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When you hear the name “Daisy,” what springs to mind? The Great Gatsby? Princess Peach’s brunette sister in Mario games? A flower? If you were a young parent in the late ΚΌ80s, it might be Guiding Light.
Frank Dicopoulos, who played the character Frank Cooper for over 30 years on the long-canceled but not forgotten daytime soap, recently reflected on its legacy for Remind Magazine.
“Guiding LightΒ was one of the most realistic shows and honest shows that didn’t deal with too much craziness,” Dicopoulos said β perhaps forgetting Frank Beaty as the cross-dressing killer Brent Lawrence/Marion Crane or Stephen Joyce’s nefarious bomb plot as Eli Sims.
“The Lillian Raines (Tina Sloan) cancer storyline was important. And when Beth Ehlers came on, her character Harley was pregnant, and we had a decision of keeping the baby or not,” Dicopoulos continued. “She chose to keep the baby and to this day, I can’t tell you the number of people that come up and say that they named their child Daisy after Harley’s baby, or they kept the child because she decided to keep the child. Now, if that doesn’t blow your mind, I don’t know what does.”
Dicopoulos’ Frank was introduced in 1987 alongside his teenage sister, Ehlers’ Harley Cooper. Harley’s agonizing deliberation over how to proceed with her pregnancy captured the attention of the devoted Guiding Light audience even over characters’ they’d been following for decades. In Sept. 1987, Susan “Daisy” Lemay was born on a highway after Harley and Frank got in a car accident on the way to the hospital.
Data from the Social Security Administration (via BabyCenter.com) reveals that at only 444 babies per million, Daisy was at one of its lowest points of popularity in over 100 years. But just the next year the name surged nearly 50 percent to 655, and by the end of the decade, had reached a level of saturation it hadn’t enjoyed since 1935 β though there’s no telling how influential Driving Miss Daisy‘s 1989 release was on that 1990 tally.
Arthur Cohen/CBS/Courtesy Everett
Though it wasn’t the first soap opera, Guiding Light boasts the distinction of being the longest-running scripted program in American broadcast history. The series began as an NBC radio serial called The Guiding Light in 1937 before making the switch to TV in 1952. The series navigated the transition to color, the rise of cable, and the explosion of soaps like General Hospital and Days of Our Lives in the 1960s, but was eventually canceled in 2009.
Dicopoulos played a significant role in the latter half of the series’ long life as Frank Achilles Cooper Jr., who worked his way up from lowly car mechanic and sometime chop-shop owner to the esteemed chief of police in the show’s Springfield, Ill., setting.
Among his proudest accomplishments are acting alongside future stars like Murray Bartlett, who played Cyrus Foley (“He was a really, really nice guy”) and Matt Bomer, who played Ben Reade (“I saw him recently and it was big hugs”). But he reserved special praise for Brittany Snow, who played his niece Daisy from 1998-2001 and who Dicopoulos now says is “k—ing ass.”
