So it’s not surprising that something that started off with the title “Guiding Light” (now what would THAT mean?) was the first to go.
It was the oldest to go, actually---The Guiding Light was the longest-lived broadcast series in history tracing back to its birth in radio in 1937 on NBC; and, if I'm not mistaken, it was the first radio soap to move to television and the only such radio soap to prove to have staying power on television, for whatever that was worth.
The show's creator/writer, Irna Phillips (who had created but lost the rights to arguably the first successful radio soap, Painted Dreams), hooked the original around the two families---the Rutledge family, whose head was a widowed church minister who'd come to an uneasily melting-pot town called Five Points, a hybrid of Poles, Slavs, Germans, Irish, Jews, Swedes; and, the Kransky family, whose head owned a pawnshop and whose daughter's friendship with a Rutledge daughter linked the two families.
The title of the show had a double reference: it alluded to how the town came to see Rev. Rutledge himself, and to a candle in his study window that indicated he was available to talk to anyone who wanted to talk to him.
The Kranskys were moved in due course to their own radio soap, The Right to Happiness, and the Rutledge focus began to change when Arthur Peterson, who played the reverend, went off to serve in World War II, and the focus began to shift toward a physician; Rev. Rutledge had been written out of the show for Peterson's service as having gone off to serve as an Army chaplain, and when Peterson returned Rutledge became a hospital chaplain and a lesser focus figure. By 1952, a new family, the Bauers (if you were a fan of The Guiding Light, you knew the Bauers were figuring heavily in the show's stories for three decades after the soap moved to television), had become the central family, the show had made its television transition (the two overlapped radio and television until 1956), and The Guiding Light was well enough established as another scandal-and-melodrama offering.
In its earlier radio heyday, however, Phillips wasn't shy about busting the soap formulae taking hold even then, going so far as to hook entire episodes (the radio version ran fifteen minutes a day, as did most of the radio soaps and, truth to be told, no few classic radio comedies such as Amos 'n' Andy, The Goldbergs, Easy Aces, and Lum & Abner) around a Rev. Rutledge sermon and its suggestions through others around town. She even worked her staff organist, Bernice Yanocek, into the show---Yanocek provided the music for several soaps Phillips had going at the same time, but for The Guiding Light Phillips sometimes had Yanocek playing the church music attributed to Mary Rutledge for her father's church.
Phillips was considered a rival to Frank and Anne Hummert for producing radio soaps but she was a different operator---she did most of the writing herself (the Hummerts had staff writers for their soaps) and worked by plotting as many as six soaps at once, dictating to her secretary and even acting out scenes (Phillips had first hit Chicago, then a major radio production hub, as an actress). She also did her best to avoid the kind of herky-jerky, melodramatic transitions typical of a Hummert soap (The Romance of Helen Trent was just the signature among their repertory).
(How do I know all this? Easy. I'm an old-time radio nut and, while not exactly a fan of the radio soaps, I have a few reference volumes, including and especially Mr. John Dunning's On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, that give plenty of detail about The Guiding Light and other radio soaps and their masterminds. When The Guiding Light was canceled in September, I couldn't resist a tribute to its longevity by satirising, on my own radio show (I have one Monday nights in Las Vegas), an original script from the radio version, from 1952 (the Rutledges were long enough gone as a major focus), in a routine called "The Groping Dark" . . .)
A handy site for all things broadcast, both radio and television.
http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=soapopera
SOAP OPERA
The term “soap opera” was coined by the American press in the 1930s to denote the extraordinarily popular genre of serialized domestic radio dramas, which, by 1940, represented some 90% of all commercially-sponsored daytime broadcast hours. The “soap” in soap opera alluded to their sponsorship by manufacturers of household cleaning products; while “opera” suggested an ironic incongruity between the domestic narrative concerns of the daytime serial and the most elevated of dramatic forms. In the United States, the term continues to be applied primarily to the approximately fifty hours each week of daytime serial television drama broadcast by ABC, NBC, and CBS, but the meanings of the term, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, exceed this generic designation.
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