History Highlights

Background

Starting in the first half of 1978, six million teenagers became fervently preoccupied with the psychosexual entaglements of a handful of young people who lived in the fictional town of Port Charles. All over the country General Hospital fever spread. In living rooms and dormitories, teens would huddle in front of color sets and later discuss the problems of Scotty and Laura and Lesley and Rick and David and Bobbie. To those millions of new soap addicts, and perhaps to a few older ones as well, it may have seemed that GH had recently premiered as a revolutionary soap meant especially for them.

It was, in actuality, on April 1, 1963, some fifteen years earlier, that the audience, mostly housewives in those days, caught their first glimpses of nurse Jessie Brewer and Dr. Steve Hardy ministering to the sick and sick at heart on the famous seventh floor (internal medicine) of General Hospital. The only young people seen were the orderlies, and a mere four or five actors carried the intensely personal melodramas in sets that were drabber than most. It was meant to mirror the highly successful medical shows then being aired at nighttime, such as Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey.

The first black-and-white show took an excruciating twenty-two hours to tape, as producer-director Jim Young nervously set up artful camera shots while the sponsors watched him work. The shows that followed were nearly as exhausting. Five years after GH began, it became the top-rated soap and put ABC's daytime lineup on the map.

Disclaimer

Most of the information in these files comes directly from History of the Soaps, published by Daytime Digest. It appears as is.

• Some of the writing is rather choppy and poorly edited.

• Storylines don't always appear in exact chronological order.

• There may be some factual errors. I tried to correct these as I found them. If you find any more, please let me know!

• Many seemingly important storylines and characters are briefly glossed over or not mentioned at all. For example, Amy Vining has been a fixture on the show for over 15 years, but you won't find her mentioned here.