Jerry Wanted to Play Sports Like Tony Dow
Dow was known as a swimmer and a gymnast before portraying Wallace “Wally” Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver. Jerry looked up to his onscreen brother.
“What I wanted to do was play sports,” the Iowa native confessed. “Tony Dow had been a star athlete. He was a gymnast. In fact, that’s one of the reasons they picked him, but he never really got to do his gymnastics on camera.”
“Had he not done Leave It to Beaver, he probably would have been an Olympian, because that’s what he was training for and that’s what they wanted,” he continued. “When he interviewed for the show, they said, ‘Highly athletic.’ What’s funny is that Tony could take three or four steps, jump up in the air, do a front flip and land on his feet. And I said to myself, ‘I can’t do that,’ not realizing that most everybody else couldn’t do that, either. But he was the only person that I was really around, so I didn’t know. I would just look at him and go, ‘Oh, OK, I’m not gonna try that.”
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