Berkeley

TELEVISION was still relatively young when, on Oct. 4, 1957, CBS broadcast the perfect sitcom scene:

A second grader known as the Beaver and his older brother, Wally, ordered by their mother to take baths before going to bed, are kneeling beside a tub they have just filled. Already in their pajamas, they are fiddling in the water with their hands to make it sound as if bathing were taking place, dampening washcloths and towels to create a trail of supporting evidence. As this goes on, the Beaver, who earlier that day was given a note by his teacher to take home to his parents but has been too afraid to deliver it, asks Wally for advice: Should he open the note, to see whether he’s in trouble?

“ ’Course not; that’d be dishonest,” says Wally, who then grabs a handful of dirt and tosses it into the draining bathtub. Why the dirt? “It’ll leave a ring,” he explains to the Beaver as the boys go off to bed, unwashed.

There have perhaps been funnier sitcom scenes since, and certainly much louder, more frenetic ones. But has the craftsmanship — wonderfully believable brotherly chat as a foundation; sly incongruity laid on top — ever been bested? Doubtful.

Wally and the Beaver, of course, were the focus of “Leave It to Beaver,” and that bathtub scene was in Episode 1 of Season 1: “Beaver Gets ‘Spelled.’ ” There would be 233 more episodes during the show’s six-season run, from 1957 to 1963, and they are full of small, knowing moments. A boxed set out this week from the Shout! Factory collects the entire series, with assorted extras and annotated booklets for each season. The discs are a technical upgrade over previous releases, but the real prize is being able to immerse yourself in the entire body of work, a time capsule from that brief moment between the end of the Korean War and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, when American life — at least as it is often now mythologized — stood blissfully still.

“Jokes get in the way,” Tony Dow, who played Wally, said in a telephone interview, talking about the “Beaver” writers’ reliance on more placid, observational humor. “They get in the way of your concentration when you’re trying to get at a story. We would throw jokes out at the table reading.”

That is what hits you first when you sit down with a box of “Beaver”: television comedy was a much slower animal back then. You have to detox mentally to watch these shows, to lay aside your caffeine and BlackBerry addictions and be prepared to wait for your rewards. That bathtub scene takes almost three and a half minutes to unspool. In that time Hannah Montana could have traded six insults with her father, tripped over a couch, lost her wig, dumped two boyfriends and had a crisis involving shoes.

Not that “Leave It to Beaver” was above using sight gags. Four of the show’s stars, all now in their 60s, had no trouble selecting a “most humiliating thing ever done to my character.”

Frank Bank, who played Wally’s friend Lumpy Rutherford, recalled taking a quart of melted ice cream (which, he confessed in an interview, was actually yogurt) over the head in “Wally’s Weekend Job” (Season 5, Episode 6). Ken Osmond — the slick, weaselly Eddie Haskell, one of the most memorable characters television has ever seen — spoke of receiving a faceful of differential fluid in “Wally’s Practical Joke” (Season 6, Episode 35). Jerry Mathers, the Beaver, still cringes at “Beaver, the Bunny” (Season 5, Episode 16), in which he ended up in a ridiculous rabbit suit for a school pageant. (The episode gave Lumpy the opportunity to utter the memorable line: “Beaver in a bunny suit. The only thing that would be funnier would be a bunny in a beaver suit.”) And Mr. Dow cited “Wally, the Lifeguard” (Season 4, Episode 4), in which Wally thinks he has been hired as a lifeguard but finds himself hawking hot dogs instead. “They put a goofy-looking hat on me,” Mr. Dow recalled. Yes, Wally is still saying “goofy.”

It seems like a perfect instance of brotherly rivalry that, when asked to choose his favorite episode, Mr. Mathers picked the show that Mr. Dow named as his most humiliating. But that’s an illusion; Mr. Mathers said his selection was based on the memory of the down time between scenes, when he outfished Mr. Dow in what is now called Jaws Lake on Universal’s back lot.

Mr. Dow named as his favorite “Happy Weekend” (Season 2, Episode 13), a wise, wistful tale in which the boys’ father, Ward (Hugh Beaumont), drags them against their will to the cabin where he used to vacation as a child. Like so many of the series’s best installments, that one was written by the show’s creators, Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, men apparently obsessed with bathing. The subject comes up seemingly in every episode, including “Happy Weekend.” “Hot dog, Beaver!” Wally says as the boys are looking over the cabin. “There’s no bathtub!”

Maybe the cleanliness fixation was a manifestation of the way Mr. Connelly and Mr. Mosher ran their operation: protectively, Mr. Dow said, with an eye out for the negative influences that have derailed so many child stars since. “There were drugs and alcohol when we grew up, but we had this tremendous core of support, first from our families, but also from the writers and others who worked on the show,” Mr. Dow said. “I remember there was this crewman who said ‘dammit’ or something once. Never saw him again.”

Mr. Dow went on to have success as a television director (“Coach,” “Babylon 5”). Mr. Mathers — despite having been killed in Vietnam, according to a false rumor that floated around for years — graduated from Berkeley and for a time went into banking, though he continued to act (including in “Hairspray” on Broadway, a job he’s particularly proud of ). Mr. Bank became a financial consultant, and Mr. Osmond was for years a Los Angeles police officer. (In one of the discs’ bonus features, he gives a matter-of-fact account of the time he was shot in the line of duty.)

In the 1980s the four, along with Barbara Billingsley, who played June Cleaver, Wally and the Beav’s mom, reunited for more than 100 episodes of “The New Leave It to Beaver.” And thus the “Beaver” franchise was, as Mr. Bank put it, “probably one of the most evolutionary shows of our time”: at first, it was the world as seen through the Beaver’s eyes; increasingly in later seasons it was taken over by Wally and his friends; then, years later, it revisited the characters in adulthood.

That’s the main pleasure waiting in a box of “Beaver”: the first six years of that evolution. Think of it as a 234-episode history lesson, of a family, a country, a medium. Each installment has a few pearls worthy of that necklace June is always wearing (even while doing housework). Consider, for instance, what “Ward’s Baseball,” Season 3, Episode 28, can teach us:

EVERYTHING WAS NEW ONCE June has just been grocery shopping, and Ward, wandering by the kitchen, helps her unload the bags. “What’s this?” he asks, indicating one particular purchase. And June says: “Frozen waffles. You just heat them and serve them.” That’s right: she has to explain to him what frozen waffles are.

OUR RELAXING SKILLS HAVE IMPROVED CONSIDERABLY It’s the weekend, and Ward is chilling in a chair when the doorbell rings. “It’s probably Fred Rutherford,” Lumpy’s father, he tells June, showing mild annoyance at having his laid-back Saturday interrupted. “I don’t know anyone else who would drop in on Saturday without phoning first.” Thing is, Ward has been doing his Saturday relaxing while wearing a coat and tie. When he opens the door, Fred too is wearing a coat and tie.

THESE SHOWS CONTAIN THE ROOTS OF ALL FAMILY AND TEENAGE COMEDY “Ward’s Baseball” involves a valuable autographed baseball that the Beaver accidentally wrecks. See “Hannah Montana,” Season 2, Episode 21: “Bye Bye Ball” (Miley Cyrus’s character wrecks her brother’s valuable autographed baseball).

These “Beavers” are constantly doing that: reminding you of a scene or plotline in some subsequent show or movie. When Eddie got that faceful of fluid in “Wally’s Practical Joke,” it’s because he was under Lumpy’s car, repairing the damage from a practical joke gone awry: he and Wally had chained the car to a tree, and when Lumpy drove forward, the back axle was yanked off. “American Graffiti,” anyone?

Cheating on homework, being mortified by clothes or haircuts, running away from home, discovering the cruelties of the working world, feeling the stirrings of interest in the opposite sex: “Beaver” covered those and dozens of other topics that later turned up in “Family Affair,” “The Wonder Years,” “The Bernie Mac Show,” “Hannah Montana” and everywhere else, and will turn up again in whatever family series comes next. You might have thought kids, with their electronic devices and their early maturation, had changed too much for half-century-old stories to still resonate.

“Nah,” Mr. Osmond said. “Kids are still the same as they were in 1810.”

It shouldn’t have seemed weird, but it did: Jerry Mathers, also known as TV’s Beaver, having just polished off a 16-ounce steak at the Palm, picked up his cellphone and called his girlfriend, asking her to come over for dessert.

Mr. Mathers has as much right to grow up as anyone of course, and he has: two divorces, three children, a stock portfolio and, this past Saturday, a 59th birthday.

But it’s hard to look past that half owlish, half doughy face and that keenly sincere manner: A girlfriend? A cellphone? What would Gus the fireman say?

Tonight Mr. Mathers will make his Broadway debut in “Hairspray,” playing Wilbur Turnblad, Tracy Turnblad’s goofy and good-hearted father. One could dismiss it as a casting gimmick, but the role fits him oddly well, as does the show itself. It’s set in 1962, when that decade’s turmoil was just beginning to bump up against the chaste chipperness of the 1950s, an era often represented by a certain television show that, at the time, was in its fifth and next-to-last season.

Wilbur Turnblad is not exactly Jean Valjean, but it’s not a chump role, either; Dick Latessa won a Tony for featured actor in 2003 for playing the part. Mr. Mathers says he is both confident and a little terrified.

“I’m fine with the acting,” he said. “But that dancing. ”

The Broadway idea was cooked up by his agent, who tossed it to the “Hairspray” people without Mr. Mathers’s knowledge.

Matt Lenz, the show’s associate director, said, “It was one of those ideas that, as soon as it was it was floated, everyone was intrigued.”

After a successful audition in December Mr. Mathers was set up with dance and vocal coaches who worked with him in Los Angeles, where he lives. At a rehearsal on Friday, his first with his Broadway co-stars, his moves were a little tentative. But he had them down, and his lines were greeted with laughter and applause by cast members watching from the orchestra.

“The Beaver had this kind of clueless look and you can still see that,” said Tevin Campbell, who plays Seaweed in the show. “That’s why it’s so funny. But he’s good. He’s got it.”

Lately Mr. Mathers has been spending much of his time making appearances, sometimes as a spokesman for diabetes treatment (he was found to have diabetes in the early 1990s) and sometimes simply as the actor formerly known as the Beaver.

He talks about how television has changed in the 50 years since the debut of “Beaver,” how children are being exposed to sexuality too early, and how parents should be involved in what their children are watching. That’s not to say, he assured, that “Leave it to Beaver” was the mainstay of innocence it is sometimes painted as.

“You know, ‘Leave it to Beaver’ was the first show to show a toilet on TV,” he said proudly, describing the episode in which Wally and the Beav adopt a pet alligator.

At some point it had to be asked: Has it ever bothered Mr. Mathers that he reached the pinnacle of his career — in his words — before he turned 16?

He looked as if he didn’t even understand the question.

“Honestly, by the time I was 13, I was a self-made millionaire,” he said.

Mr. Mathers went to high school, joined the Air National Guard, graduated from Berkeley and started a career in banking and, later, real estate. He was not, as was widely reported, killed in Vietnam, though Tony Dow, a k a Beaver’s big brother, Wally, sent flowers to the Mathers family upon hearing the news.

One day in the late 1970s Mr. Dow asked Mr. Mathers if he wanted to join him in a production of “Boeing Boeing,” a ’60s farce, at a dinner theater in Kansas City, Mo. Mr. Mathers said he initially saw it as a way to bring a higher profile to his real estate business.

But the stint was so successful they followed it up with another show, “So Long, Stanley,” which toured the country. He returned to California to become the host of a radio show for a couple of years. (In a quirk laden with cultural resonance, Mr. Mathers was the emergency replacement for Timothy Leary, who tended to repel listeners.)

The ’80s was a decade of nostalgia for the Beaver era, and Mr. Mathers spent it working on the television movie, “Still the Beaver,” and the ensuing series, “The New Leave It to Beaver.” It was a period of intense work, he said, which ended with the breakup of his second marriage.

Since then Mr. Mathers has spent his time raising his children — all now in their 20s — making his talks and doing the occasional acting job. The discovery in the mid-’80s that he owned a piece of the grosses from all “Beaver”-related merchandise certainly helped pad things a bit.

“I definitely have had a blessed life,” he said.

Almost no one from the “Leave it to Beaver” gang, Mr. Mathers said, has had reservations about sailing in the wake of the show (though Ken Osmond, who played Eddie Haskell and later became a Los Angeles police officer, did spend quite a bit of money, Mr. Mathers said, trying to prevent a porn star from claiming that he had played Eddie Haskell).

Frank Bank, who played Clarence (Lumpy) Rutherford, seconded Mr. Mathers in saying that “Leave it to Beaver” was only good fortune. He even wrote a book, “Call Me Lumpy,” detailing, among other things, his copious sexual exploits in the years following the show.

Mr. Bank is now Mr. Mathers’s investment adviser (“Vietnam and Malaysia are hot,” he said in a phone interview) and his closest friend from the old days. He and Mr. Mathers had talked about the Broadway venture.

“I had to laugh,” Mr. Bank said. “I said, ‘Let me get this straight: You can’t dance and you can’t sing.’ But then I said, ‘You know what?’ ” What Mr. Bank said next isn’t printable but it comes down to this: He believes Mr. Mathers will do a very good job.

Only Mr. Dow occasionally balked at drawing attention to his “Beaver” fame, Mr. Mathers said, worried that it might interfere with his career as a successful producer and director.

The girlfriend arrived: Teresa Modnick, the community relations director for the Center for Healthy Aging, a Santa Monica-based nonprofit.

They have been going out for two years, after being set up on a date by their sisters. Ms. Modnick talked about Mr. Mathers as a kind-hearted and generous man, no different than if he were a kind-hearted and generous man who sold aluminum siding for a living. She seemed unfazed that strangers at restaurants often approach to introduce themselves to the Beav.

“I can go anywhere in the world, and people know me,” Mr. Mathers said, still seemingly amazed at the life that was set out for him when he was 9 years old. “In Japan the show’s called ‘The Happy Boy and His Family.’ So I’ll be walking through the airport in Japan, and people will come up and say, ‘Hi, happy boy!’ ”

More than 150 personal items and works of art that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg kept in her Washington residence and Supreme Court chambers are up for auction.

The Potomack Company auction house in Alexandria, Va., opened catalogs this month for the items, which include ceramics by Picasso and a caricature print of the widely admired justice, who died in 2020. Proceeds will benefit the Washington National Opera, whose concerts Justice Ginsburg frequently attended .

The Potomack Company said it would donate 10 percent of the seller’s commission to fellowships offered by the Women of Berkeley Law, a student group at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Justice Ginsburg was known for fighting for women’s rights for more than a half century.

The auction for Justice Ginsburg’s modern art collection will take place on April 27, followed by a session the next day with decorative arts and memento items from her Supreme Court chambers and residence in the Watergate complex in Washington.

“These items are truly tangible pieces of her life and times as one of America’s greatest Supreme Court justices,’’ Elizabeth Haynie Wainstein, owner of the Potomack Company, said on Wednesday. “These items would be of interest to all Americans who admired Justice Ginsburg as a civil rights pioneer and defender of equality for all Americans.”

Ms. Wainstein said the bids with the highest estimates were the Pablo Picasso ceramic pieces , one of which had a bid of $15,000 on Wednesday.

There is a caricature print of Justice Ginsburg by the artist Eleanor Davis. The print, which hung in the justice’s Supreme Court chambers, had a bid of $7,500 on Wednesday.

A “natural black mink coat” with the justice’s name in a pocket had a bid of $1,200.

On the more affordable end, there is a concert poster from a performance that featured her grandson. The bid was for $30 on Wednesday.

The collection also includes bronze sculptures by Glenna Goodacre, who designed the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington. There are medals and awards that Justice Ginsburg received over the years.

Justice Ginsburg died from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87 in September 2020. She was the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

In her later years, Justice Ginsburg developed a rock-star following and became a popular cultural figure to younger generations.

A law student, Shana Knizhnik, nicknamed her the Notorious R.B.G. — a play on the name of the Notorious B.I.G., the rapper who, like Justice Ginsburg, came from Brooklyn. She became a pop culture icon, inspiring impersonations on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

The auction is the latest example of how Justice Ginsburg has been honored and remembered.

Last month, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History said that the justice’s children were donating her “dissent” collar , which she wore when presenting powerful and pointed opinions that were at odds with the Supreme Court’s majority.

The distinctive collar is one of four being donated, along with other items, including the judicial robe that she wore most often during her more than 25 years on the court. The donations coincide with the museum’s decision to posthumously award Justice Ginsburg its signature honor, the Great Americans Medal .

On March 31, the U.S. Navy said it would name a ship after her. The U.S.N.S. Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be a John Lewis-class replenishment oiler ship designed to carry fuel to the Navy’s operating carrier strike groups, the Navy said.

The vessel will be the first U.S. Navy ship to bear Justice Ginsburg’s name and is sponsored by her daughter, Jane Ginsburg. The ship has not been constructed yet.