Guiding Light
Guiding Light (known as The Guiding Light before 1975) is an American television soap opera. It is listed in "Guinness World Records" as the longest-running drama in television in American history, broadcast on CBS for 57 years from June 30, 1952, until September 18, 2009, overlapping a 19-year broadcast on radio from 1937 to 1956. With it 72 years of radio and television runs, "Guiding Light" is the longest running soap opera before "General Hospital" and the fifth-longest running program in all of broadcast history; only the American country music radio program "Grand Ole Opry" (first broadcast in 1925), the BBC religious program "The Daily Service" (1928), the CBS religious program "Music and the Spoken Word" (1929), and the Norwegian children's radio program "Lørdagsbarnetimen" (1924-2010) have been on the air longer.
Guiding Light (1970–79)
In the 1970s, unlike in the 1960s after Agnes Nixon left to begin writing for "Another World" in 1966, there was less of a revolving doors of head writers and story line seemed to stabilize in only two directions, first what was aired from January 1, 1970 to near the end of October 1975 and then what was aired from near the beginning of November 1975 to the end of the decade on December 31, 1979. The first half of the decade was mainly dominated by the story lines that were written by the head writing married couple of Robert Soderberg and Edith Sommer who wrote for the show from near the end of 1969 to the spring of 1973 and were long time and reliable soap scribes. And then the head writing team that replaced Soderberg and Sommer, James Gentile, Robert Cenedella and former "The Guiding Light" cast member James Lipton continued most of the stories in the same direction as started by Soderberg and Sommer from the spring of 1973 to near the end of October 1975.