And Sandra looked at me and said, ‘That’s the house that I grew up in.’ A couple of months later we had to go to her real house - I think it was for the funeral of her father - and when we got there, it wasn’t at all the house she showed me. It was landscaped, it was by a city park, it was so lovely. “There was this time when we were driving through a very nice area of Oak Cliff, and Sandra pointed to this very beautiful home.
#Eddie haskell personality type tv#
In a 1987 D Magazine story by Eric Miller and Skip Hollandsworth, high school friends described her as “a little aloof” and “sort of like an Eddie Haskell type,” a reference to the sycophant with a naughty streak on the TV show “Leave it to Beaver.” She wasn’t involved in school activities, and she didn’t date.Ī friend who knew Sandra in her early 20s, Paula Johnson, told the magazine: Sandra graduated from Kimball High School in 1962, and friends reported that she had a bad relationship with her stepmother. When she was 6, Arthur Powers remarried and relocated for a job as a salesman at Laurel Land Funeral Home and Memorial Park. Camille Powers died in a car crash when Sandra was 3. in 1944 and adopted as an infant to Arthur and Camille Powers. But the truth is that she was raised in Oak Cliff by her father and stepmother. She was suspected of killing her third husband and a close friend, although she was never charged with those crimes, before she was nabbed for felony identity theft in 2007.įriends say Sandra often fabricated background stories for herself.
And no one in the outwardly pedestrian yet insightful plots was more misunderstood than Eddie Haskell.Many adored Sandra Powers as a delightful hostess and super mom who gave lavishly to her friends and their causes.īut just a few years into her reign as a wealthy Dallas princess, Sandra gained a new nickname: The Black Widow of Dallas. It was more like the drama of “The Twilight Zone” - young boys making their way in an alien land that happened to be postwar suburbia. It was a better-written and better-acted show. It was not in the same vein as the insipid sitcoms of the day (“My Three Sons,” “Ozzie and Harriet,” “Father Knows Best,” etc.). In the same way the era is misremembered, the most representative sitcom of the period, “Leave It to Beaver,” is misunderstood. A culture that in hindsight can look pasty-faced and intolerant in fact included idiosyncratic voices of protest and anti-majoritarian values. It was, after all, the era of, among others, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, Thelonious Monk, Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Rosa Parks and Central High in Little Rock.
In many ways, that’s a mischaracterization. In today’s culture, the 1950s and early 1960s are portrayed as a white-bread era of bland conformity and racism. Perhaps the most telling thing Eddie ever told Wally was, “if you can make the other guy feel like a goon first, then you don’t feel like so much of a goon.” At heart, he was a decent and likable person. It was that insecurity that made him the way he was. If you watch the show carefully, you discover Eddie was actually a sensitive, insecure kid who grew up in an unhappy home. In a number of shows, the writers attempted to explain the essence of Eddie Haskell and, by extension, why people like him behave the way they do.
He was a far more complex character than he is thought of today. He never used physical violence and even his taunts were generally more good-natured than mean. Many of the obituaries and tributes to Ken Osmond called Eddie Haskell a bully - he was anything but. The writers took great pains to flesh out the personalities of the boys and their parents. Contrary to popular opinion now, the characters on “Leave It to Beaver” were not cliches.
Yet for all that familiarity, Eddie Haskell is also one of television’s most misunderstood characters.
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