Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life by Frank Bank, Gibu Twyman Read Free Book Online

brunt of the frustration a lot of times.
Best athlete on the show:
Tony Dow. Tony almost in a way was a professional athlete. When he got the show, he was training for the Olympics in swimming and diving.
Ken Osmond was a fair athlete, but he was always kind of a skinny person, so he wasn't as athletic as Tony.

 

Page 37
Frank was fairly athletic. Baseball was more his sport, but there was no real place to play baseball. With baseball, all we basically could do was catch.
With basketball we could play half-court right on the sound stage, 2-on-2 or 3-on-3, depending on how many people were there.
Hugh Beaumont would play with us. He was very good. In fact, he taught me how to shoot one-handed shots and jump shots, all that stuff.
Whether I got to play basketball would depend on whether there was another kid there my age. Larry Mondello, Rusty Stevens would work. But otherwise, I wouldn't play just because when they divvied up the teams, there was no one close to my age or my prowess at the sport, because I was so much smaller.
When they're 13 or 15 and you're 8, you really don't play with them that much.
But anyway, what a lot of people don't understand, it was really almost a total work environment. We were on a very tight schedule. There really wasn't a whole lot of time for fooling around.
About Hugh Beaumont
I've been an actor since I was 2. And I knew Hugh before "Leave It to Beaver." Hugh actually was a very very close friend of my family. So I knew him not only on the set, but off the set. He would come over and my father and he would play golf and things like that. Aside from being someone I worked with, Hugh was like a Dutch Uncle maybe.
Why the show endured:
I think the first thing is the writing. Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher were both excellent writers. All of the shows from the original "Leave It to Beaver" came from real life.
They had quite a few kids of their own . . . 11. And then Richard Currell, who played Richard Rickover on the show . . . a lot of the "Beaver" character was based on things he and his friends did. And on things my friends and I did.
What Joe and Bob would do, when their kids came home from school, or Richard or I told them about things that had happened, they would pick little parts out that were universal, that happened to all kids.
Each show, I'm not saying happened to one kid. It's a conglomerate that happened in a similar vein to hundreds of kids. But because they really did happen to kids, things that really happened in the '50s or early '60s, could have happened in the '20s or '30sand still could happen in the '90s. And I think that's why so many people could relate to them.
In fact, one of the things I found peculiar, they just did a big demographic view of "Leave It to Beaver" and the No. 1 audience group for "Leave It to Beaver" . . . what would you think it would be?
You might think men in their 50s or 40s, right?

 

Page 38
Actually, the No.1 demographic group for watching the show is women 18-to-35.
So it just shows "Beaver" is not just things happening to two brothers growing up in the '50s.
It's stuff everybody can relate to. It's things that happen to kids. It's gender-neutral. It's things that happen to two children growing up. And it's not two kids growing up in the '50s. It's not two kids growing up in the '80s or '90s or whatever 2000s there are.
Any drawbacks to the show:
Actually the biggest problem with the showif there is a problemis that a lot of people don't understand that it's situation comedy and all the problems are cleared up in 23 minutes.
And then they live their own life and go, "My life is the pits because this is going wrong and that's going wrong."
Well, it's television and it's comedy. It's not a documentary of those times.
I do a lot of personal appearances. People always say, "If my life could be like the Cleavers, it would be perfect."
I tell them, "No one's life was like that."
This is comedy. This is not real life.
But a lot of people in our