Love of Country

By Norman Lear

My grandparents, whom I lived with for three years as a child, were the greatest influence on my life. My grandfather Shia Seicol had come to the U.S. from Russia. He had a great passion for America and an amazing love of country. In New Haven, Conn., where they lived, we were always going to parades. My grandfather and I would stand on the curb, and he'd be holding my hand; I could feel his hand breaking my fingers when the flag was coming by, and the martial music was playing. I'd look up into his face and see a tear.

In between parades he was an inveterate letter writer to the President. Every letter started off, "My dearest, darling Mr. President: Here's what I think you should do about this or that ..." Even when he disagreed with the President, the letter still started, "My dearest, darling Mr. President: Didn't I tell you last week that such and such and so and so ...?"

He and my grandmother lived in a fourth-floor walk-up--I suppose you could call it a tenement building. I would run down the three flights of stairs to get the mail out of our little brass mailbox. Every now and again there would be this small white envelope with the words THE WHITE HOUSE on it, and my 9-year-old heart fluttered. It would be a formal reply, and they came in those wonderful envelopes.

When I asked him why he wrote the President, he said it was because everything the President was responsible for was important for those he loved.

I thought of him when, years later, people started telling me how All in the Family had changed our culture. I didn't know what people were talking about. I thought if a couple thousand years of the Judeo-Christian ethic hadn't corrected racism and lack of equal opportunity and so forth, my little half-hour situation comedy wasn't going to do it either. Then I remembered my grandfather, standing at a lake with me when I was 11 or so. I was dropping stones in the water, and my grandfather told me that each time I did it, I raised the level of the water. He said if a scientist were there, he could prove to me that each stone raised the level of the water. All you can see is the ripple, he said, but the ripple tells you that you did something.

How my grandfather would have loved being with me when I first saw the copy of the Declaration of Independence that my wife Lyn and I subsequently bought. It was spring 2001, and I had read that the document was going to be auctioned off by Sotheby's on the Internet. One of our little girls went to school with a little girl whose dad ran Sotheby's in Los Angeles. He told me that the document, which happened to be sitting in his office, was one of 25 that existed in the world at the time. It was one of those that had been printed the night of July 4, 1776. One of those that had been handed to men on horseback and sent around the 13 colonies. One of those that were read aloud in the town squares.

I went to see it at his office, and I was surprised at my own reaction. I looked at it, and I cried--like my grandfather had cried with the flag--and I knew in an instant that I would wish to buy it. I knew in that same instant that I would never just hang it on the wall in my home and that, if I could get it, I would find a way for it to travel.

By the time I got back to the office, I was absolutely certain I would be able to raise the money to make something big of it. In a matter of three years, we worked with Scholastic magazine and got curriculum materials to 20 million high school kids across the country and much more. It's a thrill to look back and see the straight line that started in my childhood. It all goes back to those years living with my grandparents.

--As told to Barbara Isenberg

With reporting by As told to Barbara Isenberg