“A thousand women,” Bank told PEOPLE, though his costars, including Eddie Haskell’s alter ego, actor Ken Osmond, found the claim hard to swallow. She gets a few lines, climbing into the back seat of the Rutherford convertible next to Ward, sitting at the park bench. Barrett turns up as Gwen Rutherford, mother to Lumpy and Violet. In his 1997 autobiography Call Me Lumpy, he claimed that, during the Beaver years, he lived a life of wine, women and song – with maybe little emphasis on wine and song. Beaver and Wally know the Rutherford kids well, because son Lumpy Rutherford is their bully-turned-pal and Violet well, Beaver is sweet on Violet. As she once told PEOPLE: “Frank is certainly brighter than Lumpy Rutherford, and a very good stockbroker.”īut then, he was never like Lumpy, really.
LEAVE IT TO BEAVER LUMPY MOVIE
Once the gentle sitcom about childhood was canceled, Bank continued to make sporadic TV appearances, including those on The Hollywood Squares, Family Feudand the 1983 TV movie Still The Beaver(it spawned The New Leave It to Beaverseries, which ran four years) – although, in 1972, he had entered an entirely different profession: as a stock-and-bond broker.Īccording to a 1998 PEOPLE profile, Bank learned to handicap horses and read The Wall Street Journal during breaks on the Beaver set, where he also taught himself “everything there was to know about tax-free bonds.” Within three years of getting started, he said, he was earning $300,000 a year at an L.A.-based company.Īmong his clients were Mathers and Barbara Billingsley, who played Leave It to Beaver‘s matriarch, June Cleaver. biopic The Will Rogers Story, and then managed to deliver other TV roles at the same time he was appearing on Leave It to Beaver. My deepest condolences to Frank’s family.”īorn in Los Angeles, Bank first appeared on screen as the very young Will Rogers in the 1952 Warner Bros.
He was a character and always kept us laughing. Beaver star Jerry Mathers, now 64, posted to his Facebook page Saturday: “I was so sad to hear today of the passing of my dear friend and business associate Frank Bank, who played Lumpy on Leave it to Beaver.