These Times

Season 3, Episode 4, ‘All in the Family’

Kirk Ericson | Apr 25, 20240

From “Gloria and the Riddle,” an episode that aired on CBS in October 1972:

Gloria: There’s this father and his son and they’re driving along in the car. The car crashes and the father is killed.

Edith (Gloria’s mother): Oh, that’s so sad.

Archie (Gloria’s father): Oh, geez. It’s only a story Edith.

Gloria: Anyway, the father is killed, and the little boy is badly injured so they rush him to a hospital and take him into the operating room. The surgeon walks in and says, ‘I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.’ How come?

Archie: Well, that’s easy. The surgeon is his father and he ain’t supposed to operate on his own family.

Gloria: Daddy, I just said the father was killed.

Mike (Gloria’s husband): Oh, then it was the stepfather that was killed and the surgeon is the real father.

Gloria: No.

Edith: Oh! I know. The father was a Christian Scientist. They never operate.

Archie (after a slow burn): How could the surgeon be a Christian Scientist, Edith. Those dumbbells don’t even allow sickness. If the father was dead, what’s the difference what kind of religious nut he was.

Mike: Hey! The father was a priest, right? Like a Catholic father.

Gloria: No. It was a real father and his real son.

Mike: Let me get this straight. The father and son are in a car crash. The father’s killed, the son is rushed to the hospital. They bring him to surgery, the surgeon walks in and says ‘I can’t operate on that boy. He’s my son.’

Gloria: That’s right.

Mike: Is it a case of mistaken identity?

Gloria: That’s wrong.

Archie: Of course it’s wrong.

Mike: How can you be so sure? You don’t know the answer.

Archie: Well I know what it ain’t the answer.

Edith: Maybe the answer has something to do with the people who come back from the hereafter. Like that milk company.

Gloria: Oh … reincarnation?

Edith: Yeah.

Gloria: No, that’s not the answer, ma. You give up Michael?

Archie: Yeah, Michael gives up. What’s the answer?

“All in the Family” is not a show that could be made today. It used words for racial, sexual, religious and ethnic minorities and played on engrained notions that would offend today’s delicate sensibilities, even though the point of the show was that Archie was a bigot who couldn’t accept the world was changing.

The man who played Archie, a character referred to in the 1970s as “America’s favorite bigot,” was Carroll O’Connor, who became known for his liberal politics. The creator of the show, Norman Lear, started the group People for the American Way, an advocacy group that pushes liberal causes. “All in the Family” was not a show designed to showcase the merits of Archie Bunker’s point of view.

I watched that riddle episode when I was a 12-year-old white boy living in the boondocks of Spokane County. I couldn’t answer the riddle, and I was annoyed when I heard the answer. I figured I was more evolved than I apparently was. I also figured that in the future, this riddle won’t be a riddle because the answer will be so obvious.

Several decades later, I presented that riddle to my oldest son, who was then 12 years old.

Alexander responded with the same types of responses heard decades early. The father was his stepfather. The father wasn’t really dead. The doctor was his godfather.

No. No. And no.

The father had a sex change? The father was actually the mother?

No. Interesting idea, but no.

I told Alexander the answer. His eyes widened. He might have been as surprised as was his once 12-year-old dad.

After all these decades, what has changed? Maybe, just maybe, we’re closer to the day when one of my sons can ask one of their (still theoretical) kids and they’ll say, “Geez. That’s not a riddle anymore. Just how old are you?”

I presented the riddle this week to Adi, my youngest son’s girlfriend. She’s 20 years old and her mother is a doctor.

She knew the riddle, and the answer.

Adi said her mom told her and her sibling the riddle when they were children, treating it as a lesson in how rooted preconceptions can be. But Adi did mention that she heard the riddle first when she was about 8 years old. She said she didn’t know the answer then, thinking that because it was a riddle, the answer had to be far more complicated than it turned out to be.

Back to “All in the Family” …

Edith: I think I have the answer to the riddle! The surgeon couldn’t operate on his own son, but not because the surgeon was the boy’s father. The surgeon was the boy’s mother!