PicoBlog

The well-deserved tributes have been rolling in for Norman Lear since his death last week at 101. However, the obituaries and think pieces have overlooked his challenging but formative early years.

The creative genius who would give us “All in the Family,” “Maude” and “The Jeffersons” was born in my adopted hometown, New Haven, in 1922. It was a long way from Hollywood. What were the odds he would make it there?

Although as a New Havener I had been aware of Lear’s roots for a long time, I didn’t know what he had endured as a kid until his memoir, “Even This I Get to Experience,” was published in 2014. I wrote a column about it for the New Haven Register, titled “Norman Lear’s Lonely But Colorful Elm City Years Led to a TV Revelation.”

In the second paragraph of that column I laid it out: “Imagine being separated from your charismatic but sometimes foolish and unethical father for three years when you’re 9 to 11, being farmed out by your mother to live with your grandparents while your dad is in prison for selling phony bonds.”

And I quoted Lear: “My mother and sister were nowhere to be found. My dad was a hole in my heart.”

I noted this was the father figure who would inspire the creation of the bigoted but often lovable Archie Bunker.

Lear’s father, Herman Lear, often would yell at his wife, Jeanette: “Stifle yourself!” Sound familiar?

In his memoir Lear didn’t spare his mother either. He described her as “a world-class narcissist.” It was clear he still hadn’t forgiven her for shipping him off to live with his grandparents.

His grandfather, Shia Seicol, who had immigrated to New Haven from Russia in 1904, owned a dress shop here. Lear recalled living with his grandparents in “a small two-bedroom, fourth-floor walk-up with patterned oilcloth on the kitchen table and on the floor.”

Lear said his grandfather paid him and his cousin Elaine to fold black cardboard to create the store’s boxes. They got a penny for each box.

Those pennies were important; they helped to shape young Lear’s love of popular entertainment. “Ten pennies each got us into a movie — actually two movies, a double feature.” He and Elaine spent many hours together at New Haven’s downtown movie palaces,, such as the Roger Sherman Theater. All of those wonderful venues are long gone. And so is the multi-ethnic neighborhood where Lear spent those several early years. It was bulldozed for “urban renewal.”

In the summer of 1934 his dad, after serving time in a Boston prison for selling those phony bonds, was turned loose and put on a train to New Haven. Lear, his sister and his mother, met him here at Union Station. “I stood there aching for the sight of him.”

That love was not always returned. More than once he told his son: “You are the laziest white kid I ever saw.”

The family eventually settled in Hartford. But life on the home front was not pleasant. Lear wrote that his parents “lived at the ends of their nerves and the tops of their lungs.”

And yet, and yet. Lear also wrote: “Despite all the hurts and disappointments, how I loved my father! I wrote love letters to him all my life, many of them in ‘All in the Family,’ in which Archie has so many of my father’s characteristics.”

I’ll bet his hard-ass dad would have been impressed if he had ever walked down Hollywood Boulevard and seen his son’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Maybe the old man would have softened at the sight of President Bill Clinton awarding Lear the Presidential Medal for the Arts.

All of us who are of a certain age have affectionate and vivid memories about watching “All in the Family” and the shows that spun off of it. I was in my junior year of college (Boston University, a few blocks from Lear’s alma mater, Emerson College) when “All in the Family” debuted on Jan. 12, 1971. Suddenly here was a TV show that captured the generational tensions of the time. Those scenes between Archie and his long-haired son-in-law whom he called “Meathead” (Rob Reiner) echoed some of the tumultuous back-and-forth between my Republican parents and me as we debated the war in Vietnam and the other divisive issues of that time.

This was a long way from the TV shows I had watched at home just a few years earlier — “Green Acres” and “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

As I wrote at the end of my tribute to Lear in 2014, the arrival of All in the Family” was a welcome revelation. And I noted: “We owe our gratitude to that troubled, lonely kid from New Haven.”

Yes, and I can dimly recall a night sometime during the 1980s when Lear returned to his old hometown to speak to a group of Yale students. I was there but I can’t look up what he said; for some reason I must not have filed a story for the Register. I do remember a smiling, generous man wearing that funny little hat of his. Maybe that night he inspired a young Yalie to create something that made a difference.

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