Former As the World Turns star Scott Bryce (ex-Craig) recently took part in a reunion on YouTube along with former co-stars Hillary B. Smith (ex-Margo) and Gregg Marx (ex-Tom).
Scott Bryce: As The World Turns Memories
The Daytime Emmy-nominated Bryce shared, among other tales, a story as to how ATWT helped former press secretary James Brady partially recover from injuries he received during an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.
The year was 1981 and Brady was shot six times when John Hinckley Jr. made an attempt on the life of the President. Hinckley discharged his weapon, striking Brady, who suffered, among other injuries, a severe brain injury.
Brady required the use of a wheelchair after the shooting and also needed to relearn how to speak. Bryce shared on The Locher Room that Brady studied ATWT in order to regain certain faculties.
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“[The shooting] affected his speech dramatically,” Bryce recalled. “When he was in rehab, he needed to re-learn how to speak. He did it by watching As the World Turns. [The show] was his like his rehab.” Brady, according to Bryce, became a fan of not only the show but of his and Craig’s in particular. Brady, in fact, was so much of an admirer, he asked if he could visit Oakdale in person. An invitation was extended!
“So, he and his wife came to visit the CBS Broadcast Center and watch the show,” Bryce recalled. “I got to have lunch with him. I asked him how did As the World Turns help him learn how to speak? He said, ‘Well, you guys repeat everything.'”
The following year, Brady returned for another visit only this time he brought with him numerous other politicians and a security detail. “It was [Craig’s] son’s birthday and Sierra (Finn Carter) was thought dead [at the time],” recalled Bryce, who remembers the visual of several actors and several politicians facing one another. He quips that if a photo were taken of that moment “the caption would read, ‘I could do that!'”
On August 4, 2014, Brady died in Alexandria, Virginia. The medical examiner decreed that Brady’s death was a homicide as his passing was directly related to the gunshot wound he suffered in 1981. Because Hinckley had been found not guilty by reason of insanity, he did not face additional charges.
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