Wallace "Wally" Cleaver is a fictional character in the iconic American television sitcom Leave It to Beaver.

Child actor Paul Sullivan, however, portrays the character in the series pilot, "It's a Small World", which aired in April 1957.

Leave it to Beaver was created by writers Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, who found inspiration among their own children for plot lines and dialogue.

His friends, Clarence "Lumpy" Rutherford and Eddie Haskell, have a knack for getting into trouble and taking Wally along for the ride.

Though Wally sometimes warns Beaver he will suffer some sort of physical punishment from Ward ("Dad's gonna clobber you!

Wally arrives home and finds his mother preparing dinner; he regales her with teenspeak banter about the day's events at school.

Then, as Wally leaves the room with a parting bon mot and the canned laughter kicks in, the camera catches June's bewildered, dazed, or amused facial expression.

In the first season of Leave It to Beaver, Wally is a thirteen-year-old in his final year (8th grade) at Grant Avenue Grammar School.

The series ends with Wally a high-school graduate preparing for State college and Beaver looking forward to entering Mayfield High.

Wally's first girlfriend on the show is Penny Jamison, a New York girl he meets during ballroom lessons at Miss Spencer's School of the Dance.

In one episode, Wally grows a moustache over the summer, thinking Julie will be enchanted with his debonair look, and then the poor boy is humiliated when she laughs at it when he arrives back to school.

As Beaver grew into an awkward young teen, he sometimes took a back seat to his older brother Wally, a student in his final years of high school.

Tony Dow had grown into an attractive, athletic young man and was often featured in "heartthrob"-type magazines aimed principally at teen girls.

Producers took advantage of Dow's popularity and scripted episodes delving into Wally's dating life, his after school jobs, his pals, and his car.

When the sequel series begins in 1984, Wally and Mary Ellen are the parents of a 10-year-old daughter, Kelly (Kaleena Kiff).

In 1986, Mary Ellen gives birth to their second child, Kevin (who was age advanced to 4 years old in the fall of 1987 and played by Troy Davidson).