Sally Struthers Says She Experienced Culture Shock During ‘All in the Family’

Sally Struthers says the change of scenery from her childhood home in Oregon to the raunchy set of All in the Family in Los Angeles came as a bit of a culture shock.

Reflecting on her breakout role as Gloria Stivic in the popular sitcom, for which she won two Emmy Awards, Struthers, 78, recalled being shocked by the provocative language that came from the character Archie Bunker.

“Well, I was very young when I started on that show,” Struthers told Fox News in a recent interview. “I was young when I finished it. And I grew up in Portland, Oregon, living 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,” she continued.

“And so they would bargain with [creator] Norman Lear about how many words he had to take out,” Struthers said. 

Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton starred as Archie and Edith Bunker, respectively. Struthers played their daughter Gloria, and Rob Reiner starred as their son-in-law, Mike, though Archie preferred to call him “Meathead.”

“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?’ ” Struthers told Fox News. “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.”

All in the Family ran from 1971 to 1979 on CBS, and Struthers appeared in 182 episodes. She also starred in the spinoff Archie Bunker’s Place and her own short-lived spinoff, Gloria.

According to Struthers, she is not sure if All in the Family’s language would go over well with today’s audiences — but thinks much of the culture is still the same.

“I don’t know, I guess the circle of life, the rhythms of life, the centuries that we’ve gone through as human beings,” she told Fox News.

“I think, you know, everything that leaves comes back maybe with a new sparkle on it or a new twist, but there’s really very little in life that’s completely new again unless it’s a piece of technology that no one could have thought was coming,” she continued. “I just, I enjoyed the fact that there was that one brief moment in time where that television show got to come on the air.” 

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“And I don’t know, maybe educate a few people,” she continued. “I’ve had so many people approach me over all my years to say, and they, quite often, a lot of them start out with a sentence: ‘My dad is just like Archie. My grandfather is Archie Bunker, my uncle.’ And I always just say, ‘My condolences.’ ”

Struthers found TV fans once again decades later with her role as Babette on Gilmore Girls, and is next set to appear in the Christmas film All Is Merry & Bright, which follows a mother as she tries to forgive her sister after a tragic accident that occurred during their teenage years.