In October 1930, the Chicago radio station WGN began airing Painted Dreams, a long-running “serial drama” set in an Irish-American household. Its central character was Mother Moynihan, a resilient widow who offered homespun good sense to the two younger women who lived with her.
The show’s writer was Irna Phillips, a former teacher turned radio actress. When Phillips fell out with WGN a couple of years later, she began writing similar “serial dramas” for rival stations.
Aired during the daytime and featuring strong woman characters, the original Depression-era radio “serial dramas” were aimed at American housewives and soon gained the interest of corporations keen to target this key market for their products. In 1932, soap manufacturer Procter & Gamble sponsored The Puddle Family, followed swiftly by the long-running Ma Perkins. And so was born the soap opera and the golden age of US radio sponsorship.
For the next almost 30 years, the twistingly plotted, melodramatic soap operas became inseparably linked in the audience’s imagination with the brands they were designed to promote.
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The emergence of television killed the old-style radio soap opera in the United States, although one of them, Guiding Light, created by Phillips in 1937, morphed into a television soap, and ran until 2009, making it one of the longest-running of its kind.
Procter & Gamble invested more than any other company in the soap opera. One of the company’s founders was the Irish immigrant James Gamble. Born to Methodist preacher George Gamble and his wife, Mary, outside Enniskillen in 1803, James was educated at Portora Royal School before emigrating with his family to the United States when he was 16.
George Gamble had intended to settle at Shawneetown, Illinois, but during their journey down the Ohio river, James became ill, and the family were forced to stop in Cincinnati. James began his career as an apprentice to a soap manufacturer, before setting up his own business in the late 1820s.
In the early 1830s he married Elizabeth Ann Norris. Elizabeth’s father, Alexander, was also an Irish immigrant and suggested to James that he go into business with another of his sons-in-law, William Procter, a candlemaker from England. Thus began Procter & Gamble.
Cincinnati was the ideal base for the company. The city was nicknamed Porkopolis in the 19th century because of its role as a hub for animal slaughtering and meat packing, and animal fat was essential for the production of both candles and soap.
It was the US civil war, however, that sealed the company’s fortunes. On the eve of the war, the company bet big by buying large quantities of rosin from suppliers in New Orleans. (Rosin is a resinous material obtained from pine trees and other plants, mostly conifers).
Rosin was then essential for the manufacturing of soap. When the war began, and other manufacturers could no longer lay their hands on supplies of rosin, Procter & Gamble was in prime position to win the contract to supply candles and soap to the Union Army.
Procter & Gamble’s distinctive moon and stars logo, imprinted on the soap crates being shipped to the front, soon became widely recognisable – an example of modern branding.
After the war, millions of veterans returned to their homes across the country, now familiar with Procter & Gamble’s products and their distinctive logo. Among the company’s most famous products was a floating bar of soap developed by James Gamble’s chemist son, James N Gamble.
In the postwar era, the company was one of the first in the United States to invest heavily in national newspaper advertising. In the 20th century, Procter & Gamble sponsored radio and television drama and even established its own TV production company.
The most famous US soap opera the company produced was probably the much parodied As The World Turns, which was on air from 1956 to 2010. The most dramatic episode aired on November 22nd, 1963.
In the mid-1960s, the show was still broadcast live. At 1.40pm, the actors were performing from New York City when a CBS news bulletin interrupted to inform the watching public that president John F Kennedy had been shot. Because there was no camera ready in the CBS studio, Walter Cronkite delivered the news by audio only, informing the watching public of events in Dallas.
Oddly, CBS returned to As The World Turns for a couple of minutes before a decision was made to cut back to Cronkite. By 2pm, the cameras were ready and the US networks began four days of uninterrupted coverage of Kennedy’s assassination and funeral.
Interspersed throughout the half-hour of As The world Turns and Cronkite’s news bulletins that day were advertisements for laundry starch, fabric softener, instant coffee and dog food.
There were none for soap.
