Warning: this is long. I know, "get a blog."
My older sister watched in the late 70s, so I remember a little about the Lassa Fever stuff. And little Jeremy getting sick. My grandfather watched too, and I remember the Heather LSD stuff, Steven Lars/PJ, and Tracy holding Edwards medication while he had his (fake) heart attack, seeing some of those episodes while at my grandparents' house.
I recall a Cape Cod vacation, the family would spend the mornings on the beach, have lunch and come home. I was big into Casper comic books, so they'd let me watch the Casper cartoons at 2:00 or 2:30, but at 3:00 we'd switch over to GH. It must have been 1980, I had just turned 12, because I remember L&L on the run, dancing at the department store, sleeping with the blanket hung to separate the bed. My sister oohed and aahed, and my mother told her it was a rip-off from "It Happened One Night".
Driving home from that vacation, we had a copy of Soap Opera Digest in the car, so I'd quiz my sister on the GH cast list. Who played Alice Grant? Lieux Dressler! Amy Vining? Shell Kepler! It was reading that copy of SOD when I realized that soaps weren't just love stories, they had mysteries and murders, too! (In addition to Casper, I loved Agatha Christie novels.)
With that, I was hooked, especially the Heather Webber stuff. I'd watch even if my sister was working that afternoon. The Diana Taylor story - this isn't just nostalgia talking - was so well done. Bringing it to a slow boil, and plotting out details. Heather learning the Webber's had a gun in their home (where her mother was the housekeeper), stealing the gun and hiding it in the plastic head of the doll belonging to Sarah, her roommate in the sanitarium. Learning she resembled Nurse Shelly Vernon when she pinned her hair up. Hearing Shelly tell a mechanic that the spare key to her car was hidden in the wheel-well. Stealing the nurses' uniform when she worked in the laundry room and hiding it under her mattress, and plotting the big escape from Forest Hills to kill Diana and reunite with Jeff and her son. This took months to play out, but they were addressing all the details of the crime. You'd never see that today.
I watched GH until 85 or so, part way through high school, but also read SOD religiously, and tuned into other soaps when I could when they had a good mystery going. (Original Silver Kane on AMC in 82-83 was second only to Diana Taylor in my book.)
It's funny, I followed all the soap storylines through junior high/high school, once in college I'd watch one on occasion, but that was it. I have some awareness of stories or characters on soaps, but post-1990, I'd never get hooked into them again the way I once had.
