Leave It to Beaver matters. If you’ve listened to my show for a while you know I start the day with back to back viewings of the Beaver on MeTV. Initially it was to just recall a warm fuzzy time from my youth but in the past few years it has become a necessary elixir. As wars continue to sprout up around the globe, climate change ebbs and flows “literally,” crime rises, and politicians get more and more witchy, the Beav is now a wall where nonsense is held at bay. Here’s when the show became a very necessary cleanse. In preparation for a guest, Karen Conti on my Cocktail Show, I started reading her book: Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy. Gacy as you may know is one of the worst serial killers ever in the U.S. who was put to death 30 years ago in Illinois. Karen was part of Gacy’s legal time to get him off death row, she is anti-death penalty which is why Karen and her late husband’s legal expertise got involved with this monster. I started reading the book at a pretty good clip, however, as the details became more and more grizzly I found myself only able to read a few pages at a time and needed a breather of some sort before I would go back to the book. Enter Leave It to Beaver. The show ran from 1957 to 1963 and I’m sure heinous stuff was going on then too but June, Ward, Wally and the Beav sanitized it all for our protection. Rotary dial phones, big cabinet televisions, large fin autos and newspapers the size of tablecloths are well represented and capture the era perfectly. June wearing earrings, pearls and high heels while vacuuming and Ward sitting in his suit with his tie still tightly cinched after work reading the paper, not so much. However, when you’re reading about a psycho who killed 33 men and boys and buried most of them in his crawlspace you need to find something to pull you back to normal and that’s why a little black and white tv show from over 60 years ago is the ticket. Karen also does brief bios on other death row inmates of Gacy’s who pop into view. THANK GOD THERE ARE PRISONS. So part of my happy idiot demeanor will always use Jerry Mathers as my shield, and lo and behold 5 months after LITB ended its run Kennedy was assassinated. Where’s my Beaver and bourbon!
Gunga, galunga
Garry