Diane Brewster

I have whipped him, his father has whipped him. He is very sorry, we are very sorry.

This quote, from the first regular episode of Leave It to Beaver, has lived in my head for decades, as has Diane Brewster’s reaction as Miss Canfield, the teacher who receives this note. (It’s a note the boys wrote in response to one she sent home that he didn’t read asking him to be Smokey the Bear in the school pageant.) She is bewildered, as well she might be. The show is explicit that this is the era where children expected every note sent home to be proof that they were in trouble at school. It’s even in the opening narration. The alarming thing is that her concern about Beaver’s getting ‘whipped” is only because he has done nothing wrong. That’s the ‘50s for you.

Brewster was actually a descendant of William Brewster, which gave her a fascinating array of relatives. Everyone from the Mowry family to Sarah Palin. Her first job in entertainment was as the secretary to a radio station while she was in college. Eventually, she left Kansas and moved to Los Angeles, where she launched a steady career in TV and movies. She doesn’t appear to have ever been the star of anything, but she kept working, racking up nearly seventy credits, most in a little over a decade.

Despite not playing the lead, she played several memorable characters. She was, as established, Miss Canfield. She was also a recurring character on Maverick. (She was opposite Bret three times and Bart once.) One suspects that the only reason she wasn’t on The Rockford Files was that it was in the years when she was essentially retired, having married and had children. She was the murdered Helen Kimble a few times, when they needed an actress for flashbacks or recordings.

Really, her career was in the golden age of minor performers. Seasons were longer then, and if there weren’t many channels, every individual show needed a ton of actors. Between Westerns and courtroom dramas, any number of shows went through a lot of cast. You always needed someone to play a schoolmarm or a defendant, and if the characters traveled, you needed new schoolmarms every week. Her husband was killed on Perry Mason once, too, and that was a pretty frequent character. After all, the show averaged thirty episodes a season.

After leaving acting, Brewster did return a few times. Twice, it was as Miss Canfield. Which is a bit alarming to me, inasmuch as one of those was in the 1983 reunion movie and the other was in several episodes of the TV show. Which is great, don’t get me wrong. It’s a lovely tribute to a character you probably care a lot about if you’re a fan of the show. That said, “Miss.” In 1983. Sure, the Beav had a crush on her in the ‘50s, but that’s no reason not to let the character get married, you know?