A Guiding Light Thanksgiving Blooper On the First Televised Holiday Show

Soap Hub contributing writer Alina Adams has a historical fiction novel, Go On Pretending, coming out on May 1, 2025, set in the world of radio and television soap operas! Travel back in time with heroine Rose Janowitz, who works under Irna Phillips, creator of multiple classic soap operas, including Painted Dreams, The Brighter Day, As the World Turns, Another World, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, and The Guiding Light. (The was dropped from the title in 1975 to sound more modern.)

History Lesson

GL premiered on radio on January 25, 1937. It made the move to television on June 30, 1952. Their first Thanksgiving episode was that November. Things didn’t go smoothly. What happened, exactly? We’ll let Rose tell you in this excerpt from Go On Pretending…

The Way We Were

Irna’s hands were currently too full with the television broadcast. Not a week went by that Rose didn’t hear about some mishap during the live broadcast, whether it was needing to make actors in their twenties look like they were in their thirties by adding white tufts to their foreheads, which they dubbed “little gray wings” – and were constantly loosening when they ran their fingers dramatically through their hair, or the Thanksgiving episode when, not only did the prop man forget to put a turkey in the oven, leaving actress Charita Bauer to peek inside, slam it shut and chirp, “I think it needs a few more minutes!” but an actor’s head kept getting in the way whenever the camera would track around the festive meal. With each circuit, elderly Theo Goetz was forced to duck under the table.

Back To the Future

What happens next? How do they fix their technical problems? What other Guiding Light secrets will be revealed? Learn more about Go On Pretending, here!