Exactly 68 years ago this month, Americans were introduced to an everyday kid. While TV viewers loved Lucy and trusted Father to know best, they also embraced the unassuming, impish Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver.

From the minute he first appeared in family rooms on fuzzy black and white TV screens at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 4, 1957, folks couldn’t get enough of the boy’s antics. (In Episode #1, “Beaver Gets Spelled,” he mistakenly thinks the note his teacher instructs him to take home to his parents is expelling him from school. Spoiler alert: he wasn’t.)

Over the next six seasons, Beaver’s voice deepens as he enters adolescence, getting in one hilarious mess after another along the way, with his patient parents wisely intoning important life lessons at the end of each episode. By the ti

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