To Have and To Hold

The New York produced soaps recruited Broadway actors who worked the daytime small screen between "legitimate theater" jobs, many of the newer serials were being produced in Los Angeles with bigger budgets, the more popular shows were expanding from a half hour format to a full hour of daytime.

As huge as soaps were for the network, the same popularity which made them profitable made them very expensive for sponsors. Seeking an alternative, Bristol Myers entered a deal with Mutual to produce an hour long "umbrella program" called Radio Playhouse.

The Radio Playhouse umbrella covered "two soaps, a dramatized novel and a comedy". Each of the stories was targeted at women. Each of the shows, The Faces of Love, Author's Studio, The Little Things and Life and To Have and to Hold, took a 15 minute segment of the 3-4 pm block, Monday through Friday. Out of the hour, Bristol Myers got six minutes of advertising and the Mutual affiliates could sell 12 minutes to local sponsors.

To Have and To Hold, "The story of the traditional vows, the new morality, and the people caught in the conflict between them", has many of the elements of a '30s-'40s "washtub weeper" married with the production advances which were making CBS Radio Mystery Theater a popular radio hit in the post-Golden Era.

Centered around two families of doctors, To Have and to Hold opens with a pair of orphaned sisters discovering mementos of their past in the family attic. We learn that the younger sister Emily, who is married to handsome Dr. Jason, is doomed with a brain tumor. We also discover that her older sister, who introduced the couple, still carries a torch for jason.

See also: The Little Things in Life