Marlena says: Before Beyond the Gates’ current tornado, other daytime soaps were visited by all manner of disasters. Here’s a vivid history of some of the memorable ones by soap historian Michael Poirier.
By Michael Poirier
How did the writers and producers shake up a soap opera in the early days of the genre? For many years, it was car accidents, house fires, shootings, etc. However, by the 1970s, these daytime dramas decided to open the budget wallet even more with natural disasters.
What inspired Robert Soderberg and his wife Edith Sommer to introduce meteorological catastrophes to the troubles of the denizens of As the World Turns, is unknown. Perhaps they noticed the deluge of disaster films such as The Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Earthquake? However, on Thursday, August 7, 1975, there were ominous signs of a storm coming. Not just any storm, but a tornado. The wind knocks over something in the window of Bob and Jen Hughes’ house. The newspaper on Dan Stewart’s desk declares there are tornado warnings in the central states.
The action picks up on Friday with Kim Dixon in her resort cottage in Centerville, which is a few hours away from Oakdale. Troubles over her love life prompted the getaway. The day before, Dan finds her and convinces her to marry him. She decides that, as soon as she gets back to Oakdale, she will fly to Nevada and get a divorce from John. Dan has left ahead of her due to a camping trip he promised young Betsy and Emmy. Kim’s car is unfortunately in the shop in Centerville but is almost fixed. Today she decides she will write a love letter to Dan, but she can’t find stationery. As she walks out the door to get some from the resort office, the radio interrupts with more warnings. The watch area includes Centerville and surrounding areas.
Kim writes her letter, but now she can’t find a stamp in her purse. She leaves the porch to look for a stamp in her other purse. The announcer breaks in on the radio: the sto warning is in effect until 5 P.M., but Kim cannot hear the radio. It’s now just after 3 P.M. When Kim returns from the other room, the music is playing again, but the wind has picked up, scattering her papers all over.
Although not a major cliffhanger, the viewers are clued in that something big will happen when the show picks up again on Monday. They are right. Now she has to close the window because the curtains are blowing all over the place. Her car should be ready soon and she begins packing. Remembering her radio, she enters the porch area and is alarmed by the ferocity of the storm. Just then, the announcer cuts in that motorists have seen a tornado just seven miles east of Centerville. Turning off the radio, she runs to the window. Stock footage of a tornado is used to show it’s headed straight for her cottage. They focus on Kim’s anguished face as the noise is deafening.
Tuesday picks up with the last few minutes of the previous episode, but now the beleaguered heroine runs for the door. The intensity of the wind rips the door off the hinges as Kim covers her face and her vase of daisies falls to the floor.
Barely fifty episodes later, nature again changes the course of the people’s lives in Oakdale when Kim’s sister Jen is killed in a car accident. The cause of the accident? Her car skids off a slick road on a rainy evening, following Nancy Hughes’ disastrous birthday party where Norman Garrison has a cardiac arrest.
Under water in Sunset Beach
A few years later, the ratings-challenged the NBC soap The Doctors’ attempts to portray a similar storm the week of November 12, 1979. It continued through the end of the month. A combination hurricane and tornado hits the town of Madison. Where was Madison? According to Barbara Morgenroth, the show’s final headwriter, the network said it was just outside Providence, Rhode Island. Intermittent stock footage shows big flying debris, including traffic lights, broken building windows, and power lines blowing in the winds. This time, we see the heavily damaged sets resulting from the disaster. Steve and Carolee Aldrich’s house is practically destroyed. Eastside General Hospital sustains considerable damage as Steve and Colin Wakefield are trapped in the rubble. Maggie Powers and Matt Garner are as well while that area catches fire with the possibility of a gas explosion. Unrealistically, Viveca Strand’s houseboat doesn’t show any sign of rocking.
All My Children sent a few of their characters on a ski vacation to Zurich, Switzerland. Unfortunately, Chuck Tyler and his ex-wife Donna Cortlandt are caught up in a blizzard while in the Alps but find shelter in a cave. Their lovemaking, while facing death, leads to her pregnancy. Her husband Palmer knows he’s sterile. At the same time, Edge of Night, was also in Switzerland, but the only complication was Raven nearly being murdered, plotted by the faux Sky Whitney.
One of the most spectacular disasters on a daytime drama was the earthquake on Santa Barbara. The show was only a few months old and needed shaking up, literally and figuratively. Taking advantage of being set in California, show creators Jerry and Bridget Dobson crafted a disaster that would have made Irwin Allen proud. People from the network leaked that audience testing found many of the characters unrelatable to viewers. According to veteran columnist Tom Shales of The Washington Post, the network even, briefly, considered getting rid of most of the characters.
He spoke with producer Jill Farren Phelps, who set the story straight. It was never designed to solve ratings problems, she insisted. “Actually, we are not cleaning house,” she said. “We are only going to have one fatality. We hope this will be very positive. It will bring out the good and the bad in all our characters. The idea was to bring everybody to a certain point in the story and hit them with a catastrophe. We’re really only killing one character who would have met a demise anyway.”
Contradicting other sources, she claimed this event was not due to suggestions from the research department. While filming on location, they experienced a real earthquake registering a 4.7 on the Richter scale. “That was a little spooky,” said Ms. Phelps. Waxing nostalgic, she stated, “We destroyed the most beautiful set we have.” Who was the victim? Blue collar patriarch, John Perkins. The fateful day began airing on November 9, 1984. The ceiling collapses on young Brandon DeMott and a heavy bookcase falls on C. C. Capwell at the Andrade house. Ted Capwell is caught in a cave. Eden Capwell watches the ground open up at her mother’s grave and finds it empty. Augusta Lockridge falls off a cliff and is hanging onto roots and branches when her husband Lionel arrives to rescue her. Minx Lockridge hides in a sarcophagus. Cruz Castillo rescues Rosa and Rueben Andrade from the collapsing Capwell mansion.
Did it move ratings? No. In fact, by the end of the year, Search for Tomorrow surpassed it in the ratings at the start of 1985 for a few weeks. However, the show’s rating did improve throughout the year as it found its groove with romantic couples like Cruz and Eden, witty dialogue, more exciting storylines, and other appealing goings on. To learn more, you can read about it in Melissa Braverman Spear’s upcoming book on the iconic soap opera.
What do you do when a soap is on its last legs? New producer John Whitesell and returning Headwriter Gary Tomlin decided a catastrophic flood should wash away the mythical town of Henderson.
Whitesell spoke to many journalists about his thoughts and plans for Search. He told Mark Schwed, “We don’t want to wash 34 years of history down the drain… It is a new birth, like a baptism… Search for Tomorrow has been floundering for a while.”
He further discussed how he came to his decisions with Connie Passalacqua. “We’re beginning anew. The only difference between starting a new show and doing what we’re doing is this: We have the advantage of having established characters that the audience cares about.”
Continuing, he informed her, “Unlike earthquake it’s something you can fight against and recover from quickly. It brings people together. And it’s a great metaphor for washing away the
problems of our past. We’re going to cleanse ourselves and start over.” The estimated cost of the flood and creating new sets was estimated to be between $200,000 and $300,000.
Where would he take the vulnerable show, which was languishing at the bottom of the Nielsen’s? He explained it to Lynda Hirsch. “For a half-hour show, we can’t do five stories a day and have thirty-six characters. I want each day to count for something. I want a viewer to walk away with a special feeling after every episode. Whether it’s a feeling of lightness from a comic moment, or a feeling of intense emotion, romance – every episode should produce some special
feeling… We may take one day and follow a single character. We truly want Search for Tomorrow to be different.” In an ironic scene, the show’s indomitable heroine, Jo (played by Mary Stuart for the entire run) was seen clinging to dear life waiting for rescue, just like the show itself. The ratings did not budge, Whitesell and Tomlin were replaced, and by the fall of 1986, the ratings continued to drop heavily. The show’s last episode aired on December 26, 1986.
Probably the most impressive disaster in daytime history was the tornado that swept through Pine Valley on All My Children. In a twist of fate, a suburb of Philadelphia was hit by a tornado just as the storyline aired. Multiple people were killed and over thirty were injured in the real-life tragedy. Almost all of the major characters on the show were attending a party at the Chandler mansion when tragedy struck. The tornado swept through the ballroom and the special effects were incredible for viewers like me.
What happened when disaster struck Pine Valley
I spoke with Hal Corley, the multiple Emmy award winner who was the Associate Headwriter of All My Children at the time. Having rewatched the sequence directed by James Baffico, he said, “It looks as spectacular as I remember it.” Corley emphasized how this event created much more story for Pine Valley’s citizens. “The tornado was the catalyst for a major AMC romance: Julia Santos and Noah Keefer. Julia (Sydney Penny) was hit by a chandelier and left with a huge facial scar. Her sister Maria (Eva La Rue) gave her rudimentary stitches, but she saw herself as a monster and fled to Center City (Philadelphia) where she was taken in by Noah. It was purposefully a reverse gender Beauty and the Beast. The beautiful young woman, deformed, found solace with a renegade. The story created a near super couple, that years later resulted in their wedding. Tad also had a near death experience, and saw his dead sister, but fans probably will remember Sydney Penny’s character’s descent and rescue more.”
Sunset Beach, set in California, used an earthquake to show that shifting plates could also cause a tsunami. The show’s cast was divided so that some experienced the devastation of the tremors on land, while others on a cruise found themselves at the mercy of the tidal wave that flipped their ship completely upside down.
I asked journalist Lisa Guerrero, then the actess who played Francesca Vargas, about her experiences doing this Poseidon Adventure homage. “At the time that I was hired, I had no idea that that was going to be the premise of my character’s introduction. And I’m not a good swimmer and I’m very insecure about water and swimming underwater. And so, I was thrilled to have been hired, but at the same time I was terrified to go underwater on multiple sets. And to be in the costume I was in, which was a kind of spaghetti strap gown, and to swim underwater and to retain the dialogue that I had to remember at the time. So, at any rate, it was just it was a wild introduction.”
As this is being written, the production team at Beyond the Gates will introduce a catastrophic storm that will be sure to change the lives of those in its path. As they say, stay tuned.
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Postscript: Thank you to Hal Corley and Lisa Guerrero for sharing their memories.
What a great article! I remember many of these disaster stories.