Ward Cleaver: A Most Amazing Life

Don Theo III
3 min readNov 2, 2016

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When someone mentions the name Ward Cleaver, what do you think of? You probably think of this guy:

Well there is much more to the legacy of Mr. Cleaver. Allow me to introduce you to his wonderful and storied life.

Ward grew up in Shaker Heights in Ohio. Ward’s mother Miriam was a burlesque dancer at the Duck Island Club who danced her ass off while Ward’s Daddy (named Margaret) tended the farm and gathered eggs from the goats and turkeys on the land.

Ward was bullied at the Shaker Heights High School because he was an amazing roller skater and the bullies of the school were flabbergasted at his kicks and turns. And yet all the local girls were enamored by Ward’s dreamy smile as he did his little flip spins with a twinkle in his eyes.

Ward went on to be a WWII hero, flying aeroplanes into Nazi areas like Michigan and Arkansas. Thank goodness he made it out of there alive. On the day before he was discharged, he met a lovely lady named June in the malt shop at 3961 Haftelrod Ave.

They got along like swell gangbusters and got married and moved into June’s mother’s Grandpa’s grand estate at 211 Pine Street. As baby making tends to happen among young lovers, Ward and June produced a wonderful young son named Tony Dow who would grow up to be a talented actor who would play the role of Preston in the first episode of the fifth season of the award winning television sitcom “Charles in Charge” starring Chachi.

They made a great family, Ward and June. And after a few years, Tony Dow got himself a troubled little miscreantic brother that got named after a wild animal.

The older brother, Tony Dow, went off to Vietnam and killed many people, mostly by accident. His younger brother, “The Beaver” built a ponzi scheme out of his paper route and was arrested at age 18 and sentenced to 12 years in a federal penitentiary where he spent most of his time teaching white collared criminals how to whittle Winnie the Pooh out of chunks of wood cut from trees on the prison grounds.

All of this tumultuous parenthood took its toll on Ward Cleaver, and in 1968 he left June to join the Family International in Huntington Beach, California.

After the cult disbanded in 1979, Ward came crawling back to June to ask her for her forgiveness. But it was too late. By this time, June had taken a position as the head sound engineer for Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion radio show and wanted nothing to do with Ward.

Ward Cleaver grew his hair out long and stopped shaving his beard. A scraggly Ward bunkered down in a Holiday Inn in Scottsdale, Arizona and wrote a three-act play about Caligula if Caligula had been a woman.

He was last seen on the way to his agent to deliver it.

Nobody has seen Ward Cleaver since that windy autumn day and all of Hollywood and Broadway hope to one day read the play that he wrote.

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