DOES FATHER KNOW BEST?

I recently bought the first season of Father Knows Best. I remember that show like it was yesterday. Funny thing is, the show started its run in 1954, when I was one year old. I'm pretty sure we didn't have a TV in 1954, and if we did, I'm pretty sure I wasn't watching it. Even if by some miracle I was watching it, what are the odds I'd remember 55 years later something I'd seen when I was one?

Now, the show ran through the '59-60 season, so I must be remembering the later episodes. By then Betty was pretty grown up and kinda hot--at least to a seven year old--and Bud was even dopier than he was in 1954. Must be the shows I saw when I was five or six or seven that I'm remembering.

It's funny to watch those first season episodes because Robert Young looks way too old to be the dad of that family. He looks nearly as old as Marcus Welby, MD, who was old. Jane Wyatt doesn't look like a spring chicken, either.

These '50s TV shows are a great retro microscope on American culture back then. Dad wore his suit at the dinner table, mom wore a cocktail dress under her apron and the kids wiped their mouths with cloth napkins before asking to be excused from the table. Mom and dad slept in separate twin beds that were covered with those nubby bedspreads. Mom stayed home and cleaned the house and cooked while dad went off to an office we never got to see. Oh, and mom wore FMPs when she did the vacuuming.

We do know what Jim Anderson did for a living, though: he sold insurance. I like that little touch. I'm still wondering what Ward Cleaver did. We got to see him at the office a few times, but it was never clear exactly what he did. Sales, maybe. But what he might have sold remains a mystery. I guess if it didn't matter to Wally and the Beve it shouldn't matter to us, either. It's just one of those little things that have always bothered me.

BTW, Leave it to Beaver ran from 1957 through the 1963 TV season. TV seasons used to start in October and run through June. Shows used to have 39 episodes each season. Talk about change....