America's Mom

(4 of 4)
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hether any modern children would be tempted to believe the parables served up on FKB is debatable in an age when kids are bred on cynicism. But back then, to me, growing up in a nice middle-class clan with a passing resemblance to the Andersons, the show had the ring of familiarity, if not of gospel truth. Though I didn’t always follow the precepts peddled by Jim and Margaret, I was raised on them. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that FKB was the documentary of my 1950s — the way the '70s PBS series An American Family might have mirrored real life for younger kids, but with the accent on the positive, not the corrosive.

And on its own terms, the show worked. It was put together by a unit as tight as the Andersons; all of the episodes were directed by either William D. Russell or Peter Tewksbury, and almost all were written by either Paul West or Roswell Rogers (from the Andy Hardyish family created by Ed James for the radio show). Did the writers and directors, and the cast, believe in the small world they reinvented each week? I think they believed in it as a TV reality. What’s more, they sold that reality to the audience with the entrepreneurial conviction Jim must have used on his clients. It was a slick construct, and it was good.

What About Mom?

Of course, like any idealized fiction, FKB was a fantasy. Maybe more than most, since in this neighborhood we learned almost nothing about the neighbors. The show got along without supporting characters in the families next door or across the street. The Andersons solved their little dilemmas with no outside help. Their home might have been some enclosed universe in a Twilight Zone episode. What happened at 607 stayed at 607.

The typical plot had one of the kids getting into a social gaffe or an ethical scrape before Jim stepped in to adjudicate. OK, but where did that leave Margaret?

Margaret was the image of suburban chic in her short-sleeved blouses, her slim waist cinched by a kitchen apron, her pretty face set in a near-permanent smile. As each episode’s plot played out, she would be baking cookies or measuring the living-room couch for new slip covers, assuring that the mother ship was shipshape. In a show that ventured infrequently into Jim’s office or the kids’ school, where the home was the essential set, Margaret — the only Anderson without a nickname — was also the only one whose daily business didn’t take her away from the house. She was the rock, the one the others came home to. She was the home.

For a while, Margaret was invisibly chained there; she didn’t learn to drive until season four. But she also was allowed yearnings of escape. She wants a weekend away from the kids — perhaps because, in the lodge, they won’t have to sleep in those separate beds. She takes a college English class (where Betty happens to be a fellow student), and dancing lessons (dragging Jim, the perennial square, against his will). In a 1958 episode that won the show an Emmy, Jim announces he’s building a trophy case for the scholastic and athletic prizes the kids have amassed, and Margaret realizes she has no medals. Darned if she doesn’t go out and try to win one. Inevitable moral: Mom, here’s a medal you’ve earned just for being you.

She is also the most openly liberal member of the family. She has a soft heart for immigrants: the Spanish immigrant she hired to do lawn work, the Korean refugee kid a friend’s family adopted. And the year after she learns to drive, she wins a car and donated her time shuttling kids from an orphanage. All this suggests that the show’s writers applied Jane’s own beliefs to Margaret, allowing her to do good within the confines of a non-controversial, pre-'60s America.

Jane always defended Margaret’s role in the show. “She was the power behind the throne,” she told the New York Times in 1986. “She helped her husband out. Mother always knew best, too.” Spoken like a real-life good wife, good mother and do-gooder. But Jane was also a career woman, embodying an ideal of feminine grace and pluck that may seem antique today but was a beacon for her age. She was a great lady, a terrific person. And I’d say that even if I thought that, if I did, Jane would reach out from the beyond and punch me on the arm.