THE MAN Behind the Laughs

HOW HE TURNED PERSONAL STORIES INTO TV GOLD

- Katie Bruno

Growing up in Hartford, Conn., Norman Lear wasn’t expected to amount to much. The son of a con artist who spent time in prison, Norman left college to enlist in the Air Force. After World War II, he landed in California, where he worked as a door-to-door salesman before taking a gig as a comedy writer.

“You looked around television in [the 1950s and 1960s], and the biggest problem any family faced was ‘Mother dented the car, and how do you keep Dad from finding out,’” Norman said. “The message that was sending out was that we didn’t have any problems.”