All in the Family is certainly one of the greatest television sit-coms of all time. It definitely ranks in my top ten favorite shows. It has special meaning to me in a way too -because it was this show that was being broadcast at the time that I was born. My Dad still remembers watching the episode Archie in the Lock-Up in the hospital waiting room on that fateful evening of October 2, 1971. The show’s theme song “Those Were the Days” was one of the very first songs I ever learned. My Uncle Ed still remembers me singing “Dozer da Days” at the top of my lungs in the car during our visit to Washington D.C. in 1973.
My first attempt at getting an autograph from a cast member occurred on December 11, 1985 and it was highly successful. Autographs of Carroll O’Connor are not all that common, so I was thrilled to get a genunie one back on March 12, 1986. He signed the above photo that I sent to him along with one out of the two notecards that I sent.
I didn’t even consider parting with this photo for long enough to attempt to get any other cast member until the early Summer of 1998 during a tremendously large and long collecting campaign of ’97-’99. I stuck my toe in the water initially by sending three independent requests to Jean Stapleton, Rob Reiner, and Sally Struthers. As seen below, Stapleton and Reiner each signed the vintage photo that I sent them and added an additional, more recent photo as well. Sally Struthers only sent a more recent photo as seen here.
Because this experiment was so successful, I began sending the cast photo to each of the stars one by one. Struthers and Stapleton were both successes, but by the time I sent it to Rob Reiner, it was returned with a wrong address label. After that, I soured on the idea and so the cast shot remains incomplete. After Carroll O’Connor passed away in 2001, I decided to hold off and hope that Rob Reiner will make a personal appearance at some point that Bob might attend.
Autographs of December 1985 will continue…
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