Reverend Ruthledge

Not to be pedantic, but I think you mean Santo Domingo.

AW from 1964-1975 was soap opera at its best. The Matthews was a great soap family and right up there with the Bauers, the Hughes and the Hortons. How AW stayed on the air the last twenty years that it did is, in my opinion, nothing short of a miracle.

Although they had much shorter runs, I would add Ted White, Ben Scott and Lee Gantry to that list.

I really hate that, with each new interview that comes around from The Locher Room, I have to decide if I'm going to watch it by mentally measuring whether my interest in the guest will outweigh the annoyance of the host.

I think this was the decision to kill off Julie Bauer on GL. When they moved Mike to AW, having him a new widower opened up a lot of storyline possibilities. That, plus the fact that Sandra Smith probably wasn't interested in playing the character again.

Thank you for posting that, Alan. I always liked Lezlie Dalton so it was interesting to see her now.

I agree with the previous posters about ATWT in the late 70s. ATWT was always a slow-moving soap in the past but with a depth that most soaps didn't have and that kept viewers thinking below the surface. The slow, conservative (some say stuffy) tone of ATWT in the 50s and 60s was a strength as it allowed for a lot of subtext that I think intelligent viewers enjoyed. There weren't too many gimmicks and shiny objects to dazzle that a lot of writers use to forego the harder work of writing on a complex level. Having long-time characters only adds to that multi-layered aspect. However, in the late 70s, the core of the show and its raison d'être got lost along the way a bit and the positive aspects of being slow and conservative weren't as much of a strength of the show as it was in the past and the negative aspects of being slow and conservative, without the positive aspect, became a bit glaring. Things got a bit drab and boring. Characters, instead of becoming even more complex with time, became a bit tired and boring. Attempts to make them more interesting usually had them doing things out of character. Any attempts to "jazz up" the show seemed to fall flat as it meant a lot of disconnected, inconsequential characters and weird, uninteresting storylines. This all came to a head in the early 80s which is the only time ATWT really felt completely lost and the show went a bit off the rail. I know he's not everyone's favorite, but Douglas Marland really performed a miracle by reviving the show when he came along and he struck the perfect balance between making the show exciting plot-wise but also engaging the viewer to think on a deeper level. He also knew what to do with characters that had a long history by actually utilizing those histories and making the characters interesting BECAUSE they'd been around so long. I think the only instance he dropped the ball on this was with David and Ellen Stewart but I know Henderson Forsyth's lack of total commitment to the show dictated some of that. Anyway, Maryland really "got" the show which I honestly don't think anybody had gotten since Irna Phillips. Having said all that, I think there was some good writing in the late 70s. I just think it's the time when the show started to have a bit of an identity crisis which got worse in the early 80s and which it recovered from when Marland took over. As much as I love the 50s, 60s and early 70s of ATWT, I actually think the show was the best under Marland. Not that he was better than Irna. It's only because a show like ATWT is dependent on its history probably more than any other soap and it just took several decades to let that history happen. Marland had a lot of history to mine from and he did that. I don't know who was writing in the late 70s and early 80s, but I don't think they got that.

I agree with your assessment of the character. I'm equally bewildered as to why she lasted so long.

Danny Pintauro seems like a nice guy and Colleen Zenk was probably the nicest soap star I ever met. It was good to see them together.

The exact date is March 20, 1958

Great idea, FrenchFan. Thank you. Next best thing to being alive and in front of a television set on May 11th, 1965.

I didn't realize Roerick died in a car crash. Interesting to learn. I always thought it was an age-related ailment that caused him to die.

100% correct. I get so mad because he interviews a lot of people I'm interested in and couldn't see interviewed anywhere else but I have to endure him in order to see the interview. He's a horrible interviewer and strikes me as someone who believes his own PR. Someone who really cares about him needs to stage an intervention. Having good connections does not make one a good interviewer. He should be behind the scenes organizing things and let a more skilled interviewer do the interviewing. Although he's in good company with some big name interviewers. Larry King comes to mind. He was the king of missed opportunities and not listening to his guests.

Most writers, with a few great exceptions such as Marland and Nixon, don't want to play off another writer's material and want to create their own stuff. However, most of them are also deluded to think that they are just as good, if not superior, a writer than the previous writers. That's the mistake. It would help them to ride the coattails a bit. Very few later soap writers seemed to get the concept of the specific genre that long-running serials are and the CONTINUING (which means incorporating the past) aspect of it. They treated it like it was a new show that they were starting. Trying, and mostly failing, to make their mark as a writer and ignoring that the show was bigger than they are.

To Leslie Denniston's defense, I think the character of Maeve was supposed to be boring. I don't know why but I remember Reva, upon meeting her, cattily remarked, "She's kind of quiet, isn't she?" It may have been good acting instead of bad acting on Leslie's part. I think Maeve was supposed to be the anti-Reva. The opposite of loud and over the top.

I do remember him fumbling his lines quite often although it wasn't so much him fumbling his lines as him always pausing too long before delivering his lines. I've noticed other actors doing this. Eileen Fulton did it. So did Helen Wagner. You can tell the pause is them trying to remember the lines. He would mix things up too from time to time but he was good at saving it. As was Fulton. I would imagine they edited out the big fumbles. I can't imagine how any of them memorize all those lines. I, personally, couldn't do it.

Thanks for the history lesson. I was at least partially right with it being Leslie he was defending and the year being 1972. I didn't remember about Flip Malone. I guess the butterfly collar was a 1972 thing. I didn't think they came along until the late 70s. My fashion knowledge isn't as extensive as my TGL knowledge. To say the least.

Could be. My 70s historical knowledge is spotty but he could be referring to winning Leslie's court case when she was tried for murdering Stanley Norris which would have been 1972, I believe. I didn't know he was shot right after that, though. I wonder who shot him.

Thanks for sharing! I wonder what year this was? By the fashions, I would say late 70s but he said TGL had only been on 20 years. Even if he was only counting the radio years, that would put this at 1972.

One was definitely a tribute to Charita Bauer and it was introduced by Ed Bryce. The other one, I BELIEVE, was Phillip learning out who his real parents were. I'm not 100% sure on that one but I know it was Grant Alexander and Michael O'Leary introducing it. I'm pretty sure that was the scene shown.

How did you find that Pat Collins, Robert Gentry, Mart Hulswit and Richard van Fleet failed to capture the essence of Ed Bauer as well as Peter Simon did?

He was your favorite but did you think he was the actor who most definitively captured the essence of the character of Ed?

Oh no! We finally have a difference of opinion! LOL. While I definitely think Hulswit was much more likable than Gentry, I never thought of the character of Ed as being likable so Gentry was more the definitive Ed for me.

I found the GL books better for me than the ATWT book only because they did offer specific years for events, even if it was wrong a lot of the time, which made it easier to locate specific episodes I wanted. But, other than that, the ATWT book and the GL books are of similar quality and good.

I wonder whatever happened with Todd and Frank.