Despite their invaluable contribution to the look and feel of a series, even the most iconic set pieces sometimes get thrown out without a second thought like the crap you only put in the Goodwill donation box if you know you won’t have to hand it to a person who can look you in the eye. Dick Van Dyke’s ottoman, Mary Tyler Moore’s yellow chair, Bill Cosby’s good reputation — we have no idea where most of these things ended up.
The chain of provenance of one character’s home furnishings, however, has been documented like a museum artifact. That’s because that’s what it is. Not just any little roadside nostalgia trap, either — we’re talking the museum you think about when someone says “museum.” We’re talking about, of course, Archie Bunker’s chair, one of the few pop-culture relics available for viewing in the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution.
We don’t know too much about where the chair came from or its movements before it was purchased, alongside the chair used by Edith Bunker on All in the Family, for $10 in a Southern California thrift shop around 1971. (That’s about $80 in today’s money, so those were some nice-ass secondhand chairs.) We do know, based on historians’ analysis of the chair’s material and construction, that it was probably made sometime in the 1940s, much like Archie himself, if it can be said that men are made when they get shot in the ass by Italian fascists.
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On All in the Family, the otherwise unassuming chair became such an important symbol of the rapidly changing political climate represented by the series that the Smithsonian asked to keep it after the eighth season wrapped. “This was the first television acquisition that we made, so it was a big deal,” one of the museum’s curators said. “It was a watershed moment in the history of the Smithsonian, to take this really seriously and put these alongside the military and political history of this nation,” which feels like a real snub to Bunker’s service. Did you hear us about the ass shot?
It was kind of a troubled process, though. Everyone thought the series was ending after the eighth season, so producers saw no reason to turn the Smithsonian down — until it was renewed for a ninth. They asked if they could maybe wait on that donation, but apparently, the Smithsonian has a “no take-backsies” policy, so a replica had to be painstakingly constructed to the tune of $15,000. Again, that’s 1978 dollars.
Today, the original chair sits in the museum, alongside Bunker’s side table, ashtray, beer can, and yes, Edith’s chair, though nobody ever mentions that. The poor thing is still being treated like a dingbat.
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