NRR Project: 'The Guiding Light' (Nov. 22, 1945)

 

Irna Phillips

NRR Project: “The Guiding Light”

Created by Irna Phillips and Emmons Carlson

Broadcast Nov. 22, 1945

14 min.

It was the longest-running scripted show in electric media’s history. This soap opera, 15 minutes Monday through Friday, debuted on NBC Radio on January 5, 1937. It moved to CBS Radio in 1947, continuing even after the TV version began its broadcast on June 30, 1952. (For four years, the performers did it twice: once for the microphone, once for the camera.) The video incarnation lasted until Sept. 18, 2009.

It is difficult to conceive how prevalent the soap opera has been, from its beginning in early network radio. It was the great progenitor, Irna Phillips, who launched the genre with Painted Dreams in 1930. Phillips would create many more, including this show, As the World Turns and Another World. She was a genius at spawning a drama that would move forward with various and interconnecting emotional dramas, eking out mileage from conflicts, misunderstanding, and the woes of the fated, that were designed to amuse bored housewives during the day.

Looking at a schedule of daily broadcasts, it is instructive to see that soaps dominate the hours between the morning news and the afternoon kids’ shows. Some titles: Adopted Daughter, Backstage Wife, John’s Other Wife, Life Can Be Beautiful, Myrt and Marge, The Strange Romance of Evelyn Winters.

Phillips produced her own stuff, then sold it to sponsors and the networks. She somehow wrote (or rather dictated) 30,000 words a week, composing multiple series simultaneously, keeping things clear with charts. For a time, she had the inhabitants of three different soaps – Guiding Light, The Woman in White, and Today’s Children – interpenetrate each others’ stories.

At the show’s beginning, its protagonist was Rev. John Ruthledge, who ministered to the folk of “Five Points” in Chicago. He and his daughter Mary (the great Mercedes McCambridge) interacted with the parish, and the usual heavy drama ensued, year after year, effortlessly making the move to television.

Karen Fishman’s story about this entry is top-notch and must be referred to. She has heard the actual episode and I have not. It takes the form of a Thanksgiving sermon, the first since the end of the war. Fishman quotes from it extensively: it is well worth a read. The gist of it is the reaffirmation of the spirit of brotherhood in mankind. Such noble sentiments are true and good, even if unenforceable. However, it reflects a time during which America was seen as the moral conscience of the world, and could best deliver salvation thereunto through democracy and capitalism. We were sick of war; we really wanted the unification of the human race (well, except for with the godless Communists -- the Cold War was already brewing).

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: F.D.R.’s funeral.