CAN SOAP REALLY HELP CHANGE THE WORLD?

There was a moment of remarkable significance in the history of American culture. September 1960 virtually all the long-running radio soap operas were being taken off the air. They were no longer attracting the vast audiences they had ever since the early 1930s. Shortly thereafter Americans realized a new young president, a Vietnam war, and a swarm of angry, tradition-shattering events called The Sixties.

Now 50 years later network television is doing what radio did -- taking the last of their soap operas off the air. Is it possible this national encore moment is about to foreshadow another shattering array of events?

But, soap operas...? Who cares...? Hold on, we might wish to care a great deal! During the 1930s, radio soap operas may have hardly been the lantern of literature, yet 20 million Americans a day (15% of the total population) were all listening all at the same live-time to these 15-minute washboard-weepers. Which was why sponsors were putting up 350 million in today's dollars every year for LIFE CAN BE BEAUTIFUL, OUR GAL SUNDAY, HELEN TRENT, MA PERKINS, and PEPPER YOUNG'S FAMILY. Among avid listeners were Cole Porter, Elsa Maxwell, and the Mayor of New York city.

What these 25-year running daytime serials lacked in literacy, they made up in relentlessly espousing the traditional virtues of work, honor, honesty, and respect for family and flag. Most of which began to steadily seem less relevant in the angry, free-spirited, anti-convention decades that followed.

James Thurber defined the genre: "A soap opera is a kind of sandwich whose recipe is simple enough, although it took years to compound. Between thick slices of advertising, spread 12 minutes of dialog, add predicament, villainy and female suffering in equal measure, throw in a dash of nobility, sprinkle with tears, season with organ music, cover with a rich announcer sauce, and serve 5 times a week."

His humor is valid, but may have missed the cutting edge to this maligned art form. For the generation who endured the Great Depression and then WWII, these daily cultural sandwiches helped feed the body politic with many of the very same virtues that were to see them through the agony of their times.

The television soaps now going off the air hardly embody the same "corny, post-Victorian" values. Could that be their loss..? and that of their audiences...? Hard to say, but for someone who grew up in those old radio days, I'm drawn to the poet James Grahame: "What strong, mysterious links enchain the heart to regions where the morn of life was spent."

Wish you had been there, to judge for yourself...