The All-American Boy

This species has seldom been seen and naturalists have considered putting it on the endangered species list. He is marked by his love of baseball, by having a skill with rural machinery and hunting firearms beyond his years, and his propensity to emit sounds like "gee whiz". The All-American boy usually dwells in a Quirky Town within which he is as free as the air driving every where on his bicycle. He is always naive but charming, and respectful to his elders (who most likely include a Standard Fifties Father and a Housewife). If he has a sibling, it will be an older brother to idolize or a little sister to protect.

There are variants of this trope. The geeky variant still maintains the ingenuity, self-reliance, and wholesomeness of this but applies his interest to such things as home science experiments and the like. The high-school variety wears a letterman's sweater and spends his off hours using his mechanical skill to restore an old car.

An All-American boy often gets a job as a Kid Detective. If he joins the military when he grows up he will almost inevitably become a Southern-Fried Private.

The closest Distaff Counterpart would probably be Girl Next Door.

Examples of The All-American Boy include:

Comics

• Steve Rogers (aka Captain America (comics)) pretty much fits the general personality of this trope, although he was a terrible athlete as a child, in large part due to his Geek Physique. After he got the Super-Soldier Serum, he was able to embody the trope even more.

Film

• Audy Murphy in the beginning of To Hell And Back.
• The title character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a grown-up example, as well as all the boys in his "Boy Rangers" group.
• Often smuggled into big-budget Hollywood films set in other countries, particularly when this makes no contextual sense (See: The Three Musketeers 1993, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, etc)
• Big Fish is a great example. Quirky small town, baseball, etc.
• The Andy Hardy film series.
• Bye Bye Birdie: The number "A Healthy, Normal American Boy" describes Conrad Birdie as this in a series of Blatant Lies.

Literature

• The Hardy Boys.
• A pair of Kid Detectives in The Crow and the Castle by Keith Robinson.
• Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
• Jeff and the "four horsemen" in 1632. Lean more toward the geeky variant in this case.
• Some of Robert Heinlein's works are this Recycled in Space.
• Henry Huggins in the Ramona and Beezus books by Beverly Cleary.

Live-Action TV

• Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver, from Leave It to Beaver.
• Orel Puppington of Moral Orel is a Deconstruction of this.
• Opie Taylor and his pals on The Andy Griffith Show.
• Cory Matthews of Boy Meets World is a modern example. He begins by caring about more baseball than anything and seeing his father as Superman.

Newspaper Comics

• Dennis the Menace US is closer to this than the name suggests, unlike his British counterpart.

Radio

• Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy.

Theater

• Biff in Death of a Salesman is this as a kid. As he grows up, not so much.

Video Games

• Ninten from MOTHER 1 and Ness from EarthBound, both of whom are bat-wielding Everyman boys from a small town.
• Mike Jones, teenaged ace pitcher from StarTropics. His All-American-ness—contrasted with and found strange by the natives of the islands he's visiting—is a large part of the game's humor and tone.

Western Animation

• According to Word of God, Rocky of Rocky and Bullwinkle is an All-American Boy in squirrel form.
• Hank and Dean Venture, The Venture Brothers, at least initially.
• Davey Hansen in Davey and Goliath.

Real Life

• Institutionally invoked by the Boy Scouts of America.