Summertime was spent working the yard in the mornings and then sit down lunch for Soap Opera watching time with my mom and grandmother. One Life to Live, General Hospital (I grew up during its heyday of Luke/Laura spy thrills) with the occasional Bold and the Beautiful, Young and the Restless and the Guiding Light thrown in. Let us not forget the night time soap's as well: Dallas and Dynasty were the big 2 for my mom. 

Occasionally, I watched Dallas because of J.R. Ewing and sometimes back then ... I was watching Dynasty with my girlfriend who was hooked on it. That's all the Soap Opera that I watched ... with that same girlfriend - I watched with her - All My Children that featured Susan Lucci as Erica Kane and she was her biggest fan. She met her about three times in her life as was thrilled by it. I'm not a Soap Opera Fan ... was forced too because of my girlfriends that wanted me to watch it with her.




Susan Lucci as Erica Kane

Growing up, both of my parents worked, so my sister and I got shipped off to a babysitter's house for the summer. Usually it was an older woman from either the neighborhood or the church, and soap operas were a regular staple of the afternoon around there. It was almost always Days of our Lives or General Hospital, and I have vague recollections of both the Bo/Hope courtship on DooL and the Luke/Laura phenomenon from GH.

When I got into high school, I started watching both General Hospital and Santa Barbara, as well as occasionally keeping up on Days. This carried through into college, which was a good move as md62 mentioned, because my room was right near the first floor elevator and the TV faced the hall, so girls were constantly stopping in to see what was happening, and they would usually stay through the end of the show.

In adulthood, I have alternated between Days and GH, although it has been a couple of years since I kept up with either one regularly; it was during my period of being laid-off back in 2016 when I was looking for things to do every day. I will occasionally watch GH on Hulu if I'm caught up on all of my other shows, and I do read the Soap Opera Digest in the checkout line at the grocery store to pass the time on Saturday mornings just so I know what is going on in case I want to pick any of them back up again as a regular pastime.

When home sick from school and on rainy summer days, yes, to a point. I got into General Hospital when they were doing the James Bond thing, with Robert Scorpio, The World Security Bureau, Nikos Consadine and the Ice Princess weather machine. It was too hokey not to watch.

The closest I ever came to actually following "soap opera" was professional wrestling. Pro Wrestling has traditionally been booked as serialized male-oriented soap opera. Same dynamics: evil heel who spins their plots and eventually gets a comeuppance, virtuous heroes who suffer endlessly, last minute rescues, surprise relatives, new actor in the role (sometimes, with masked wrestlers), temporary alliances, etc, etc. Storylines would play out on tv to entice fans to buy tickets to the matches, where the outcomes would be revealed, usually with a disputed finish, building the storyline until the final, winner-take-all match, with special stipulations. That changed drastically in the late 90s, with the Monday Night Wars (WWF and WCW broadcasting in opposing slots, on Monday nights) and the emphasis on ratings, to where they were throwing out storylines in favor of stunts to pop a rating. Much like the crossover events in comics, especially the 90s.

One of my grandmothers watched Search For Tomorrow, and so I remember watching that occasionally when visiting her--I remember Morgan Fairchild from that show. Oh and also Where The Heart Is--I believe these were both CBS shows.

Later on I became an ABC soaps watcher, but only All My Children and One Life to Live. These were the shows my friends and I rushed home from school to watch (my friends also liked Dark Shadows, @mrjupiter, but I never watched it).  And I never got into the very-popular General Hospital though I watched it every so often; same for Port Charles and Loving. But I followed AMC and OLTL on-and-off for years, even if during some of those years I kept up exclusively through the soap mags. Something that interests me about soaps--apart from the serialistic nature (a format I love)--is seeing the same actors pop up in different roles over the years. 

I finally stopped watching AMC and OLTL maybe 10 years ago or so, due to a combination of having no interest in newer characters and also due in part because the shows were canceled or something (I know they've been revived and/or shown via other channels). 

Now that you mention it, I recall my grandmother also watched Love of Life too so I caught a few episodes of that. I remember actor Jerry Lacy--I didn't know his name until much later, but he was very distinctive looking and much later when I on I saw him in other shows and movies I said hey, that's the same guy! Same thing happened with Morgan Fairchild, whom I mentioned in my earlier post.

And I should amend my earlier statement about rushing home from school to catch All MY Children and OLTL; it should have read "OLTL and Somerset" (an NBC soap). AMC was on mid-day, so that was just-for-summer fare. But during the school year my friends and I loved Somerset! I remember that Ann Wedgeworth played a character named Lahoma Lucas--that name really cracked me up. And then there was a very good-looking actor named Ernest Thompson who played someone named Tony, a kind of quiet, not-flashy character who nonetheless always seemed to be involved in a quite a few big storylines during the time I watched (which was only about a year or so).

Some years later there was a play on Broadway called "On Golden Pond" that was later made into a film starring Henry Fonda (his Oscar winner), Jane Fonda and Katharine Hepburn. The play was written by someone named Ernest Thompson. I remember thinking at the time, hmmm that's the name of that actor I liked in Somerset--and as I found out, yes, it was one and same person!