The seventh decade.

It’s Tony Dow’s birthday today. The actor who gained fame playing Wally Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver would’ve been 81. Dow passed away in 2022, shortly after being diagnosed with liver cancer. He was 77. That’s just eight years older than I am now.

Leave It to Beaver aired from 1957-63. Only 12 as the series began, Dow got more attention from the show’s writers as he entered his teenage years and became what used to be called a “teen heartthrob,” the subject of endless speculation in magazines oriented toward teen girls: who is he dating, what are his hobbies, what’s he really like?

Dow never had another hit series after Beaver, nor did he move on to leading-man roles in the movies. That was not at all unusual for TV actors in those days who achieved stardom while in their teens. Think of David Cassidy from The Partridge Family, Don Grady and Stanley Livingston from My Three Sons, Johnny Crawford from The Rifleman, Dwayne Hickman from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Dow’s young co-star, Jerry Mathers, was never a teen heartthrob–the series ended when he was not yet 15–but he, too, never became a star as an adult. Dow got a number of parts in other series as the ’60s and ’70s rolled on, but rarely as a recurring character. He reprised his role as Wally in a 1983 TV-movie reunion, as well as in a subsequent series, The New Leave It to Beaver. Mathers was back in those productions, of course, along with their TV mom, Barbara Billingsley; by then, the Cleaver patriarch, Ward, had passed away (actor Hugh Beaumont died in 1982). Also in the reunion series was Wally’s smart-ass best friend, Eddie Haskell, played again by Ken Osmond.

The eighth decade is what usually gets us.

Tony Dow turned 70 in 2015. Although most people would think that turning 70 means someone is entering their seventh decade, it’s actually the last year of their seventh. (Decade #1 is from age 1-10, since a decade is 10 years, and so on. For the same reason, the 21st Century didn’t begin on January 1st, 2000, but a year later.) The life expectancy for males in the United States is now at 76.5 years. By comparison, women are at 81.4. But if a guy makes it to 65, he can be expected to live another 18 years or so, well into his 80s. Dow and Osmond (1943-2020) didn’t meet those expectations, unfortunately for them.

My father did; Dad passed away in June 2022, nearly 5 months past his 87th birthday. He outlived his own father and his older brother by 11 years each, which surprised him; I heard him say more than once that he didn’t expect to pass 76, but at 79 he was dancing at his granddaughter’s wedding and lived nearly eight more years after that.

So, I have another 18 months (plus 9 days) to go before entering my eighth decade. I’ve been thinking about it lately because, of course, hitting one’s 70th birthday is a milestone all by itself, and also because I’ve noticed a fair number of guys in their 70s who are leaving this realm well before their eighth decade is done. Dow and Osmond were two of them. Another was Phil Garner, who died two days ago at 76; Garner was a Major League Baseball player on some of the great Pittsburgh Pirates teams of the ’70s and later managed my favorite team, the Milwaukee Brewers. Another former Brewer skipper, Davey Lopes, died last week at 80.

So, mortality has been on my mind lately, a little more than usual. Guys not much older than me seem to be dropping one after another. I see obituaries of eighth-decade guys in the local newspaper, too. Of course, this is nothing out of the ordinary; I’m simply paying more attention now. When I was in my teens and early twenties during the 1970s, we lost famous eighth-decade guys like John Wayne (72), Moe Howard (77) and Larry Fine (72) of the Three Stooges, Bing Crosby (74) and aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh (72).

Keeping it going.

I shouldn’t worry myself, though, because there are guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger (79 in July) and Clint Eastwood (96 next month) who are not only still with us, but still living pretty good lives and contributing in their fields of expertise. Kurt Russell, 75 last month, is a co-star of the latest Taylor Sheridan-penned TV series, The Madison, whose first season I really enjoyed. Sylvester Stallone turns 80 this summer and has already filmed Season 4 of another Sheridan creation (and favorite of mine), Tulsa King. Tom Selleck, 81, is set to play small-town police chief Jesse Stone for the 10th time.

Thinking of guys like Russell, Stallone and Selleck make me feel better about continuing to work. More than four years after my retirement from the Social Security Administration, for which I’d worked for more than 15 years, I’m still working part-time in radio, to which I returned some five months after leaving SSA. In fact, I’ll be on the air tomorrow morning, helping my listeners on WJMC-FM get their day going. I’m actually in my fourth go-round with the radio station. The first was 1991-99, a full-time tenure during which I met Sue, on my fourth day on the job. We married some four and a half years later. I had a part-time run as a sports announcer from 2010-17, left again, returned in August of ’19 for a third run that ended in April of ’24, and then returned yet again seven months later. It’s that latest turn that will find me rising around 4:15am tomorrow and rolling into the station’s parking lot about 90 minutes later to start another half-day.

(There might be some news on the radio front for your humble correspondent in a few more days, but that will wait for my next post, which will definitely include news beyond that.)

When you start thinking of your own mortality, you also start wondering what’s next. In that respect, our recent Easter season comes into play. As a Christian, I know what’s next for me. Although I will certainly be sad to be leaving this realm behind, most especially my wife and my kids and my grandson, I know that within moments after I close my eyes for the last time, I’ll be with the Lord, and my parents and grandparents will be waiting for me, along with three dogs who are at the Rainbow Bridge.

I miss my parents very much, and my grandparents. I wish I could go fishing with my grandfathers again, but I remember their most important gift to me: showing me how to live a life of simple dignity and honor. I wish I could talk to Dad about whatever’s been bothering me lately, so that I could get his advice and straighten things out. But when I’m in one of those moods, I think of what Dad would say about this or that, and it invariably comes to me and helps me get back on course. That gift–and it is definitely a gift–was Dad’s most important bequest to me, going way beyond teaching me how to swing a bat and shoot free throws, beyond helping out with college tuition and career advice on my long road to my own semi-retirement, even beyond shepherding me through the tumultuous end of my first marriage and smoothing the way for me to join with Sue for my second (and last).

I still have a little time left before my eighth decade begins, but I’m confident I’ll be around to note the milestone and keep going toward my ninth, and even beyond. Why not give it a shot? There’s still a lot I want to do down here. One of those things is what I’ll talk about in my next post. See you then!