Norman Lear

Norman Milton Lear (born July 27, 1922) is an American television writer and producer who produced such 1970s sitcoms as All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Good Times, and Maude. As a political activist, he founded the advocacy organization People for the American Way in 1981 and has supported First Amendment rights and progressive causes. 2Early lifeEdit Lear was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of Enie/Jeanette (née Sokolovsky) and Hyman "Herman" Lear, a traveling salesman. His mother was born in Elizabethgrad in Kherson Gubernia in Ukraine, while his father was born in Connecticut, to Russian-born parents. He had a younger sister, Claire Lear Brown (1925–2015). Lear grew up in a Jewish home and had a Bar Mitzvah ceremony. When Lear was 9 years old, his father went to prison for selling fake bonds. Lear thought of his father as a "rascal" and said that the character of Archie Bunker (whom Lear depicted as white Protestant on the show) was in part inspired by his father, while the character of Edith Bunker was in part inspired by his mother. Lear graduated from Weaver High School in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1940 and subsequently attended Emerson College in Boston, but dropped out in 1942 to join the United States Army Air Forces. After the Pearl Harbor attack, during World War II, Lear enlisted in September 1942, serving in the Mediterranean Theater as a radio operator/gunner on Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers with the 772nd Bombardment Squadron, 463rd Bombardment Group (Heavy) of the Fifteenth Air Force, where Lear said they bombed German