I feel almost as if I’d lost a cousin I’d grown up with. He was of my generation, and I grew up watching the show and then watched its reruns for more than half a century. (Currently two episodes are on here every day.) The character Wally was a nice guy, and from what I could see when Tony Dow appeared in interviews and on some shows about ex-child actors, he was too.
Usually when I regret the passing of an actor or musician, it’s impersonal, and I just appreciate what they have contributed. This time it feels more personal.
Like some of the other persons in this thread I grew up poorer than the Cleavers. Also I was more of a nonconformist. Within my family we were outspoken and not so formally polite, but we were taught the same basic principles of right and wrong that Wally and the Beaver were. Being nice was not considered uncool.
True, the show may have been unrealistic at times when it comes to the goodness of the family, but on the other hand characters such as Eddie and Lumpy weren’t really as bizarre as comic figures on more recent sitcoms have tended to be. A good many things on the show were true to life. In the early episodes, especially, sometimes one of the characters would say a jewel of a line about childhood experiences — the more ordinary ones, not the traumatic ones — and I’d chuckle and think, “That’s a good observation.”
There were some jarring lines (for instance, the boys would say they enjoyed movies in which they “croak” people), put in there, I suppose, to counteract the over-good portrayal of the family — as if to say, see, we’re ordinary kids. What appealed to me, though, was its mostly gentle humor and basically good, benevolent attitude toward the treatment of other people.