From The Scoop: Romance of Helen Trent

From the July 7 issue of Gemstone Publishing's The Scoop:
You gotta love a series that lasts for nearly 30 years and the heroine never ages a day.

You're probably thinking Susan Lucci, right? Guess again. We're talking about The Romance of Helen Trent, a show whose star (played by Virginia Clark until 1944 and by Julie Stevens until 1960) was 35 years old from 1933 until 1960. Can you imagine?

One of the precursors to the modern-day soap opera, The Romance of Helen Trent was full of melodramatic departures and returns, lost loves, thwarted trysts, high hopes dashed by gradiose revelation, peril and evil and death--not necessarily in that order.

As its name suggests, the show focused on Helen's pursuit of a pure and abiding love--something she nearly but never found during the show's 27-year run. In fact, just before her last prodigious paramour was set to return to her, her own death was written into the show... so that it ended on a properly histrionic note after 7,222 episodes!

Billed as "the queen of soaps," producers reportedly used the Helen character to prove that plans for love and marriage need not be abandoned over the age of 30. And yet Helen's untimely passing before securing a wedding-band-bearing beau did much to dissolve that then-ambitious claim.

Two premiums from the series were released in 1949--a radio replica mechanical brass badge and a silvered brass medallion. The former is worth just $90 in mint condition, while the latter is worth a mere $35.

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