Sally Struthers revealed she experienced serious culture shock when she joined the cast of All in the Family in 1971. The actress, who was just 24 when she started out as Gloria Stivic on the CBS comedy series, told Fox News Digital she was stunned by some of the things that came out of her TV dad Archie Bunker’s (Carroll O’Connor) mouth throughout the original series—because she had never heard such things before.
The series, which aired from 1971 to 1979, addressed subjects such as racism, sexism, homosexuality, and the Vietnam War, often through the eyes of O’Connor’s bigoted Archie as he argued with his liberal son-in-law Mike “Meathead” (Rob Reiner).
“I was very young when I started on that show,” Struthers said in the November 2025 interview. “I was young when I finished it.”
The Portland, Oregon native explained that she grew up with “a Lutheran Norwegian family, who had absolutely no bigotry coming out of their mouths or in their hearts. “
“And so for the first couple of years that I sat in that rehearsal hall at CBS here in Los Angeles, and we would, on the first day of rehearsal, read the script out loud for all the writers to hear it, the producers, the network execs, programs … people who were marking it for how many times they would let Archie say ‘Geez’ because they said, of course, you know that’s short for ‘Jesus’ and that’s swearing,” Struthers recalled. “And so they would bargain with Norman Lear about how many words he had to take out.”
“Something would come out of somebody’s mouth in the show, usually Archie’s, and I would turn to whoever was sitting next to me and say, ‘What does that mean?’” she shared. “I didn’t hear racial slurs growing up. I didn’t hear negative epithets. I really didn’t know that all this ugliness was out there. So it was a big learning curve for me.”
Struthers once revealed that she and co-star Jean Stapleton were the most stunned by Archie’s most offensive slurs in the series. “I think Jean and I were more shocked than Rob and Carroll,” Struthers told Closer Weekly in 2021. “We would give each other looks like, ‘What was that?’ None of us had a clue of what was to come!”
Norman Lear Knew ‘All in the Family’ Would Be Controversial When It Debuted in 1971
Struthers recalled that in January 1971, showrunner Norman Lear met with the cast hours before the premiere episode aired to give them a warning.
“In the rehearsal hall at CBS Los Angeles, Norman Lear sat us down and said, ‘One of two things is going to happen tonight. It’s either going to be a big hit, and you will be recognized everywhere you go … Or, the public is going to be up in arms with the way Archie talks, with all his racial slurs, and it’s going to be off the air after tonight, and we’ll all be out of a job,’” she told Grant magazine in 2017.
All in the Family went on to become one of the biggest hit shows of the 1970s, winning 22 Emmy Awards during its nine-season run.