Archie Bunker on the final episode of "Archie Bunker's Place", on April 4, 1983. He is a Taurus. In Season 5, during a three-episode stretch where Archie's whereabouts are unknown, it is revealed that he attended Flushing High School and lettered in baseball. While locked in the storeroom of Archie's Place with Mike, in the season 8 "All in the Family" episode , a drunk Archie confides that as a child, his family was desperately poor, and he was teased in school because he wore one shoe on one foot and a boot on the other, so kids nicknamed him "Shoe-Booty". In
Archie Bunker the show progresses, it becomes apparent that Archie's prejudice is not motivated by malice, but is rather a combination of the era and environment in which he was raised and a generalized misanthropy. Archie himself is depicted as a hard worker, loving father, and basically decent man; nevertheless, he is bad-tempered and frequently tells his long-suffering wife Edith to "stifle yourself" and "dummy up". Series creator Norman Lear admitted that this is how his father treated Lear's mother. As the series progressed, Archie mellowed somewhat, albeit often out of necessity. In one episode, he expresses revulsion for a Ku Klux