblematic peer. I don’t remember watching the show at that age — i.e. my dad actually choosing that channel and letting us watch it — but my recall suggests I did see one particular episode when Beaver’s voice had already changed and Wally was having a “teenage party” with dancing, boys wearing suits and girls full-skirted dresses, and nothing looked like the world I lived in or the teenaged life I might soon be entering. It’s possible I saw that episode as a first-run in 1963, when “teenagers,” and not housewives, were a baleful fascination.

During an earlier era of watching the show’s re-run syndication in the 70s, I would not have been very aware of June except to have the usual, now stock, response that she was a stereotype of something that never existed, wearing dresses, heels and pearls as she cleaned house and cooked. Turns out Barbara Billingsly mandated that her skirt length not be low mid-thigh nor above the knee[3].  She didn’t specify who mandated dresses and skirts, but it’s interesting how it was considered groundbreaking when Mary Tyler Moore wore “capris” as a wife on The Dick Van Dyke Show nine years later in 1966. (June did not get forerunner credit even though she did wear “trousers” herself on at least one episode where she, not convincingly in my experience, was gardening. Billingsly did wonder, in a 2003 interview, why they didn’t allow her to wear pants more often.) The heels were foisted upon Billingsly, who’d begun the show in casual flats, but it was because the two child actors were growing quickly, and producers wanted June to remain taller than her sons. And the famous pearls: This piece of wardrobe was added by Billingsly in collaboration with production, because the hollow of her throat was pronounced and caused a shadow which appeared, on TV, like a large hole in her neck.[4]

There was no further occasion for me to ponder June until 1980 and her iconic appearance on Airplane, when she volunteers, “excuse me, I speak Jive,” and proceeds to “translate” a form of Black vernacular for the perplexed stewardess — probably still, at the time, called a stewardess, just as African American Vernacular English (AAVE) was called jive. The joke not just that an older white woman is able to “speak jive” with young African American men, but that the woman is, in fact, June Cleaver, the archetype American housewife, which may have never existed in actuality. The underlying racist “joke” here is that the movie’s writers were, in fact, denigrating so-called “jive.” They invented the vernacular used in the movie precisely to make it gibberish. Before Billingsly stepped up to translate (and speak it herself to the two men), the movie ran subtitles for what they were saying, to deepen both the icon-of-gender irony and racism-of-the-era joke.[5] . Admittedly, at the time, I had no idea the “jive” in the movie was not AAVE (formerly called Ebonics). For me the intended irony of having June Cleaver be the jive translator hit its mark.

Three years later CBS tapped into the earliest era of Baby Boomer nostalgia — the 2^nd half of the Boomers might be in the 2^nd phase of grad school, caught between childhood and starting life — with a TV movie, Still the Beaver, starring both boys now as men, and Barbara Billingsly still their mother. Beaver had become (as could have been predicted by how many times Wally called him a goof), a fuck-up, divorced and living with his mom. When June is “worried about the Beaver,” she goes to Ward’s grave to talk to him. [Hugh Beaumont had died in 1982; research has not answered whether the 1983 movie was in production yet and thus had to be re-written. It’s imaginable, judging by the fact the movie put Ward’s death in 1977, that Beaumont had declined participating.]

As a graduate student in Brooklyn, I watched the movie on a 13-inch B&W TV I’d bought and lugged on a bus back to the bedroom I rented in Flatbush. Beaver’s continual ineffectiveness in life and doleful expressions didn’t impress me as much as June’s earnest conversations with her dead husband. Three-thousand miles away from my parents, I was freshly aware that there had not been and never would be life-lesson dialogues with either my father or mother, and I knew that moving back home for any reason would produce nothing but a milieu of disgust and contempt.  This doesn’t mean I necessarily wished my camp-counselor, swimming-coach, girl-scout-leader Mom was more like June Cleaver.

Sometimes Mom wore dresses, sometimes jeans, sometimes shorts, sometimes a bathing suit, sometimes (after they were invented) a pantsuit. No makeup except lipstick. No hairdresser. No pearls, unless fake ones, until she was adding a paycheck to the family finances. That wasn’t until after her youngest was in kindergarten and she went back to college for 4 or 5 years (one class a semester at first) to get a teaching credential, then began work teaching 4^th grade. Yes we had to wash for dinner and sit all together at a dining room table, no we didn’t stay in our rooms (dealing with a goof-up that would soon be discovered) until food was ready to eat. Yes she vacuumed, did our laundry and dusted our rooms; no, she didn’t do it alone in the background of our important lives. Yes, we were primarily aware of our own daily problems, worries and social negotiations, with no notion of hers; no, it wasn’t true that she never cried within our hearing.

In the evening when she was tired — and it is only now that I know how tired — if we asked her to play a boardgame, she usually would. Take a dozen 11-year-olds on a campout, or roller skating, or a dozen 7-year-olds on a field trip: yes, she would. Fish a Sierra stream, shoot and clean a dove, mold a ceramic nude, get the roller-coaster to stop just to remove her own screaming child: yes, she did. I didn’t need June Cleaver.

Yet, during the most recent foray into Leave it to Beaver, before dawn with breakfast, June Cleaver captured my admiration in a way that elevated her (almost) to my mother’s status. And yes, they both made mistakes.

By February 1961 Beaver was going through changes. His voice was changing and he might have become tall enough that June’s heels no longer did their job so direction began using a method where June might either be seated or standing on the first step of the stairway when she and Beaver spoke. Written into the storyline for “Nobody Loves Me,” Beaver gets plenty of overly obvious plot-complicating messages, both direct and indirect, that he used to be cute but now has become gross, awkward, ugly, and unlovable. When June and Ward become aware of Beaver’s misery (as so frequently happens, Wally gives them parenting advice), they go to Beaver and tell him one of those stories about “a friend and his son,” and how parents will always love their children but later, as their children grow, they even come to respect them. The slow string version of the theme song will play here.

My mother didn’t have the opportunity to play a scene like this because she never knew; she was too busy raising five children to know. Complicating the issue of me was that while I never exceeded 5-feet, I did become taller than my next-older sister who never got to 5-feet. Maybe by junior high, certainly in high school, I certainly felt gross to her petite. (She was also popular and boys liked her.) But way before this, Mom had two children younger than me who had slipped into the “cute” phase as I slipped out. One evening she settled onto the sofa with her three younger children to read us a story. She only had two sides to her. Was one little brother on one side and the other on her lap, giving me her remaining side? That part I don’t recall. What I do remember is her elbow pushing me away, and her voice, “don’t lean on me, you’re too heavy.”

In 1960 the series aired a show called “Larry’s Club.” This is a story too many of us may recognize, from both sides of the story’s conflict. The boys Beaver’s age have formed a secret club. Beaver joined, but then was told that this club would be excluding Beaver’s friend Larry Mondello because the club was only for “neat guys.” In fact, as Whitey says (and was it an accident Whitey was chosen to say this?), “the only reason to have a club is so you can keep other guys out.” Naturally hurt, Larry figures out his own way to respond: he tells Beaver he had an even more secret club. Larry’s club has armbands and even “a secret hood.”

“Must be a real neat club to have hoods and everything,” Beaver exclaims. Then Larry adds that the paper bag hoods are only temporary until they get their velvet hoods. (Certain parts of the KKK uniform are made of velvet.) The club would also wear blue sweaters (throwing us off the KKK trail) and have secret meetings in graveyards.  “The neatest club I ever heard of!” says Beaver.  Larry doesn’t think The Fiends will let Beaver join, but maybe he can attend a special meeting, under certain conditions: Beaver will have to be blindfolded to attend the secret acceptance meeting. Larry carries the whole fabricated club meeting and vote off until Beaver, tearing off the blindfold, discovers that Larry’s club is a ruse.

Again in this instance, my mom and June resolve the problem in different ways. My sixth grade class was dividing into groups to create, write and perform puppet shows. The groups were all determined by the 11-year-olds. Memory doesn’t help me know why I was excluded from every group. I do recall the exclusion was of the “No, not you” variety that Larry experienced, except girl-style with the silent-treatment. It was a rare instance (and maybe the last one) when I told Mom my dilemma. She must have elicited from me the name of another girl who had been excluded; we knew her from Girl Scouts. Mom picked up the girl, brought her home, she had dinner with us, and the other girl and I, in a group of 2, fabricated hand puppets and a cardboard stage. Decades later, after my first memoir was published, that girl, who’d been raised by a single mother who had to work full time, and who knew my mom as her Girl Scout leader, told me she always pictured my childhood home as one where the mom was always organizing crafts, games and activities.  I’ve remembered this because of the hurt, and the embarrassment of my puppet stage being the smallest (and the only one not painted “psychedelic”), and because my Mom responded proactively, but not because there was a lesson imparted. In fact, I was one of the “mean girls” at some point that same year.

If my 6^th grade teacher had discovered and rebuked the meanness — I and several others wrote “Debbie Books,” folded-together pamphlets with lists of unkind untruths about a girl in our class — there is a story my mother could have told me:

Physical education majors at Sargent College were required to take summer activity courses at a remote site in New Hampshire — sailing, canoeing, horseback riding, swimming, field sports. The all-girls college camp’s facilities included kiosks with cots for sleeping bags. The summer before senior year, 1945, Mom’s group was worried; there were two African American girls in their class, and they wanted the whole group to stay together in the kiosk, but the administration felt the Black girls “would be more comfortable” sleeping by themselves in another location. These girls swam in the same pools, played team sports together, and dressed in the same locker rooms. In Mom’s story, she the one who went to the dean to explain that the senior class wanted to remain together, and the dean allowed integrated housing for the summer camp of 1945.

Her telling was without surprise that the dean would relent; I don’t know what the group would have done if he hadn’t. One hint: among my mother’s papers, there were saved news articles about the same group of phys. ed. majors forming a strike when the merger with Boston University threatened to change the name of Sargent College, and they won that standoff for their college to keep its original name. But there is no artifact evidence of their venture into demands for civil rights. There’s only a clipped news item from 1944 showing five African American young women who are contestants for The Sepia American Beauty and Talent Contest. One of those in the news clipping (far right) was one of Mom’s classmates at Sargent College. Mom clipped the article, then I found it where she’d saved it 70 years later. The same contest was featured in a one-page spread in the 1944 issue of The Crisis (founded by W.E.B. Du Bois as the official publication of the NAACP), also showing five young women. The Crisis didn’t seem to have issue with a beauty contest, and showing the five young women in bathing suits, or calling them “lovely lassies.” Mom never made a connection between her appeal to the dean for non-segregated housing, the strike to keep the name of their school, and that one of her Black classmates participated in a beauty contest — and what possible sinew between them would add value to the story that Mom didn’t tell me until I was writing my first memoir, perhaps one she should have told me when I was 11.

When June and Ward discover Beaver’s experience with exclusive clubs (again, Wally has the inside dope), June says, “I don’t like the idea of boys Beaver’s age forming clubs to keep other boys out.” Ward agrees but doesn’t “want to make a lecture out of it.” He “could level with him, but that sounds so corny.” What sounds corny, Ward? Who wrote that line? And the qualifier of “boys Beaver’s age” for June’s line?

But it turns out, Beaver was attuned to metaphor. Ward tells him not a personal story from his life, but a parable about a village of friendly people who all worked together. Then a sub-group decided to build a castle, and the castle is constructed to keep other people out. Other groups followed and built castles, until there were six castles. The people in one castle wouldn’t talk to the others. They wouldn’t work together or help each other. When an invader came, because the people were so suspicious of each other, the invader was able to capture all six castles, “one by one.” Poland, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Denmark, France … actually there were more than six.

Beaver catches on quickly. “Are those castles like clubs?” And when his father says yes, Beaver quotes good-old Whitey: “Whitey says the only reason to have a club is so you can keep other guys out.”

“When people divide up into groups just to hurt others, sooner or later they’re going to end up like those people in the castles.” Was Ward (through the writers) more consciously thinking of the run-up to World War II, and not minorities in the U.S. facing segregation? Maybe. But … maybe not. That would be June.

After Ward returns downstairs, June asks, “Did you explain about clubs?”

“No — castles.”  Not prevalent in North American segregation, but there were plenty of castles in pre-WWII Europe. Conveniently, also a staple of children’s literature. Ward explains, “How else to get a little guy’s interest?”

The couple is standing close, but not touching, and Ward then muses, “I wonder, what do people who live in castles tell their children?”

What a strange line to write. Unless the two actors ad libbed. That’s what I’d like to believe. Because June replied, “Probably stories about Levittown.”

[1] http://ushistoryscene.com/article/levittown/

[2] https://anderstomlinson.com/garden-2/low-water-garden/welcome-to-allied-gardens/

[3] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-feb-10-et-quintanilla10-story.html

[4] Same citation as above

[5] https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/11208/translating-the-jive-dialogue

Cris Mazza’s new novel, Yet to Come, will be released in fall 2020 from BlazeVox Books. Mazza has eighteen other titles of fiction and literary nonfiction including Charlatan: New and Selected Stories, chronicling twenty years of short-fiction publications; Something Wrong With Her, a real-time memoir; her first novel How to Leave a Country, which won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction; and the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? She is a native of Southern California and is a professor in and director of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.