Leave It to Beaver’s Jerry Mathers Reveals What TV Parents Hugh Beaumont and Barbara Billingsley Were Really Like (Exclusive)

Jerry Mathers is looking back at his early years — and his fictional parents — starring on Leave It to Beaver.

“They were really nice people,” Mathers, 77, tells PEOPLE of his sitcom parents. Mathers played the titular son Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver, who often gets in trouble. Hugh Beaumont played father Ward Cleaver and Barbara Billingsley played mother June Cleaver. Tony Dow rounded out the foursome as older brother Wally Cleaver.

“Hugh Beaumont and Barbara Billingsley were wonderful to Tony and me. They were actually kind and caring to everyone,” Mathers tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview.

“Hugh Beaumont was basically a very nice man, but he was also a minister,” Mathers explains of his on-screen father, who died in 1982 at 73. “So he kept everybody pretty much on the straight and narrow.” That meant that while the set was still “a good time” and “a lot of fun,” the crew on the show was people who “weren’t out drinking every night and coming in drunk,” according to Mathers.

His favorite part of being on the show was going into the studio. “I go there, I see all my friends, all the light people and all the different people and they’re all friends of mine and they’re happy to see me and we all fool around and have a good time,” he remembers. Mathers was just 8 years old when he joined the series. Leave It to Beaver ran for six seasons in total, from 1957 to 1963, and continues to run to this day in syndication.

“It was fun all the time. I could have had to go to school and stuff like that, but it was just a lot of fun and a lot of nice people, so there wasn’t really any bad part to it,” Mathers adds of starring on the show.

“Every day” he’d do different things on set, “but it was always fun,” he says. He also learned as an adult that almost everyone in the cast and crew was a parent, so “they knew how to be around kids.”

Mathers’ relationship with Billingsley, who died in 2010 at 94, continued to grow after the series. “She did a lot of charity work,” he remembers. “Every once in a while, she’d call me up and say that maybe she was not feeling so well that day, could I help her? And I’d go around different places that I’d never been before and help out with whatever organization she worked with.”

Mathers’ wife Teresa also tells PEOPLE that Jerry stayed in touch with his on-screen brother Dow, who died in 2022 at 77, over the years as well. “He would be at a lot of the autograph shows with us,” she remembers.

These days, Mathers keeps in touch with his fans on social media. Earlier this month at the fan event The Hollywood Show, Mathers also reunited with Leave It to Beaver costars Luke Tiger Fafara, 80, who played Tooey Brown, Stephen Talbot, 76, who played Gilbert, Veronica Cartwright, 76, who played Violet Rutherford and Jeri Weil, 77, who played Judy Hensler.

Mathers and Teresa still watch reruns of the series from time to time, they add.

“We shot 234 episodes from 1957 to 1963 so there is quite a lot to see,” says Mathers, “and watching the show brings back many happy memories for me.”