A Guiding Light Extinguished
by Suzanne Strempek Shea
SEPTEMBER 17, 2009 TAGS:
Throughout grammar and high school in the early 1960s through the mid-1970s, the end of my day was celebrated by hopping from the bus, rushing across the street, swinging open the door to my grandmother’s New England home, and moving into the Midwestern city of Springfield.
My return fell just after 2 p.m., when Guiding Light lit the screen of Babci’s enormous four-legged Zenith. As I entered her living room, I also entered the living rooms, kitchens, hospital rooms and bedrooms of a show as familiar to me as my own life. That’s not to say that in second grade I was contemplating remarrying for the sixth time, or discovering children I didn’t recall birthing. It’s just that GL, like Babci, was always there. Every weekday. Every year. Same time, same place, same faces. Same world, yet so compellingly different from mine.
Unlike the light nighttime sitcoms I watched, Guiding Light was a continuous and serious story that engaged you deeply, then left you hanging. Rather than finding this to be boring adult stuff, the nascent storyteller in me was transfixed by the deep drama beaming into my sleepy rural community. My favorites then and now: interactions on porches and in kitchens - especially those long ago in the kitchen of Bert Bauer, the show’s matriarch when I began watching.
As the Spauldings, Coopers and Lewises now do, the Bauer family, rooted in the United States by German immigrant Friedrich "Papa" Bauer, son Bill, daughter-in-law Bert, and grandsons Mike and Ed, then were the show’s center (and their home the scene of a Fourth of July barbeque, complete with Bauerburgers, that has remained an annual event). Counsel given at the Bauer kitchen table made me feel hopeful and comforted, even if the problem being discussed was life-altering. Bert would solve it - and would look great in the process. All of Springfield woke looking straight from the hair salon, dressed in Sunday best, even if they weren’t leaving the house; they never had a knickknack out of place and found the ice bucket full even if just back from a month in Europe.
Guiding Light was one of what Babci called her “programs,” a roster including The Edge of Night, Search for Tomorrow and Another World. Background noise for her day of housework, those latter three have gone onto the great Zenith in the sky. Come Sept. 18, after being on for a whopping 72 years, airing 5,762 weekday programs on television and radio, and providing a launching pad for stars including Kevin Bacon, JoBeth Williams, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, Hayden Panettiere and Melina Kanakaredes, Guiding Light will join them. And I’ll join the legions mourning.
Our first salutes will be to the late Irna Phillips, who created both CBS’ Guiding Light and As the World Turns, and NBC’s only remaining soap, Days of Our Lives. GL got its start in 1937 on NBC radio, a 15-minute program set in the Chicago suburb of Five Points, where the show’s Rev. John Ruthledge welcomed visitors with a lamp in the window. It switched to CBS television in 1952 and grew to 30 minutes in 1968, when I was in fourth grade and by then watching during summers, too. TV was allowed as long as my sister or I were doing something creative: drawing, knitting, or needlepoint. Each afternoon, weaving stacks of potholders, I watched Bert struggle with Bill’s drinking.
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In high school I monitored each glance between sinister Roger and gorgeous Holly, who were both estranged spouses and step-siblings. I lugged a 12-inch portable to college and in the late 1970s found Guiding Light a link to the familiar. Three hours from my home, I could tune into Springfield, where I knew the location of the coffee cups in each character’s kitchen. I cheered in 1977, when the show expanded to a full 60 minutes, then had to work on rescheduling classes.
In the ’80s, I watched from the first home I purchased, one that included a newfangled VCR. Among the episodes captured was the 1985 memorial for Charita Bauer, who’d played Bert Bauer on radio from 1950 to 1956 and on TV from 1952 to 1985, and who died at 62, just weeks short of her 35th GL anniversary. Due to a blood clot, the real Charita had a leg amputated in 1983, and she returned to the show the following year to a storyline with a similar problem and resolution.
GL by then was focusing on a new generation. Little Freddy Bauer, Ed’s son, was grown up and called Dr. Rick. His circle included handsome Phillip Spaulding, son of evil Alan; Mindy Lewis from the newly arrived wild Lewis clan; and Beth Raines, daughter of Lillian, a Bert Bauer in nurses’ whites.
In a 1990s ratings grab effort, GL had me shaking my head but watching still as Josh Lewis mourned beloved presumed-dead spitfire Reva Shayne so much he had her cloned. Across town, others dabbled in time travel.
The millennium brought the show’s 70th broadcast anniversary, in 2007, marked by efforts to involve both cast and viewers in good deeds including rebuilding Katrinaland. GL won the Daytime Emmy Awards for Best Writing and Best Show that year, but not enough viewers’ hearts. In a world where stay-at-home mothers were as rare as working moms had been when the show began, and viewers wanting to peek into other lives need only turn to reality TV, the entire genre was struggling.
With GL as eighth in the list of eight soaps on the air (19 were broadcast in the 1960s and ’70s), producers announced the cancellation last April. As the World Turns, launched in 1956, now becomes the eldest. A revival of the game show Let’s Make a Deal will fill GL’s slot. I will use the additional hour to write. Maybe about a place that for most of the days of my life came into my home, bringing with it another just as real.
My return fell just after 2 p.m., when Guiding Light lit the screen of Babci’s enormous four-legged Zenith. As I entered her living room, I also entered the living rooms, kitchens, hospital rooms and bedrooms of a show as familiar to me as my own life. That’s not to say that in second grade I was contemplating remarrying for the sixth time, or discovering children I didn’t recall birthing. It’s just that GL, like Babci, was always there. Every weekday. Every year. Same time, same place, same faces. Same world, yet so compellingly different from mine.Unlike the light nighttime sitcoms I watched, Guiding Light was a continuous and serious story that engaged you deeply, then left you hanging. Rather than finding this to be boring adult stuff, the nascent storyteller in me was transfixed by the deep drama beaming into my sleepy rural community. My favorites then and now: interactions on porches and in kitchens - especially those long ago in the kitchen of Bert Bauer, the show’s matriarch when I began watching.
As the Spauldings, Coopers and Lewises now do, the Bauer family, rooted in the United States by German immigrant Friedrich "Papa" Bauer, son Bill, daughter-in-law Bert, and grandsons Mike and Ed, then were the show’s center (and their home the scene of a Fourth of July barbeque, complete with Bauerburgers, that has remained an annual event). Counsel given at the Bauer kitchen table made me feel hopeful and comforted, even if the problem being discussed was life-altering. Bert would solve it - and would look great in the process. All of Springfield woke looking straight from the hair salon, dressed in Sunday best, even if they weren’t leaving the house; they never had a knickknack out of place and found the ice bucket full even if just back from a month in Europe.
Guiding Light was one of what Babci called her “programs,” a roster including The Edge of Night, Search for Tomorrow and Another World. Background noise for her day of housework, those latter three have gone onto the great Zenith in the sky. Come Sept. 18, after being on for a whopping 72 years, airing 5,762 weekday programs on television and radio, and providing a launching pad for stars including Kevin Bacon, JoBeth Williams, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, Hayden Panettiere and Melina Kanakaredes, Guiding Light will join them. And I’ll join the legions mourning.
Our first salutes will be to the late Irna Phillips, who created both CBS’ Guiding Light and As the World Turns, and NBC’s only remaining soap, Days of Our Lives. GL got its start in 1937 on NBC radio, a 15-minute program set in the Chicago suburb of Five Points, where the show’s Rev. John Ruthledge welcomed visitors with a lamp in the window. It switched to CBS television in 1952 and grew to 30 minutes in 1968, when I was in fourth grade and by then watching during summers, too. TV was allowed as long as my sister or I were doing something creative: drawing, knitting, or needlepoint. Each afternoon, weaving stacks of potholders, I watched Bert struggle with Bill’s drinking.
In high school I monitored each glance between sinister Roger and gorgeous Holly, who were both estranged spouses and step-siblings. I lugged a 12-inch portable to college and in the late 1970s found Guiding Light a link to the familiar. Three hours from my home, I could tune into Springfield, where I knew the location of the coffee cups in each character’s kitchen. I cheered in 1977, when the show expanded to a full 60 minutes, then had to work on rescheduling classes.In the ’80s, I watched from the first home I purchased, one that included a newfangled VCR. Among the episodes captured was the 1985 memorial for Charita Bauer, who’d played Bert Bauer on radio from 1950 to 1956 and on TV from 1952 to 1985, and who died at 62, just weeks short of her 35th GL anniversary. Due to a blood clot, the real Charita had a leg amputated in 1983, and she returned to the show the following year to a storyline with a similar problem and resolution.
GL by then was focusing on a new generation. Little Freddy Bauer, Ed’s son, was grown up and called Dr. Rick. His circle included handsome Phillip Spaulding, son of evil Alan; Mindy Lewis from the newly arrived wild Lewis clan; and Beth Raines, daughter of Lillian, a Bert Bauer in nurses’ whites.
In a 1990s ratings grab effort, GL had me shaking my head but watching still as Josh Lewis mourned beloved presumed-dead spitfire Reva Shayne so much he had her cloned. Across town, others dabbled in time travel.
The millennium brought the show’s 70th broadcast anniversary, in 2007, marked by efforts to involve both cast and viewers in good deeds including rebuilding Katrinaland. GL won the Daytime Emmy Awards for Best Writing and Best Show that year, but not enough viewers’ hearts. In a world where stay-at-home mothers were as rare as working moms had been when the show began, and viewers wanting to peek into other lives need only turn to reality TV, the entire genre was struggling.
With GL as eighth in the list of eight soaps on the air (19 were broadcast in the 1960s and ’70s), producers announced the cancellation last April. As the World Turns, launched in 1956, now becomes the eldest. A revival of the game show Let’s Make a Deal will fill GL’s slot. I will use the additional hour to write. Maybe about a place that for most of the days of my life came into my home, bringing with it another just as real.
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