{"id":101015,"date":"2025-10-27T19:04:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T19:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/101015\/"},"modified":"2025-10-27T19:04:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T19:04:07","slug":"appreciation-strong-and-warm-june-lockhart-was-a-model-of-tv-motherhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/101015\/","title":{"rendered":"Appreciation: Strong and warm, June Lockhart was a model of TV motherhood"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the two decades following the end of the Second World War, the culture gods declared that families should be nuclear, which is not to say atomic, and that women, who had joined the work force in record numbers with men away in the military should get back into the kitchen. On television it was, therefore, an age of mothers \u2014 wise domestic goddesses whose energies were turned largely toward the raising of children. Barbara Billingsley<\/a> (June Cleaver in \u201cLeave It to Beaver\u201d), Jane Wyatt<\/a> (Margaret Anderson on \u201cFather Knows Best,\u201d but did he, really?), Donna Reed<\/a> (Donna Stone on \u201cThe Donna Reed Show\u201d), Harriet Nelson<\/a> (as \u2026 Harriet Nelson on \u201cThe Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet\u201d) and, most certainly, the late June Lockhart, who played a mother on the boy-and-his-dog adventure series \u201cLassie\u201d and on \u201cLost in Space,\u201d Irwin Allen\u2019s science-fictionification of \u201cThe Swiss Family Robinson.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pretty in an unintimidating way, with wide-set eyes, an upturned nose and a broad smile that made her instantly recognizable her entire life, Lockhart, who died Thursday<\/a> at 100, played strong women with a sunny matter-of-factness, sometimes restricted by the prejudices of the time \u2014 which is to say, by what writers felt a woman on television could be shown to do \u2014 but always able to do what needed to be done. She might turn stern, or get upset, but her overarching qualities were predictability and stability, which is what any child wants from a parent, after all.<\/p>\n

June Lockhart \u2014 it\u2019s a name you might have invented for her if she weren\u2019t already named June Lockhart. She was born in June \u2014 June 25, 1925 \u2014 the daughter of actors Gene and Kathleen Lockhart. Her first film role was alongside her parents in a 1938 production of \u201cA Christmas Carol.\u201d They were all Cratchits.<\/p>\n

Her early career was that of a second-tier Hollywood contract player \u2014 a memorable supporting scene in \u201cMeet Me in St. Louis,\u201d the lead in the unmemorable \u201cShe-Wolf of London.\u201d Television, when it arrived, offered a series of episodic guest shots, until in 1958, at 33, Lockhart joined the cast of \u201cLassie,\u201d replacing Cloris Leachman, who had played the role of Ruth Martin for a single season as the series transitioned from its initial \u201cJeff\u2019s Collie\u201d seasons to the better remembered \u201cTimmy and Lassie\u201d years. (It continued past those, until 1973.)<\/p>\n

Descended in a crooked line from the 1943 Elizabeth Taylor and Roddy McDowall film, \u201cLassie Come Home\u201d \u2014 Lockhart had appeared in the war-themed follow-up \u201cSon of Lassie\u201d as a romantic interest for Peter Lawford \u2014 the series was the quintessence of sentimental wholesomeness. Yet for all the corn, it remains surprisingly watchable, six decades on. Indeed, writing this little tribute has been slowed down considerably by my watching.<\/p>\n

Jon Provost played Timmy, a well-intentioned but improvident child who often finds himself in life-threatening situations that require Lassie to alert his folks and guide them to him. (It isn\u2019t the only sort of dilemma the family will face, but it does happen a lot.) Nominally a farmwife, Ruth\u2019s style is suburban homemaker, typically wearing an apron over a shirtdress, even when not working in the kitchen \u2014 the implication being that she just was, or she\u2019s about to be. (In one episode, she waxes ecstatic over \u201ca brand new second hand electrically operated gleaming white modern refrigerator\u201d to replace their old icebox. Lassie, less enthused, refuses to eat food from it. Ruth to Lassie: \u201cWe have no room in this house for two stubborn females.\u201d) Once in a while, if she\u2019s rustled out of bed by some nocturnal emergency, she may be pictured in a robe with hair down; seeing her, atypically, at the top of an apricot tree, wearing a sun hat and doing some actual farmwork for once, is strangely exciting.<\/p>\n

Timmy had a father, too \u2014 he was actually a foster child, a point the series does not belabor \u2014 Paul, played by Hugh Reilly, who did not achieve the level of pop cultural permanence as Lockhart; if you had told me that Ruth was a single mother, I would have believed you. The odd thing about watching the show now, as a discerning adult, is noticing how little the dog \u2014 or the dogs, three in Provost\u2019s tenure \u2014 relates to the boy; he\u2019s always looking off toward his trainer, like an actor leaning on cue cards. (Lassie was female, but the dogs who played her \u2014 including Pal, Lassie Junior, Spook, Baby, Mire and Hey Hey \u2014 were male.) Because she\u2019s almost always at home, Ruth is the human Timmy spends the most time around; on a level of shared scenes and actorly connection, \u201cLassie\u201d was the story of a mother and son.<\/p>\n

Lockhart\u2019s casting as Maureen Robinson in \u201cLost in Space\u201d feels like a line drawn from Ruth Martin, \u201cLassie\u201d having established her as an archetypal figure of motherhood. In that Maureen has a young son who gets into scrapes and has a non-human friend that tries to keep him safe \u2014 \u201cDanger, Will Robinson!,\u201d quoth the Robot \u2014 \u201cLost in Space\u201d sounds a distant echo of the earlier series. But it\u2019s a show without intimacy; there are too many other characters getting in Maureen\u2019s way, and son Will (Billy Mumy) spends all his time with comically, cowardly Dr. Smith (Jonathan Harris), getting into increasingly absurd scrapes. Maureen\u2019s astro-husband, professor and Lt. Col. John Robinson (Guy Williams), is not a gentle helpmate like in \u201cLassie,\u201d but the mission\u2019s ranking officer, who tends to act like one even among the family. Maureen is ostensibly a biochemist but her job around the spaceship is basically to garden and cook; she\u2019s there to be a mother when one is (rarely) needed, to represent the mature female element, smile indulgently, tell the kids to be careful and generally to inject warmth and humanity into the chilly reaches of space. She\u2019s underused but absolutely necessary.<\/p>\n

In her third regular television role, on the countrified sitcom \u201cPetticoat Junction,\u201d Lockhart played a physician new to the fictional hamlet of Hooterville; it takes the citizens a three-episode arc to get them to accept that a doctor could be a woman, and a woman a doctor. (\u201cHere\u2019s a lady MD\/She\u2019s as pretty as can be,\u201d run the lyrics in the revamped theme song, encapsulating the culture\u2019s confusion over what to value in a woman.) She entered the series, part of what might be called the Beverly Hillbillies Extended Universe along with \u201cGreen Acres,\u201d in 1968, immediately upon the cancellation of \u201cLost in Space,\u201d as a replacement for the late Bea Benaderet\u2018s Kate Bradley, proprietor of the Shady Rest Hotel. Her Dr. Janet Craig is single and childless (not widowed, the standard marital status for single women over a certain age), but the show sets her up as a substitute, surrogate mother to Kate\u2019s three adult girls. The actor radiates happiness in a happy role in a happy show.<\/p>\n

Lockhart played a mother again (widowed) in the 1974 \u201cThese Are the Days,\u201d a single-season \u201crealistic\u201d animated cartoon about a family at the turn of the 20th century. She hosted beauty pageants and the Rose Parade and Macy\u2019s Thanksgiving Day Parade, appeared on game shows, recurred on \u201cGeneral Hospital,\u201d and made many guest appearances on episodic television, from \u201cMagnum P.I.\u201d to \u201cThe Drew Carey Show\u201d to \u201cGrey\u2019s Anatomy.\u201d She made a cameo in the 1998 \u201cLost in Space\u201d<\/a> film, where Mimi Rogers played her old character, and performed the voice of Alpha Control in the series 2018 Netflix reboot<\/a>, in which Molly Parker played Maureen. They may have been given more to do than Lockhart \u2014 the Netflix series is excellent \u2014 but they are still squatters on space that she cleared, and will own forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the two decades following the end of the Second World War, the culture gods declared that families…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101016,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[16337,146,501,85,46,65142,65146,66771,65507,20550,65510,5458,3263,1665,145,8443,66772,5175],"class_list":["post-101015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-child","tag-entertainment","tag-family","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-june-lockhart","tag-lassie","tag-lockhart","tag-maureen-robinson","tag-mother","tag-ruth-martin","tag-series","tag-show","tag-son","tag-space","tag-television","tag-timmy","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}