When “All in the Family” hit the TV screens in 1971, the war in Vietnam was raging, cities from Washington, D.C., to Detroit were charred from riots in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, and many young people like me were leaving those cities, moving west to rural America.
Archie Bunker stayed in Queens, where a “bar was a man’s castle,” while daughter Gloria and son-in-law “Meathead” tried to help Archie grasp hippies and anti-war protests.
We called ours the “back to the land” movement, and we chuckled with Meathead as Archie Bunker got chuckles from our dads. But we were done watching “Leave it to Beaver” and “Ozzie and Harriet.” Our flexible families were radically changing.
