Our history: P&G put the ‘soap’ in 'soap opera'

Jeff Suess | Cincinnati Enquirer

Count soap operas among Procter & Gamble’s many successes. P&G was one of the first companies to sponsor daytime serial dramas on the radio in the 1930s to advertise their products to housewives. The shows were associated with sponsors such as P&G’s Oxydol, Duz and Ivory soaps and were dubbed “soap operas.”

P&G was prolific, producing several long-running soap operas for radio and television.

The company first dipped into radio in 1927, underwriting NBC’s “Radio Beauty School” to advertise Camay perfumed soap.

Then, in 1930, Chicago radio station WGN hired Irna Phillips of Dayton to write “Painted Dreams,” a domestic serial drama. The format was appealing to P&G, as research suggested women would prefer to be entertained while they did housework.

P&G had a top-notch radio studio in its own backyard with WLW, broadcasting from the Crosley Building in Camp Washington.

After trying out “The Puddle Family Radio Show” in 1932, P&G sponsored “Ma Perkins” at WLW, starting Aug. 14, 1933. The 15-minute serial was picked up for a nationwide rollout on NBC on Dec. 4, 1933, and production moved to Chicago.

“Ma Perkins,” sponsored by Oxydol laundry soap, starred Virginia Payne of Price Hill as the venerable widow who ran a lumberyard in the small Southern town Rushville Center and raised her three children. “The mother of all soap operas” was produced by Anne and Frank Hummert, the leading soap opera creators in the 1930s and ’40s.

The connection to Oxydol was so strong that the show was often called “Oxydol’s Own Ma Perkins.”

Although Oxydol dropped its sponsorship in 1956, “Ma Perkins” continued until Nov. 25, 1960, when all the remaining radio serials were canceled. The date became known as “the day radio drama died.”

Payne played Ma Perkins in all 7,065 episodes over 27 years. She later performed on Broadway, then moved back to Cincinnati and often appeared in productions for Playhouse in the Park. Payne died in her Clifton home in 1977, at age 67.

P&G sponsored numerous radio shows, including “Perry Mason,” “The Red Skelton Show,” “Truth or Consequences,” “The Road of Life,” “Dreft Star Playhouse” and “Against the Storm,” the only radio drama to win a Peabody Award.

Their most successful production was “The Guiding Light,” a soap opera created by Irna Phillips in 1937, and sponsored by P&G White Naphtha Soap. The series transitioned to television in 1952, but continued to also be broadcast on radio until 1956.

Procter & Gamble Productions produced several soap operas for television:

» “Guiding Light” (1952 to 2009) is listed in the “Guinness Book of World Records” as the longest-running TV drama, running 57 years. Including radio, it ran 72 years, a total of 18,262 episodes.

» “Search for Tomorrow” (1951-86) advertised P&G’s Joy dishwashing liquid and Spic and Span household cleaner.

» “The Brighter Day” (1954-62) was created by Phillips for radio in 1948, and was the only soap with an overt religious theme.

» “The Edge of Night” (1956-84) was conceived as a daytime version of “Perry Mason,” but Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner had a fight with CBS and backed out. Instead, “Edge” was a thinly veiled copy with John Larkin, who portrayed Mason on radio. The show was set in the fictional Midwestern town Monticello, but the opening credits showed the Cincinnati skyline.

» “As the World Turns” (1956 to 2010), Phillips’ sister show for “Guiding Light,” debuted the same day as “The Edge of Night” and became the second-longest running show, lasting 54 years.

» “Another World” (1964-99) was supposed to be a spinoff of “As the World Turns,” thus the name, but it was picked up by a different network.

“As the World Turns” ended its run on Sept. 17, 2010, the last P&G-owned soap opera.

Sources: “Historical Dictionary of American Radio Soap Operas” by Jim Cox, Old Time Radio Catalog (www.otrcat.com), “The Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising” edited by John McDonough and Karen Egolf, Old-Time Radio (www.old-time.com), Wikipedia, Enquirer archives