Barbara Billingsley

Early Wednesday afternoon I rode down to the bank at King and Dufferin to take out my rent money. A little later I went up the street to pay for my phone service.

That evening I heard a woman yelling, “Help!” outside of my window. I looked down to see a short East Asian woman, perhaps in her late 60s standing on the sidewalk and continuously calling out something that, because of her accent, I wasn’t entirely sure of, but it sounded like, “Help! She took my bag!” She was pointing at an attractive young woman that was walking away fairly calmly. She crossed the street and started walking west but changed her mind and walked east. She looked back incredulously at the Asian woman a couple of times and said something that seemed to be about her to someone else on the street before she continued east. It looked to me like she was carrying one bag and not two, so I don’t know if she’d actually snatched the older woman’s bag or if the Asian woman had lost her bag, then saw the younger woman carrying one just like it and assumed it was hers. Since I didn’t see a purse snatching take place, there was nothing for me to conclude.

When I think about it, as far as I remember I’ve only seen one purse snatching in my whole life and that took place in Amsterdam. It happened very quickly and the thief ran like a professional sprinter.

            That night I watched the pilot episode of “It’s A Small World”, which became “Leave it to Beaver”. It was a unique show at the time because the story was told from the perspective of the kids and the parents were secondary, even though I noticed in that first show that the actors that played the parents had top billing on the credits, with larger letters spelling their names. Beaver had been hanging around with some older kids who, to get rid of him, told him he could win a bicycle from the local milk company by collecting a thousand of their bottle caps. Beaver started collecting them and then his brother Wally started helping him. They went to great lengths to get the caps from every source they could until they reached their goal, then they hauled a wagonload of bottle caps into the office of the milk company to say they were there for their bike. The secretary didn’t know anything about a contest, but called for her boss, played by Richard Deacon, who was later to play “Mel” on the Dick Van Dyke Show. He didn’t know anything about a contest, so he called his boss, who called his boss. Each person at the company felt out of the loop because they assumed there was a contest that they hadn’t heard about but each executive passed the buck about it. Finally, Deacon’s character was told to buy the kids a bike so the company didn’t lose face for being unprepared. The kids kept the bike a secret because their father had told them they couldn’t have one until they were more responsible. When they wanted to ride it they’d lower it down from their window with a rope and take it back the same way. Meanwhile the milk company realized that there never had been a contest and so Deacon came back for the bike. The boys were given a lecture about honesty by their father. But then the higher ups at the milk company realized that the contest had been a great idea so they wanted to give the bike back to the kids but the boys refused because they hadn’t really earned the bike. Upon seeing this, Beaver and Wally’s parents decided they’d earned a bike after all and bought them one.

            The premier episode came out six months later as “Leave It To Beaver”. In the story, Beaver’s new teacher gave him a note to take to his parents. All the other kids, including his brother told him that he wouldn’t be given a note to take home unless he’d done something wrong, so he avoided giving the note the first day. The next day he accidentally lost the note and then ran away from home to avoid being punished.

            It was interesting that in the pilot episode, Barbara Billingsley was made to look much more attractive but for the premier they played her looks down quite a bit.