Eugene Hugh Beaumont (February 16, 1909 – May 14, 1982) was an American actor, television director, and writer. He was also an ordained Methodist minister.[1] Beaumont is best known for his portrayal of Ward Cleaver on the television series Leave It to Beaver, originally broadcast from 1957 to 1963. Earlier, in 1946, he had starred in a series of low-budget crime films distributed by the Producers Releasing Corporation, performing in the role of private detective Michael Shayne.[2]
A television director is in charge of the activities involved in making a television program or section of a program. They are generally responsible for decisions about the editorial content and creative style of a program, and ensuring the producer's vision is delivered. Their duties may include originating program ideas, finding contributors, writing scripts, planning 'shoots', ensuring safety, leading the crew on location, directing contributors and presenters, and working with an editor to assemble the final product. The work of a television director can vary widely depending on the nature of the program, the practices of the production company, whether the program content is factual or drama, and whether it is live or recorded.
The Methodist Church was the official name adopted by the Methodist denomination formed in the United States by the reunion on May 10, 1939, of the northern and southern factions of the Methodist Episcopal Church along with the earlier separated Methodist Protestant Church of 1828.
Ward Cleaver, Jr. is a fictional character in the American television sitcom Leave It to Beaver. Ward and his wife, June, are often invoked as archetypal suburban parents of the 1950s babyboomers. At the start of the show, the couple are the parents of Wally, a thirteen-year-old in the eighth grade, and seven-year-old second-grader Theodore, nicknamed "The Beaver". A typical episode from Leave It to Beaver follows a misadventure committed by one or both of the boys, and ends with the culprits receiving a moral lecture from their father and a hot meal from their mother.
Eudora is a city in Douglas County, Kansas, United States. The city is located along the Kansas and Wakarusa Rivers. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 6,136.
Kansas is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. Its capital is Topeka and its largest city is Wichita, with its most populated county being Johnson County. Kansas is bordered by Nebraska on the north; Missouri on the east; Oklahoma on the south; and Colorado on the west. Kansas is named after the Kansas River, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native Americans who lived along its banks. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the (south) wind" although this was probably not the term's original meaning. For thousands of years, what is now Kansas was home to numerous and diverse Native American tribes. Tribes in the eastern part of the state generally lived in villages along the river valleys. Tribes in the western part of the state were semi-nomadic and hunted large herds of bison.
Baylor School, commonly called Baylor, is a private, coeducational prep school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Founded in 1893, the school currently sits atop a 690 acres (2.8 km2) campus and enrolls students in grades 6-12, including boarding students in grades 9-12. These students are served by Baylor's 148 members of faculty, over two-thirds of whom hold advanced degrees, including nearly 40 adults who live on campus and serve as dorm parents. Baylor has had a student win the Siemens Award for Advanced Placement in math and science and a teacher receive the National Siemens Award for Exemplary Teaching. The school is also an athletic powerhouse, having the best high school sports program in Tennessee and in the top 25 nationwide according to Sports Illustrated. In the past 21 years, Baylor has won a remarkable 157 state championships, including a national record of 16 consecutive victories in women's golf from 1995-2012. They have also repeatedly been named national champions in both men's and women's swimming by Swimming World Magazine. For the 2011-12 school year, Baylor enrolled 1070 young men and women, 20% of whom lived on campus as representatives of 25 states and 30 countries.
Career
Beaumont began his career in show business in 1931 by performing in theaters, nightclubs, and radio. He began acting in motion pictures in 1940, appearing in over three dozen films. Many of those roles were bit parts and minor roles and were not credited. He often worked with the actor William Bendix. In 1946–47, Beaumont starred in five films as the private detective Michael Shayne, taking over the role from Lloyd Nolan. In 1950 he also narrated the short film A Date with Your Family.[5]
William Bendix was an American film, radio, and television actor, who typically played rough, blue-collar characters. He is best remembered in films for the title role in The Babe Ruth Story. He also portrayed the clumsily earnest aircraft plant worker Chester A. Riley in both the radio and television versions of The Life of Riley. He received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor for Wake Island (1942).
Michael "Mike" Shayne is a fictional private detective character created during the late 1930s by writer Brett Halliday, a pseudonym of Davis Dresser. The character appeared in a series of seven films starring Lloyd Nolan for Twentieth Century Fox, five films from the low-budget Producers Releasing Corporation with Hugh Beaumont, a radio series under a variety of titles between 1944 and 1953, and later in 1960–1961 in a 32-episode NBC television series starring Richard Denning in the title role.
Lloyd Benedict Nolan was an American film and television actor. Among his many roles, Nolan is remembered for originating the role of private investigator Michael Shayne in a series of 1940s B movies.
From 1950 to 1953, Beaumont was the narrator of the Reed Hadley series Racket Squad, based on the cases of a fictional detective, Captain John Braddock, in San Francisco. In a 1953 episode of Adventures of Superman titled "The Big Squeeze", Beaumont played an ex-convict with a wife and son whose trust he must win back after an apparent return to his criminal past. In 1952, he played the role of Reverend Randy Roberts in an episode of The Lone Ranger. In Hadley's second series, The Public Defender, which aired on CBS in 1954 and 1955, Beaumont appeared three times in the role of Ed McGrath.[1]
Reed Hadley was an American film, television and radio actor.
Racket Squad is an American TV crime drama series that aired from 1951 to 1953.
Adventures of Superman is an American television series based on comic book characters and concepts that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created in 1938. The show was the first television series to feature Superman and began filming in 1951 in California on RKO-Pathé stages and the RKO Forty Acres back lot. Cereal manufacturer Kellogg's sponsored the show. The first and last airdates of the show, which was produced for first-run television syndication rather than a network, are disputed, but they are generally accepted as September 19, 1952, and April 28, 1958. The show's first two seasons were filmed in black and white; seasons three through six were filmed in color but were originally telecast in black and white. Adventures of Superman was not shown in color until 1965, when the series was syndicated to local stations.
Barbara Billingsley was an American film, television, voice, and stage actress. She began her career with uncredited roles in Three Guys Named Mike (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Invaders from Mars (1953) and was featured in the 1957 movie The Careless Years, opposite Natalie Trundy before appearing in recurring TV roles such as The Brothers.
Rod Cameron was a Canadian-born film and television actor whose career extended from the 1930s to the 1970s. He appeared in horror, war, action and science fiction movies, but is best remembered for his many westerns.
A detective is an investigator, usually a member of a law enforcement agency. They often collect information to solve crime by talking to witnesses and informants, collecting physical evidence, or searching records in databases. This leads them to arrest criminals and enable them to be convicted in court. A detective may work for the police or privately.
He appeared in one of the early episodes of the CBSWestern series My Friend Flicka and guest-starred in an episode of Frank Lovejoy's detective series Meet McGraw.[6] In 1955, he also guest-starred in the Lassie episode "The Well", one of the first two episodes filmed as pilots for the new series. In those initial installments he portrays Mr. Saunders, a water company executive interested in purchasing the Miller family's well.[1]
CBS is an American English language commercial broadcast television and radio network that is a flagship property of CBS Corporation. The company is headquartered at the CBS Building in New York City with major production facilities and operations in New York City and Los Angeles.
Western is a genre of various arts incorporating Western lifestyle which tell stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, often centering on the life of a nomadic cowboy or gunfighter armed with a revolver and a rifle who rides a horse. Cowboys and gunslingers typically wear Stetson hats, neckerchief bandannas, vests, spurs, cowboy boots and buckskins. Recurring characters include the aforementioned cowboys, Native Americans, bandits, lawmen, bounty hunters, outlaws, gamblers, soldiers, and settlers. The ambience is usually punctuated with a Western music score, including American and Mexican folk music such as country, Native American music, New Mexico music, and rancheras.
My Friend Flicka is a 39-episode western television series set at the fictitious Goose Bar Ranch in Wyoming at the turn of the 20th century. The program was filmed in color but initially aired in black and white on CBS at 7:30 p.m. Fridays from February 10, 1956, to February 1, 1957. It was a mid-season replacement for Gene Autry's The Adventures of Champion. Both series failed in the ratings against ABC's The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.
In July 1957, Beaumont played a sympathetic characterization of the Western bandit Jesse James on the series Tales of Wells Fargo. Two months later, he was cast in his best-known role as the wise suburban father Ward Cleaver on the sitcomLeave It to Beaver. During that series' six seasons, Beaumont also wrote and directed several episodes, including the final one, "Family Scrapbook".[1] In 2014, in recognition of his performances as head of the Cleaver household, TV Guide ranked Beaumont number 28 on its list of the "50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time".[7]
In 1959, just before Beaumont began filming the third season of Leave It to Beaver, he flew from his home in Minnesota to Hollywood while his wife, son, and mother-in-law traveled to California by car. A car accident killed his mother-in-law and severely injured his son.[8]Jerry Mathers, the eponymous character of the show, later stated that the tragedy seriously affected Beaumont's participation in the production at the time, with Beaumont often just "walking" through his part.[9]
After Leave It to Beaver ended production and went into syndication in the fall of 1963, Beaumont appeared in many community theater productions and played a few guest roles on such television series as Mannix, The Virginian, Wagon Train, and Petticoat Junction.[1] In February 1966, 11 years after his first appearance on Lassie, he again guest-starred on that popular series, performing in the episode "Cradle of the Deep".[1] He also continued to have success as a writer, selling several television screenplays and radio scripts, as well as short stories to various magazines.[10]
Following his retirement from show business in the late 1960s, Beaumont launched a second career as a Christmas-tree farmer in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. He was forced to retire from that business in 1972 after suffering a stroke from which he never fully recovered.
Personal life and death
Beaumont married only once. In Los Angeles on Easter Sunday, April 13, 1941, he wed actress Kathryn Adams (née Hohn) at the Hollywood Congregational Church.[11] Their union lasted 33 years, until their divorce in 1974.[12] They had three children: Hunter, Kristy, and Mark.
On May 14, 1982, Beaumont died of a heart attack while visiting his son, a psychologist working in Munich, in what was then West Germany.[10] His body was cremated, and the ashes were scattered on the then family-owned island on Lake Wabana, Minnesota, near Grand Rapids. The 1983 telemovie Still the Beaver is dedicated to Beaumont.
Leave It to Beaver is a black-and-white American television sitcom about an inquisitive and often naïve boy, Theodore "The Beaver" Cleaver, and his adventures at home, school, and around his suburban neighborhood. The show also starred Barbara Billingsley and Hugh Beaumont as Beaver's parents, June and Ward Cleaver, and Tony Dow as Beaver's brother Wally. The show has attained an iconic status in the United States, with the Cleavers exemplifying the idealized suburban family of the mid-20th century.
Gerald Patrick Mathers is an American actor. Mathers is best known for his role in the television sitcom Leave It to Beaver, originally broadcast from 1957 to 1963, in which he played Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver, the younger son of the suburban couple June and Ward Cleaver and the brother of Wally Cleaver.
Kenneth Charles Osmond is an American actor and retired policeman. Beginning a prolific career as a child actor at the age of four, Osmond is best known for his iconic role as Eddie Haskell on the 1950s television situation comedy Leave It to Beaver, and for reprising it on the 1980s revival series The New Leave It to Beaver. Typecast by the role, he found it hard to get other acting work and became a Los Angeles policeman. After retiring from the police, he resumed his acting career.
Tony Lee Dow is an American film producer, director, sculptor, and television actor. He is best known for his role in the television sitcom Leave It to Beaver, which ran in primetime from 1957 to 1963. Dow played Wally Cleaver, the elder son of June and Ward Cleaver and the brother of Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver.
Wallace "Wally" Cleaver is a fictional character in the iconic American television sitcom Leave It to Beaver. Wally is the thirteen-year-old son of archetypal 1950s suburban parents, Ward and June Cleaver and the older brother of the seven-year-old title character, Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver. The characters grew older along with the actors.
The New Leave It to Beaver is an American sitcom sequel to the original 1957–1963 sitcom Leave It to Beaver. The series began with the 1983 reunion television movie Still the Beaver that aired on CBS in March 1983. The success of the television movie prompted the creation of a revival series, also titled Still the Beaver, that aired on the Disney Channel from 1984 to 1985. In 1986, the series was picked up by TBS where it aired until June 1989.
Theodore "the Beaver" Cleaver is the fictional title character in the American television series Leave It to Beaver. Originally played by Jerry Mathers, seven-year-old Beaver is the son of June and Ward Cleaver and the brother of 13-year-old Wally Cleaver.
Frederick "Fred" Rutherford is a fictional character in the television sitcom Leave It to Beaver. The show aired October 4, 1957 to June 20, 1963. Fred is portrayed by Richard Deacon. Alan Rachins played the character in the 1997 film adaptation of the series, Leave It to Beaver.
Robert "Rusty" Stevens is an American former child actor best remembered for his role as Larry Mondello, Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver's young friend, in the original Leave It to Beaver television series. Stevens appeared in 68 of the show's 235 episodes, between 1957 and 1960.
"Family Scrapbook" is the final episode of the American television series Leave It to Beaver. It last aired on ABC on June 20, 1963. It was the 39th episode in the show's sixth and final season, and the 234th episode in the complete series.
"Beaver Gets 'Spelled" is the premiere episode of the iconic American television series Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963). The episode aired on CBS on October 4, 1957. The episode is the first episode in the first season, and the first episode in the complete series. "Beaver Gets 'Spelled" is available on DVD.
"It's a Small World" is the pilot episode from the iconic American television series Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963). The pilot was first televised April 23, 1957, on the syndicated anthology series, Studio 57, without a laugh track nor the series' well known theme song, "The Toy Parade". It never aired as an episode within the series. It was televised again in October 2007 as part of TV Land's 50th anniversary celebration of Leave It to Beaver. It was released to DVD in 2005. The series made its CBS debut several months later on October 4, 1957, with the episode, "Beaver Gets 'Spelled".
The first season of the American television situation comedy Leave It to Beaver premiered on October 4, 1957 and concluded on July 16, 1958. It consisted of 39 episodes shot in black-and-white, each running approximately 25 minutes in length. This was the only season that the show originally aired on CBS.
The second season of the American television situation comedy Leave It to Beaver premiered on October 2, 1958 and concluded on June 25, 1959. It consisted of 39 episodes shot in black-and-white, each running approximately 25 minutes in length. This was the first season that the show was originally aired on ABC after the first season was televised on CBS.
The third season of the American television situation comedy Leave It to Beaver premiered on October 3, 1959 and concluded on June 25, 1960. It consisted of 39 episodes shot in black-and-white, each running approximately 25 minutes in length.
This is a list of characters featured in the American television series Leave It to Beaver, which was broadcast from 1957 through 1963.
The sixth and final season of the television series Leave It to Beaver aired from September 27, 1962 to June 20, 1963 on ABC. It consisted of 39 black-and-white episodes, each running approximately 25 minutes.
Sleepers West is a 1941 drama film directed by Eugene Forde and starring Lloyd Nolan and Lynn Bari.
↑ "Anna Marie Roker Hohn" (1884—1959), birth and death years of Beaumont's mother-in-law. Find a Grave, a subsidiary of Ancestry.com., Lehi, Utah. Retrieved January 10, 2019.
↑ Mathers, Jerry. ...And Jerry Mathers as The Beaver. Berkley Boulevard Books, 1998. ( ISBN0425163709)
↑ "News Briefs". The Daily Reporter. Indiana, Greenfield. International News Service. April 14, 1941. p.4. Retrieved October 29, 2016– via Newspapers.com.
↑ "California Divorce Index, 1966-1984", Kathryn E. [Hohn] from Eugene H. Beaumont, May 1974, Los Angeles, California; Department of Health Services, Sacramento, California. FamilySearch, archives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah. Retrieved January 9, 2019.
↑ "Phantom Raiders". AFI Catalog of Feature Films. AFI. Retrieved August 2, 2015.
↑ "The Secret Seven". AFI Catalog of Feature Films. AFI. Retrieved August 2, 2015.
↑ "South of Panama". AFI Catalog of Feature Films. AFI. Retrieved August 2, 2015.
Brooks, Tim; Marsh, Earle (2007). The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946–Present. New York, NY: Ballantine Books. ISBN9780345497734.
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