Guiding Light: 1937-2009???? Part Six!

Considered to be the heart and soul of Guiding Light were the Bauer family. The show, having been around for 72 years, is bound to create a lot of discussion and argument about who are the core families. The GL viewer of today that perhaps remembers watching the show in the 1960's are usually more quick to cite the Bauer family as the show's core...even though through the last two decades it's become much more of a Spaulding, Lewis, and Cooper dominated show. There has never been a time since 1948 when there hasn't been a Bauer family member on the scene...and while the show was consumed with Bauer's in the 1950's through the mid 1980's, the Bauer family lost that family feeling when they were written or killed off that by the late 1980's Ed Bauer and his children, Rick and Michelle, were the only ones on the show. Ed's wife at the time, Maureen, was a Bauer by marriage; her maiden name being Reardon. The other Bauer was part Bauer-part Spaulding in the form of Alan-Michael Spaulding...the son of Alan Spaulding and Hope Bauer. Mike Bauer had been written off the show in 1984...a few months after his daughter, Hope, was written off. She left town with Alan-Michael.

Bill Bauer, the alcoholic and often missing father of Mike, Ed, and Hillary, was murdered in 1983. Hillary Bauer, Bill's illegitimate daughter who came to town in 1977 with no knowledge of her father's connection to Springfield, was killed in 1984. She was the victim of a bomb that was planted inside a music box during the Susan Piper/Barbados storyline. I have an issue of Soap Opera Digest, October 23, 1984 to be specific, with the re-cap of the murder.

Bert Bauer, who you see in the picture along side her TV sons, Ed and Mike, left town in late 1984 to live with Meta, her sister-in-law. So, by 1985, the Bauer family had been dwindled down to Ed, his wife Maureen, and his son, Rick...as Michelle hadn't been born yet.

Michelle Bauer became somewhat of a soap heroine in the late 1990's and into the next millennium. Ed had gone off to Africa by then and Rick was playing the part of big brother and father figure to Michelle. In late 1996 Meta Bauer arrived in town. She had last been seen in 1974...but she arrived in town to serve as the show's matriarch and fill a void that was left in the show after the death of Bert Bauer's portray-er, Charita Bauer, in 1985. Meta, throughout 1996 and into 2002, was played on and off by daytime TV veteran Mary Stuart who had played the role of Jo on Search For Tomorrow for 35 years, 1951-1986, as I touched upon in a previous blog entry. Mary's death on February 28, 2002 came weeks after the death of Ellen Demming on February 7th, the actress who had played Meta Bauer for over 20 years, 1953-1974.

I don't have this issue of Soap Opera Digest but I wish I did...it features a similar picture of Bert, Ed, and Mike...it's from 1977...a few months before Alan Spaulding and his family came to town...

The issue was celebrating the show's overall 40th Anniversary at that time {1937-1977}. June was the month GL began on television in 1952 and so during that issue they were also celebrating it's Silver Anniversary, 25 years on television {1952-1977}.