Pine Charles

Same here.

Adam revealed they never divorced in 1991. The wedding ceremony where Erica wore the black dress happened in December 1991, so they're still married here.

I remember that coat. Erica wore it many times during that time period.

Well said. My "Romney" reply about Tom was in jest, of course. I wouldn't agree with Tom (if he were real), but I would respect him. He wasn't a bully and was respectful of others. He was a peaceful protestor outside the abortion clinic and condemned the violent protestors (like that psycho woman who attacked Julia physically). AMC @ it's best. I really do wish Tom could have stayed.

So Tom (if still alive) would vote for Romney. Anyway.... (as mentioned above) <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/l4_dqHm_h_s" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

They -- Travis & Barbara -- had the baby (I believe Sean, right?) so he could be a bone marrow donor to Molly. Travis was married to Erica at the time and Tom to Barbara. I think that happened in 1990.

Them going to D.C. does sound vaguely familiar....or maybe it was Philadelphia....? I know it was somewhere on the East Coast.

I liked when that ho cuffed Colby @ the beach house and threw her a piece of cheese, after calling her a rat. WERK, ho!

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You're like a soap encyclopedia...I love it! So I assume Ruth's rape was in the hospital parking lot (after she finished her rounds as a nurse)?

Thanks. I thought it was either late '70s or early '80s. I wish that story was on YouTube.

What year was iBrooke's abortion? About 1980, right? I remember reading about it in the AMC Trivia Book; I was very surprised, as I never remember hearing anyone mention it (unless I missed it).

Margo and Claudette sound like such tawdry sluts. Damn. Eddie Dorrance also raped Brooke; she got pregnant and aborted. That's rarely (if ever?) been mentioned in subsequent years.

Thanks for the info! Yes, I'm about 99% sure that it's Margo. Wasn't she the actress with the real life facelift and they incororated it into a story? I believe the year was 1974.

I think that cast photo is from 1976. That looks like the original Brooke (between Susan Lucci and Ruth Warrick) and that character debuted in '76, I believe.

Thanks for posting all of these awesome pictures! It might be obvious, but could you tell me who the woman is between Anne and Kitty? I'm thinking maybe the original Donna.....??

People Magazine Forever Mona 06/20/1994 FOR A QUARTER-CENTURY OF ALL MY Children, Frances Heflin watched in helpless horror as Susan Lucci tore her way through husbands (eight at last count), affairs and plot twists. With astounding forbearance, she played Mona Tyler, long-suffering mother of Lucci's voracious Erica Kane, from AMC's start—Jan. 5, 1970—until just five weeks before she died of cancer on June 1 in Manhattan, at age 71. To devoted fans of the highly rated soap opera, hardly a day went by when Mona did not roll eyes heavenward and exclaim, "Oh, Erica, how could you!" Heflin, the daughter of a dentist and a homemaker, and sister of the late actor Van Heflin, was born in Oklahoma City and had a 54-year career in theater and TV. She appeared on Broadway with 21-year-old Marlon Brando in 1945 in the original production of I Remember Mama and with Helen Hayes in the London premiere of The Glass Menagerie in 1948. Heflin, whose husband, composer-conductor Sol Kaplan, died in 1990, had three children. Unlike Mona, Heflin was no quiet hand wringer. "The two things that drove her up a wall were lack of professionalism and prejudice of any kind," says AMC executive producer Felicia Minei Behr. "When she slopped performing five weeks ago, she called me and said, 'Now you're going to have to recast Mona.' She was thinking the show must go on. But I said no—she was Mona, and there will never be another Mona."

People Magazine December 13, 1982 Sugar and Spice and Daytime Vice: the Two Worlds of Susan Lucci And—Gasp!—Erica Kane By Louise Lague ERICA: Not everyone's born beautiful. I happen to be one of the lucky ones. SILVER: Do you think there's hope for me? ERICA: You just have to be willing to make the effort. Haven't you learned anything from watching me? "Oh, boy! The first time I see the script and say these things out loud in the morning, I'm on the floor laughing," says Susan Lucci, 33, who plays Erica Kane, the narcissistic villainess of ABC's All My Children, which recently overtook the same network's General Hospital to become, again, America's most-watched soap. Her lines may be incredible, but by 4 p.m., when rehearsals are over and the camera starts rolling, Susan has pumped conviction into Erica's patter. "Erica is just trying to help people," defends Susan. "She's honest when she's saying those awful things. And every time I think Erica has gone too far, I meet somebody just like her." The power that daily transforms Lucci from a nice Italian-Swedish Catholic suburban wife and mother into the manipulative Manhattan model Erica Kane, says AMC creator Agnes Nixon, is "her talent. She's got a fix on the character." That fix costs ABC an annual salary (approximately $500,000 a year, according to one source) that is believed to be the highest in all soapdom. She may be worth every penny. Nixon gives Lucci more than a smidgen of the credit for AMC's regaining the ratings lead it lost to General Hospital three years ago. "Our male viewership is up in the last five years," Nixon says, "and Susie helps with that." Lucci herself calls AMC "the class act of daytime," with fans everywhere from the Junior League to the major leagues. Yankee catcher Rick Cerone once surprised her on the set with a baseball autographed by the team. "I never knew why anybody wanted an autograph until that moment," she says. Other aficionados are Carol Burnett, Cheryl Tiegs, Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert Lloyd. Says Susan: "I've heard that on the women's tennis circuit, a lot of pros won't play at 1 p.m. if they can avoid it." Erica and Susan have been sharing the same impeccable skin since AMC's debut 12 years ago, and the fit is surprisingly comfortable. "As a teenager, I used to be like Erica," says Lucci. "I wasn't the deepest thinker in the world. I judged people on a superficial level." She began to change when her drama teacher at Marymount College in Tarrytown, N.Y. "did an imitation of me onstage, and I saw immediately there was a lot of room for improvement." The metamorphosis into the patient and pleasant Susan Lucci, she says, "was just a matter of growing up and mellowing. I used to be opinionated. Now I'm sort of a marshmallow." The daughter of a construction contractor and a retired registered nurse, Susan was brought up in Garden City, Long Island and still lives not far from her parents. Her only sibling (brother Jimmy, now a management consultant) was six years older, so Susan spent hours alone, "watching The Guiding Light on television and playing with my mother's long black gloves and purple alligator shoes." At 11, Susan got her first role, as a Cinderella type in a Girl Scout play, and learned that "I felt totally at home onstage. First I get these butterflies, then I start to perform and I feel great." After college Susan found an agent, made a movie that was never released, and landed an interview at ABC which immediately brought her the role of Erica, then a teenager, in the first episode of All My Children. Three months before her big break, Susan married Helmut Huber, now 44, a tall, upbeat Austrian she had met at the Garden City Hotel when he was the food and beverage manager and she was a summer waitress. Three years passed before Helmut began his gentle but firm pursuit, while she played hard to get. At the time, says Lucci, "I didn't want to get married. I was so fickle, always the girl at the party who was looking over her date's shoulder for somebody better." "But she couldn't do that after she met me," notes Huber, who's 6'2" to Lucci's 5'2". Early on, says Lucci, "I made Helmut promise he'd never come home to me just out of habit. Some stories say I've stayed married to him for 13 years out of some sense of duty because I'm so good. Actually, I'm lucky I've found someone who keeps me interested." Huber, who is negotiating to open his own restaurant in Manhattan, to be called Erica's, lives with Lucci in a 14-room, 60-year-old Colonial 20 miles outside of New York. Their daughter, Liza, 7, "skis like the wind and speaks two languages [English and German]," says Susan. Much to her mother's dismay, Liza also loves to watch All My Children. "I don't like her to see me in bed with somebody," frets Susan. "I don't like her to see anybody in bed with anybody." Their son, Andreas, 2, is a merry strawberry blond "who goes around singing all day." A governess tends the children when Lucci works (an average of four days a week), and a live-in housekeeper does the cleaning, shopping and some cooking. "I tried to be Superwoman for nine years," says Lucci, "and it was stupid. I was always tired, always behind. So I hired myself a wife." Susan still lays out the children's clothes each morning and posts the day's menus on the refrigerator. Helmut often drives her to work in his Mercedes convertible; around town she drives her own Cadillac. This summer they bought a four-bedroom contemporary house with a pool in Long Island's tony Hamptons. Though Lucci thinks the Erica role is "spectacular," she is also frankly restless after 12 years in her first job. "It's been a way to have it both ways for me, to really be with my children most of every week and to work as an actress," says Lucci. Nonetheless, with only a year and a half left to go on her current contract, she is cautiously testing other waters. She had a cameo in the recent movie Young Doctors in Love and has signed to star in the upcoming Gung Ho. "In 10 years," she says, "I'd like to be making a film a year, and we'd like to have a small hotel in the Alps." She yearns to play other "women of spirit," but they needn't be villainesses. "Actually, if I never do anybody but Erica Kane, I will have accomplished something," says Lucci. "After all, she has said almost everything there is to say."

July 30, 1983 Susan Lucci, of "All My Children," receives a warm welcome during a tribute to soap operas in Washington. More than 70 daytime stars participated in events connected with the tribute. Al Stephenson / AP

Yeah, I noticed that. AMC was #1 in the 18-49 demo during that time and usually #2 overall, so not surprising with the big brand advertisers.

People Magazine Opal-in-the-Rough Dorothy Lyman Is Daytime Television's Tacky First Lady By Kristin McMurran 2/14/1983 8:07 a.m. Actress Dorothy Lyman scurries into the New York studios of the ABC soap All My Children wearing a loose purple sweater, black pleated skirt, no bra, no makeup, her flyaway hairdo a torrent of ringlets. "I'm never late," she insists, skittering down a corridor like a runaway poodle, a cup of coffee sloshing in one hand, a brown-bag breakfast clutched in the other. Moments later, wheeling into a mirror-paneled rehearsal hall, she tosses a shower of kisses to everyone on the set, scrambles to her mark beside a massage table, and instantly goes into character. "Ah know," she announces to actor Louis Edmonds in a twang as penetrating as nails on a blackboard, "you jes wanna feel ma hands all ovah your pasty flesh..." This is Pine Valley, U.S.A., home of the unisex beauty salon known as the Glamorama, and the proprietress, Opal Gardner, is daytime television's favorite red-neck vulgarian. Like Opal, Lyman has a kind of unvarnished shrewdness. She auditioned for what was intended to be a six-week role in 1981 and wound up with a two-year contract. "I came in to play a poor-white-trash mother who was pushing her daughter into modeling," she recalls, "a sort of Sears, Roebuck Teri Shields. At first they wanted her to be a villain, but I wanted people to understand Opal's feelings, so every time I had to hit Jenny, I'd immediately grab her and hug her. Villains don't last long, and I wanted a house in the country out of this job." To make sure her dream was rewarded, Lyman gave the character humor, easily the rarest of qualities in the vast banal moonscape of daytime TV. For her trouble, she receives up to 150 pieces of fan mail a week—second only to the show's femme fatale, Susan Lucci. She won an Emmy last year as best supporting actress in a daytime series, and recently made her prime-time debut as a member of NBC's Mama's Family, the mid-season sitcom that stars Vicki Lawrence. "This is like the Great Moment," Lyman exults. "The stepping-off point. I feel after 15 years I finally have the uniform on. I may get up to bat." Yet only three years ago she thought she had been relegated to a permanent spot on the bench. In 1980, after four dead-end years on the NBC soap Another World, she went off-Broadway to co-produce and direct John Ford Noonan's play A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking. The show was so successful she decided to give up acting entirely. "The minute I gave up thinking I would achieve what I wanted as an actress," she says, "Opal Gardner came along, and that led to the offer to do Mama's Family." Understandably, she harbors only fond feelings for Opal. "I love her," she says. "When I go shopping, I always buy a little something for Opal too, like a pair of plastic goldfish earrings. It may be the part of a lifetime." 10 a.m. A stage manager's voice booms over the studio public-address system, summoning Opal and Jenny to run through their scenes for the camera crew. Lyman almost never misses a line, possibly because she doesn't feel confined by the script. "If you constantly worry about what you're saying, you can't make any selection how to color it," she explains. "I don't memorize the words, I memorize the thoughts. So if I say 'Take a seat' or 'Take a load off or 'Plant it,' you get the point. If I don't know a line, I just make it up and keep going." If her All My Children colleagues are ever thrown by such liberties, none of them seems to resent it. Lyman is obviously a popular figure on the set, sashaying down the corridors, hugging and smooching the other actors, and occasionally soliciting donations for the nonprofit theater group she sometimes directs. "The toughest part about being an actress is getting a job," says Dorothy. "Rejection is soul-destroying. If you're selling encyclopedias, people say, 'I don't want the book.' In this business it's you they don't want. It took me a couple of years with a shrinker to develop a protective covering." 11:38 a.m. Sprinting from the studio on her lunch break, Lyman stops to sign autographs ("With love from Opal and me"), then catches a taxi uptown for an appointment with her chiropractor. Afterward she heads downtown for a Greek salad and a beer. "I believe in my chiropractor, my astrologer and a psychic," says Lyman. "The psychic told me I worry about my kids, but they're fine, and that my private life isn't very important to me anyway." Dorothy doesn't deny it. "All I've ever wanted is a career," she says. A stockbroker's daughter from Minneapolis, she made her acting debut at 15 in an amateur production of The Skin of Our Teeth. "I stepped out on that stage, and I knew that was how I wanted to spend my life," she remembers. After studying drama at Sarah Lawrence, Lyman married an aspiring British actor, John Tillinger, settled in rural Connecticut, and had two children. "I was the great hippie earth mother," she recalls. "I milked goats, made quilts, baked bread and grew a huge garden." She also grew increasingly restless. "One day I found myself leader of a Brownie troop of 28 screaming 6-year-olds," she says. "I thought, 'What am I doing? Anybody can be a Brownie leader. Few people can act.' " In 1978 Lyman left Connecticut, divorced her husband, and moved to New York. Her daughter, Emma, 11, and son, Sebastian, 8½, stayed behind with their father, a director at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. Dorothy sees them on occasional weekends. "It just seemed a very selfish life," she observes, "making things cozy for one man and two children. It wasn't large enough for me. When I got the job with Mama's Family, I called my kids and thanked them. I said, 'This would be great for all of us, and if I were home living full-time as your mama, this never would have happened to me." Lyman currently shares her one-bedroom Manhattan apartment with director Louis Malle's younger brother, Vincent, a film producer. "I call him my frog prince," she says. "It's purely a term of endearment." 1:09 p.m. Back at the studio, Lyman shimmies into a pair of orange Spandex pants, a floral smock and a leopard blouse. Cowboy boots, makeup and a Cuisinart coif complete a picture of unrelieved tackiness. Next comes a two-hour dress rehearsal; at 4 p.m. taping begins. "Move to Glamorama," snaps director Larry Auerbach several scenes later. "Act two, scene one. Standby to record. 5-4-3-2-1. Cue music." 5:17 p.m. Back in her dressing room, Lyman has folded Opal's fruit-studded bracelet into a plastic bag and quickly slipped into a leotard. Her contract on the serial expires in August, she says. "If they want me, we'll talk about it. Otherwise, I'll be looking for work. If Mama's Family makes it, I've signed for five years. Nighttime TV is six months work a year, six months off at twice the bread." Whatever the risks of such frankness, Lyman's ambition is never hedged with disclaimers. "Actors who tell you they became actors because they wanted to be in regional theaters their whole lives are simply lying," she says bluntly. "I spent 10 years putting other things in front of my career, and I'll tell you—at 35, I've got to make tracks."

People Magazine Picks and Pans Review: All My Children By Alan Carter 6/17/1985 ABC (1 p.m. ET) This is the Mercedes-Benz of soap operas, created by Agnes Nixon in 1970, and it still runs like a dream. It successfully combines topical issues and humor with the mandatory machinations of unwanted pregnancies, adultery and murder. The cast is first-rate; the actors appear to really enjoy what they're doing. Susan Lucci, daytime's favorite actress according to this year's PEOPLE readers' poll, was born to play the pouty black widow spider, Erica Kane. Who else could go to a somber funeral and tell a mourner, "Gee, Ellen, you look wonderful!"? (And that line was an ad-lib.) The show's dialogue is always crisp and clever. Remember Cynthia (Jane Elliott) and Ross (Robert Gentry) worrying about being blackmailed over their adulterous affair? A worried Cynthia: "The only way we'll survive is if I manage to stay on top of things." A snippy Ross: "That shouldn't be too hard for you—that's been your favorite position for years." How did that get by the censors? Michael Knight, who plays Tad "the Cad" Martin, is another scene-stealer in the grand theft class. When his ex-lover, the older Marian Colby (played by Jennifer Bassey), talked to him about her marriage plans to a well-to-do man, he said snootily: "Boy, Marian, congratulations. You were really able to hook a big one!" She snapped back: "Hooking is a poor choice of words, Tad!" Always owner of the last word, he said: "Okay, how about harpooning?" There's really very little this show does not do well. One exception was a tasteless story line about Erica searching out a Nazi war criminal. "I can't chase Nazis in South America—I don't have the right clothes!" That's not funny. Nor can anyone understand why the wealthy Palmer Cortlandt (James Mitchell) would still have his ex-mother-in-law working for him as a maid. (Perhaps it's the fantasy of every married man.) Nor have the scriptwriters satisfactorily explained why the equally wealthy Phoebe Tyler Wallingford (Ruth Warrick) would stick with her husband Langley (Louis Edmonds) after discovering that he was a con artist. Despite those relatively minor flaws, this is exactly the kind of daytime drama that makes you proud to say, "I love soap operas."