Everyone and his brother has or will write something about Jean Stapleton’s death over the weekend.  And why not?  From the moment she and the rest of the All in the Family cast hit the little screen in 1970, she belonged to us in that peculiar television way and she became a part of our lives and our vernacular.

While the rest spend their time exalting the greatness of the show and the actors, I thought I’d take a moment to share the experience of coming around slowly.  I ultimately had many fond memories of All in the Family and Maude and The Jeffersons (I can happily sing the themes of all three), but I wasn’t originally in their demographic and frankly I didn’t get it.

I was a very uptight and conservative eleven-year-old when All in the Family made its debut.  I was a kid who watched far too much TV and all of it was in either the crackly black and white of I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver and The Patty Duke Show or the nearly Technicolor cheeriness of The Carol Burnett Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Bewitched (next, in color).  TV was a place to escape to.  I was like Toby McGuire in Pleasantville.

All in the Family had nothing I was used to.  It was in color, but the colors were faded and sad and kind of hopeless.  Nothing looked as if it had ever been new.  Archie Bunker didn’t come home with a smile and take a spill over the ottoman in his clean, stylish living room; he came home grouchy from a lousy job he’d been doing for most of his life and took his disappointment out on his disappointing family.  These were people who needed to watch the shows I usually did; they weren’t the ones I wanted to watch.

The first time I tuned in was an accident.  I don’t remember the episode or what the scene was except that Archie, Edith, their daughter Gloria and her husband Mike were all sitting at the dinner table in the drab row house.  From over my shoulder I heard my mother cry disapprovingly, “Oh, look at the people!”  I was intrigued, but in that moment I was totally in Mom’s camp and I changed the channel to something more in keeping with our expectations.

Over time I was drawn back to All in the Family.  I never got to love the grittiness, but I grew to appreciate it.  More important, I grew to appreciate the characters.  They weren’t like I was.  They weren’t like I wanted to be.  But they pulled at my funny bone and my heart.  In the end, Archie almost always came through.  I can still remember him sitting at Gloria’s bedside after her miscarriage, his face showing all the pain of someone who wants to make things right and has nothing to offer but sympathy…  I can remember any number of times that he showed real affection for Edith and made you understand that he wasn’t with her simply out of habit.

I’d also never seen actors who were so drastically different when they appeared as themselves from what they were in their shows.  (Yes, I was naive.)  Dick van Dyke wasn’t that far from Rob Petrie and the Mary Tyler Moore I saw on talk shows was only a step or two away from Laura Petrie or Mary Richards.  When I saw Jean Stapleton as Jean Stapleton, I was shocked.  Who the hell was this woman with the deep voice and the coiffed hair?  The face was kind of familiar, but it was like I was in a parallel universe.  She was calm and well-spoken and not dingbatty at all.  From that I started to learn about character acting and to appreciate people who could be so different from themselves.

All in the Family even taught me that art comes from reality.  Up to that point I assumed the things I saw on TV and in the movies were creations whipped up completely from scratch in the heads of the writers.  Then I heard from a cousin that I might have been baptized at some point – though I had no memory of it and I hadn’t been brought up in any church.  I asked my mom, who hemmed and hawed and then told me that her mother had “taken me to the sink” when I was a baby one weekend while my parents were away.

I almost fell down.  Only a few months earlier this had been a plot point in an All in the Family episode.  In his typically incongruous way, the extremely non-churchgoing Archie decided it was vital for his grandson Joey to be baptized.  When Mike and Gloria said they weren’t going to do it, he took the baby to the local minister and tried to get him to do the ceremony.  And when the minister refused, Archie stopped by the font of holy water on his way out of the church and did it himself.

My grandmother was Archie Bunker. More accurately, Archie was my grandmother, since she – and I’m sure lots of other grandparents – did it first.  I couldn’t believe it.  But be that as it may, it was true and just another lesson I learned from the Bunkers.

BTW, in the end, even Mom became a fan.