Frank Bank, who played the clumsy bully Clarence "Lumpy" Rutherford on the popular 1957-1963 series Leave It to Beaver, died Saturday, one day after his 71st birthday.
Born in Los Angeles, Bank first appeared on screen as the very young Will Rogers in the 1952 Warner Bros. biopic The Will Rogers Story, and then managed to deliver other TV roles at the same time he was appearing on Leave It to Beaver.
Once the gentle sitcom about childhood was canceled, Bank continued to make sporadic TV appearances, including those on The Hollywood Squares, Family Feud, the 1983 TV movie Still The Beaver (it spawned The New Leave It to Beaver series, which ran four years) – although, in 1972, he had entered an entirely different profession: as a stock-and-bond broker.
According to a 1998 PEOPLE profile, Bank learned to handicap horses and read The Wall Street Journal during breaks on the Beaver set, where he taught himself "everything there was to know about tax-free bonds." Within three years of getting started, he says, he was earning $300,000 a year at an L.A.-based company.