The Devil Made Me Do It...Honest!

There's a classic television sitcom from the 50's called "Leave it to Beaver." It's about a typical American family (typical for the time anyway) with a stay-at-home mom, a hard-working dad, and two sons, one of whom was nicknamed The Beaver. Beaver was a pretty good kid who always managed to get himself into awkward predicaments, often with the help of his mischievous friend, Eddie Haskell.

At some point in his life every boy has a friend like Eddie Haskell. Mine was Pete Sivak. We were living on Kerr Road in Jacksonwald at the time. I was between 7 and 10 years of age. Pete was Melody's age, but I considered him to be my best friend. We did everything together, from fishing to playing shadow tag to shooting pigeons with a BB gun in the neighborhood barn. Okay, I'm not proud of that last one. Anyway, one year Pete had the bright idea of training the BBs on dad's Christmas lights on the porch. Now, I've never claimed to be very bright as a young boy and I guess this sounded like a cool idea at the time. At the time. In hindsight, it wasn't quite worth the raw behind I received from dad. Now that I think about it, I believe Pete got off scott free with that one. Which is what often happened with Eddie Haskell. I guess I missed that episode.