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I have spent an embarrassing amount of my adult life thinking about automobiles that appeared in television programs whose producers never intended for anybody to examine them sixty-five years later.

This is one of the burdens I carry.

Most normal people watching Leave It to Beaver see Ward and June Cleaver raising two boys in the pleasant little town of Mayfield. They see Wally trying to negotiate adolescence without Eddie Haskell getting him arrested, Beaver trying to understand a world that frequently made less sense than Larry Mondello, and June somehow doing housework in pearls without ever getting Ajax on her dress.

I see the car in the driveway.

And once you start looking at that car, some questions arise.

Leave It to Beaver ran from 1957 through 1963, which means the Cleavers spent six seasons presenting America with what has become one of our most enduring pictures of comfortable postwar suburban life. Ward went to work every morning wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. June stayed home. Wally and Beaver went to school. Dinner appeared every evening. The mortgage apparently never caused anybody to awaken at three in the morning. Nobody worried about the electric bill.

And every so often there was another brand-new automobile sitting outside.

This raises the obvious question.

Just how much money was Ward Cleaver making?

We were never entirely sure what Ward did for a living.

He worked in an office. He wore a suit. He had a secretary. He occasionally came home looking tired enough for June to know that something unpleasant had happened downtown, although apparently never unpleasant enough to interfere with dinner.

The series eventually established that Ward worked for a trust company under a Mr. Anderson, but his precise duties remained comfortably foggy. He was essentially a professional briefcase carrier. He left Mayfield every morning, performed important unspecified acts involving paper, and returned in time to discover that Beaver had put a frog in somebody’s locker.

Whatever Ward did, he was apparently pretty good at it.

The median American family income in 1958 was about $5,100 a year. Only about one family in ten had earned $10,000 or more the year before.

The Cleavers certainly looked like members of that upper tenth.

They lived in not one but two substantial suburban houses during the run of the show. They had a nicely furnished home, television, appliances, vacations, restaurant dinners, golf, social activities and two growing boys whose ability to destroy trousers and shoes presumably operated at roughly the national average.

June didn’t work outside the home.

There was no second paycheck.

Ward financed the whole operation.

He was also a World War II veteran who had served with the Navy Seabees, which makes the economics a little more plausible. The GI Bill could have helped with his education, and VA financing could have made homeownership considerably easier than simply walking into the Mayfield Savings & Loan with twenty thousand dollars stuffed into Ward’s briefcase.

So I don’t think the Cleaver lifestyle was impossible.

I do think it was expensive.

Put Ward somewhere around $10,000 to perhaps $15,000 annually and the arithmetic begins to work. That’s roughly twice to three times the median family income of the period. He isn’t Daddy Warbucks. But he’s doing very well.

Which brings us back to the driveway.

Because the driveway is where Ward’s financial records begin to look like they were prepared by Eddie Haskell.

1957: The Ford

The first Cleaver automobile is generally identified not as the Fairlane 500 we might remember from Ford advertising, but as a 1957 Ford Custom 300 four-door sedan, and it remained around for the first two seasons.

That actually makes sense for Ward.

The Custom 300 was respectable without being ostentatious. The completely redesigned 1957 Ford lineup was lower, longer and wider than before, with modest fins and styling that helped Ford outsell Chevrolet for the first time since 1935.

A Fairlane 500 would have been a little flashier. The Custom 300 was more Ward.

It was the sort of car that said, I have a retirement plan.

Ward could drive it to the office without looking cheap, and June could drive it to the supermarket without attracting rumors.

Everything remained financially responsible.

For two years.

Then something happened.

We don’t know what.

Perhaps Ward got tired of the Ford.

Perhaps the transmission started slipping.

Perhaps the service manager said, “They all do that.”

Perhaps Ward went back to the dealership over a mysterious vibration at 47 miles per hour and was told for the fourth time that they couldn’t duplicate the problem.

Whatever happened, by the 1959 model year Ward Cleaver had apparently crossed the street to Plymouth.

And he never looked back.

1959: Ward Discovers Fins

This is where the Cleaver driveway suddenly gets interesting.

The 1959 Plymouth Fury was no anonymous family sedan.

Plymouth had changed the Fury dramatically for 1959. What had begun as a limited, high-performance two-door model became a full series available as sedans and hardtops, with the Sport Fury positioned above it. A Fury four-door sedan started around $2,691, more than half the annual income of the median American family.

And Ward had one.

The 1959 Fury was pure Virgil Exner-era Chrysler: tailfins, acres of glass, chrome, dramatic proportions and enough styling flourishes to make the Ford look as though it had joined the accounting department.

Depending upon specification, the Fury could be ordered with a 318 V8 producing 230 horsepower, with hotter versions available.

This was not transportation designed by people afraid of being noticed.

Which makes it wonderfully strange that Ward Cleaver was driving it.

Ward, a man whose idea of rebellion was occasionally loosening his tie before dinner, was now piloting something that looked capable of intercepting Soviet bombers.

And nobody mentioned it.

Ward never walked through the front door and said:

“June, I’m afraid I’ve done something financially irresponsible.”

June never said:

“Ward, what happened to the Ford?”

Nobody asked how much he got on trade.

Nobody discussed financing.

Nobody wondered whether buying another nearly $2,700 automobile was wise with Wally eventually headed toward college.

The Plymouth simply appeared.

Television magic.

Or, more accurately, automobile marketing.

The Cleavers Discover Product Placement

Here is where reality sneaks onto Pine Street wearing an advertising executive’s hat.

The cars weren’t appearing because Ward had suddenly developed a pathological need to trade annually. Chrysler products were being placed prominently in the program. Contemporary vehicle documentation shows the family Ford through the first two seasons and the succession of Plymouths thereafter.

In other words, Ward wasn’t eating depreciation.

The studio was.

That explains something I had wondered about for years.

Nobody in Mayfield ever said:

“Good Lord, Ward. Didn’t you just buy that other car?”

Because that would have ruined the illusion.

The Cleavers weren’t merely an American family.

They were also, whether viewers consciously realized it or not, an automobile showroom with bedrooms.

And things got stranger.

Around the same period that Ward was defecting from Ford to Plymouth, Wally and Beaver appeared in a Ford promotional commercial involving the new 1960 Fords. Contemporary references to the commercial survive today.

Think about that.

Dad is home driving a Plymouth while the boys are apparently moonlighting for Ford.

I would have loved to hear that dinner conversation.

“How was school today, boys?”

“Fine, Dad. We went down to the Ford dealer and helped sell cars.”

Ward slowly lowers his fork.

June looks concerned.

Somewhere in Detroit, an advertising executive lights another cigarette.

1960: Things Get Serious

Then comes the 1960 Plymouth Fury.

Now we’re cooking.

Plymouth went all-in for 1960. The Fury was the top-line Plymouth, available in several body styles, including that gloriously pillarless four-door hardtop. A Fury four-door hardtop carried a base price around $2,775.

Mechanically, the 1960 cars were significant because Chrysler moved its full-size Plymouths to unit-body construction, eliminating the traditional separate body-on-frame arrangement.

Styling?

Let’s just say subtlety had taken the year off.

The fins curved upward. The front end looked slightly startled. The rear styling appeared to have been designed during a meeting in which nobody was permitted to say no.

I love them.

Ward apparently did too.

Or Chrysler’s promotional department did.

Either way, there it sat.

A brand-new Fury.

Again.

No discussion of depreciation.

No negotiation.

No moment when Ward came home after six hours at the Plymouth dealership and said, “June, I think I got them down another seventy-five dollars, but I’m not sure because they kept moving the numbers around.”

Nothing.

For a man whose household problems could require twenty-two minutes of thoughtful moral analysis, Ward changed automobiles with the emotional involvement most people devote to changing furnace filters.

1961: Mayfield Enters Outer Space

Then Plymouth produced the 1961 Fury.

This is where even Ward should have had to explain himself.

The fins were largely gone, but Plymouth did not respond by becoming conservative. Instead, the designers gave the car unusual sculpturing, dramatic headlight treatment and taillights that looked as though somebody had ordered them from a missile catalog.

A 1961 Fury cost roughly $2,700, depending on body style and equipment, and buyers could choose anything from the famous 225 Slant Six to some extremely serious V8 machinery. The wild end of the catalog included a 413-cubic-inch V8 with 375 horsepower.

I doubt Ward ordered that one.

Although I desperately want to believe he did.

Imagine Ward dropping Beaver at school with dual quads and cross-ram induction.

“Have a good day, Theodore.”

BWAAAAAAAH.

Miss Landers watches him disappear in tire smoke.

Nobody speaks of it again.

1962: Plymouth Shrinks the Car

For 1962, Plymouth did something unexpected.

The full-size cars got smaller.

Chrysler management had become convinced that Chevrolet was preparing to downsize its full-size cars. Chevrolet wasn’t. Plymouth and Dodge therefore arrived for 1962 with noticeably smaller cars while Ford and Chevrolet continued offering conventionally large automobiles.

The result was one of the more famous corporate miscalculations of the period.

The 1962 Fury was shorter, trimmer and far less finned than Ward’s earlier Plymouths. It was still unmistakably a Plymouth, but the great Forward Look carnival was ending.

And there one was in the Cleaver household.

In fact, the show’s vehicle continuity becomes wonderfully slippery around this period. A 1961 Fury appears in one episode and a 1962 Plymouth is sitting in the garage by the end.

Apparently Ward could trade cars between commercial breaks.

That man had connections.

Which makes one exchange from the series especially funny:

Wally asks, “Gee, Dad, how come you know so much about buying cars?”

Ward replies, “Well, Wally, as unbelievable as it may seem, they did have cars in my younger days.”

And Wally asks:

“Used cars?”

Used cars?

Wally may never have seen one.

Ward traded them before the ashtray needed cleaning.

1963: One Last Plymouth

By the final season, another Plymouth had arrived, with 1963 styling finally settling down into something more conventional.

The extravagant fins and chrome fantasies of the late 1950s were disappearing. Detroit was moving toward the cleaner, straighter shapes that would define the middle 1960s.

It was almost as though the automobile industry was growing up alongside Wally.

Beaver?

Not so much.

But something else had happened during those six years.

America had changed.

Enormously.

And Mayfield hadn’t.

Meanwhile, Outside Mayfield…

This may be the most fascinating thing about Leave It to Beaver.

The show premiered in 1957.

That was the year federal troops went to Little Rock to enforce school integration.

The Soviet Union launched Sputnik.

The Cold War was intensifying.

During the show’s run, Americans watched the U-2 crisis, the election of John F. Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The FDA approved the birth-control pill in 1960, helping ignite enormous social changes involving women, marriage, sexuality and family life.

The Civil Rights Movement moved from courtrooms into streets, lunch counters and television screens. There were sit-ins, Freedom Rides and increasingly visible confrontations over segregation.

Questions about women’s roles were beginning to move into the national conversation.

Nuclear war was not an abstraction. American schoolchildren practiced civil-defense drills.

And over in Mayfield…

Larry Mondello had been grounded for eating pie in bed.

That is not criticism.

It is part of what makes the program so interesting.

Leave It to Beaver wasn’t really trying to document America.

It was presenting an idealized little terrarium containing one particular version of America.

Mayfield had no racial conflict.

No Cold War.

No unemployment.

No serious financial problems.

No alcoholism.

No domestic violence.

No political arguments capable of ruining Thanksgiving.

Apparently nobody even had a mother-in-law.

The problems were deliberately small because small problems were the show’s territory.

Fred Rutherford could announce that he’d smacked Clarence “right in the mouth” for talking back and add, “None of this psychology for me,” and the line landed in a television world whose assumptions about parenting were very different from ours.

Beaver could ask Larry if he wanted to mess around later.

Larry couldn’t.

He was grounded.

Why?

His father caught him eating pie in bed.

That was a crisis in Mayfield.

Meanwhile the Strategic Air Command had bombers in the sky.

June Knows Better

Perhaps the best evidence that the writers themselves understood what they were doing comes from one of my favorite exchanges between Ward and June.

Ward mentions that Gilbert is always talking about his parents and asks whether June has ever met them.

June says she’s seen Gilbert’s mother at the supermarket and that she seems like a calm, sensible person.

Ward replies that you can’t really judge by appearances.

“You might look the same way to her.”

There it is.

The entire series in one joke.

The Cleavers looked perfect.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they were.

Wally had discovered this already. His wonderfully useful response to anything suspicious was:

“Are you giving me the business?”

And sixty-some years later, that’s the question I’m asking Mayfield.

Were we being given the business?

Yes.

Absolutely.

But maybe not quite in the way we think.

The Cleaver lifestyle was unusually affluent, but it wasn’t impossible. A successful upper-middle-management professional earning perhaps twice the national median income could plausibly support a homemaker wife, two children and a comfortable suburban house, particularly with the advantages available to a World War II veteran.

What he probably wouldn’t have done was buy a brand-new Plymouth every September.

That’s where Madison Avenue enters the driveway.

The cars weren’t evidence that Ward had discovered some secret 1950s economy where automobiles were free.

They were evidence that television had discovered product placement.

And I can’t even complain.

Because it worked.

Sixty-five years later, I can watch an episode of Leave It to Beaver and find myself ignoring Beaver entirely because a 1961 Plymouth Fury has just pulled into the driveway.

The advertisers won.

The cars also provide a wonderful accidental timeline of the series. Watch them in sequence and you can see Detroit changing almost year by year.

The restrained Ford gives way to Exner’s soaring fins.

The fins reach their peak.

They disappear.

Plymouth experiments wildly.

Then the shapes become cleaner and more restrained as the 1960s arrive.

Wally grows up.

Beaver gets taller.

June’s pearls remain at DEFCON 1.

Ward keeps carrying the same briefcase.

And America outside Mayfield becomes increasingly complicated.

Maybe that’s why the show remains comforting.

Mayfield, of course, was nothing like Fort Stockton.

In Mayfield, everybody seemed to know everybody else’s business, but they generally had the good manners to wait until somebody asked before offering an opinion about it. In Fort Stockton, we regard that sort of restraint as vaguely antisocial.

Ward could buy a brand-new Plymouth every year and apparently nobody at the breakfast counter wondered aloud what he paid for it, what they gave him for the trade, whether he financed it, whether he got the V8, or whether June had finally put her foot down and made him get air conditioning.

Try that in Fort Stockton.

By the time Ward got the new Fury home, Hairless would know what he paid for it, Angus would know what he should have paid for it, Rex Hall would have the factory brochure, and Mayor Goodman would be explaining an option Plymouth never actually offered. Trixie would want to know whether June picked the color, Brother Bob would be quietly concerned about the tailfins, and Lucinda would already have heard from somebody at the dealership that Ward’s trade-in had needed a transmission.

And all of this would occur before Ward finished his first cup of coffee.

So perhaps Mayfield really was the ideal American town.

Or perhaps it was simply a town without a Grounds for Divorce.

Whether that’s better or worse probably depends on who’s sitting across from you.

Nobody watches Leave It to Beaver to see an accurate cross-section of America between 1957 and 1963.

We watch because Mayfield is the America that exists in memory after memory has had sixty years to throw away the utility bills.

The houses were always clean.

Dad came home every night.

Mom was there.

Dinner was waiting.

The boys got into trouble, but never enough trouble that Ward couldn’t straighten things out before the closing credits.

Tomorrow would be another school day.

And every September there was apparently a brand-new Plymouth in the driveway.

Realistic?

Not entirely.

But if somebody had offered my family a new Fury every year in exchange for letting the neighbors see it, I suspect my father could have learned to live with the moral ambiguity.

And so could I.

Besides, as Wally would say:

Are you giving me the business?

Of course they were.

They were in television.

The remarkable part is that after all these years, I’m still looking at the cars.

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