In December 1971, nearly one year after All in the Family premiered, viewers discovered for the first time how Archie and Edith Bunker met. It was revealed in the season-two episode “Cousin Maude’s Visit” that became the origin for the eponymous hit spin-off starring Bea Arthur. The premise was that the entire Bunker household got sick with flu, and as Edith’s liberal feminist first cousin Maude Findlay, whom Archie despised, came to take care of them, Edith, as only she could, told the meandering story of how Archie, trying to get her attention, stuck his hand into her sundae at an ice cream parlor, and forever captured her heart. Later recounted again almost verbatim in the final scene of the·season-8 flashback episode “Mike and Gloria Meet,” it also illustrates just one example of Norman’s uncanny knack for mining deeply into the recesses of his past, and with tongue firmly planted in cheek, turning it into comedy gold. From “stifle,” “dingbat,” and “meathead” to Archie’s beer-stained easy chair, countless aspects from his own life can be found sprinkled throughout his signature sitcom and other shows. In this hilarious bit about how Archie and Edith became a couple, he masterfully played off the circumstances under which his own parents Herman and Jeanette Lear originally got together some fifty years earlier.

Early Childhood and Youth

But in a very real sense, it was also a prophetic metaphor for how Norman quickly learned to use comedy to survive a childhood that was marred by pain, poverty, and often desperation from a very young age. The peculiar tale of how his parents crossed paths occurred sometime in the summer of 1921 at a New Haven, Connecticut, ice cream parlor. Like Archie did with Edith, Herman-in his quest to get Jeanette, who was there on another date, to notice him-thrust his hand into her banana split. Following a brief eight-week courtship, they were married that September. Eleven months later, on July 27, 1922, their first and only son Norman Milton Lear entered this world at New Haven Hospital. Three years after that, on October 25, 1925, Herman and Jeanette became the parents of a daughter, Claire.

An aspiring jazz singer who later performed in nursing homes and was the model for Gloria on All in the Family, Claire would spend most of her life in the Connecticut area, where she was a housewife married for sixty years to a metal worker named Richard Brown and the mother of three children, deliberately eschewing the spotlight of her famous older brother. Though they were never estranged, they were never particularly close either. In 1997, Norman told the Hartford Courant that he was sometimes “exasperated by her and by her inability to grasp subtleties because she was unaware of the greater events and forces in the world,” adding that “in some ways she is as unsophisticated a person as I’ve ever met.”1 During the earliest years of his life, the family lived at 45 Mead Street in downtown New Haven, where his mother, Jeanette, allegedly dropped three month-old Norman on his head while she was bathing him in the kitchen sink, leaving him there alone as she ran next door to a neighbor to get help. “Over the years, this incident seemed increasingly funny to her,” he said in his 2014 memoir Even This I Get to Experience. “It became a kind of set piece in her life story.”