By MICHAEL POLLAK
Published: October 16, 2010
Barbara Billingsley, who as June Cleaver on the television series “Leave It to Beaver” personified a Hollywood postwar family ideal of the ever-sweet, ever-helpful suburban stay-at-home mom, died Saturday. She was 94.
A family spokeswoman, Judy Twersky, said that Ms. Billingsley had died of polymyalgia, a rheumatoid disease, at her home in Santa Monica, Calif.
From 1957 to 1963 and in decades of reruns, the glamorous June, who wore pearls and high heels at home, could be counted on to help her husband, Ward (Hugh Beaumont), get their son Theodore, better known as Beaver (Jerry Mathers), and his older brother, Wally (Tony Dow), out of countless minor jams, whether an alligator in the basement or a horse in the garage.
Baking a steady supply of cookies, she would use motherly intuition to sound the alarm about incipient trouble (“Ward, I’m worried about the Beaver”) in their immaculate, airy house in the fictional town of Mayfield. (The house appeared to have no master bedroom, just a big door from which Ward and June occasionally emerged, tying their bathrobes.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/arts/ ... ss&emc=rss
