Springfield (Guiding Light)

Springfield, Illinois is the setting of the television soap opera Guiding Light. It is generally portrayed as a small city or large town in the midwest, and circa 2008 is more specifically named as in the show's opening sequence. The township is also next to a lake large enough to have a lighthouse. Over the years, the town has become the center of major corporations, family drama and events that mark Springfield as one of the most memorable settings of the daytime drama.

Springfield was proximal to other midwestern soap cities, such as Bay City (Another World) and Oakdale (As the World Turns). Bay City and Oakdale, in their storylines, are located in the state of Illinois (in real life, there is an unrelated Oakdale, Illinois), so, ostensibly, Springfield would also be in the same state (or possibly an adjacent state).

A handful of brief references—such as a bar's sign in the July 6, 2009 episode—have given the state as Illinois; however the real Springfield, Illinois is the state capital and much larger than the town usually represented on Guiding Light. On the show's last episode, airing September 18, 2009, a car with Illinois license plates was shown leaving the town's public park.

The real-life Springfield Township, LaPorte County, Indiana is a good fit distance- and location-wise, but is much too small, while Springfield, Ohio is about the right size, but too far away. In other references, most recently in a check written by the character Alexandra Spaulding (played by Marj Dusay), Springfield is a generic city merely located in "United States" (much like Salem on Days of Our Lives and the Springfield depicted in The Simpsons). However, envelopes addressed to various characters showed a ZIP code beginning with 6; Illinois ZIP codes begin with 6. But Springfield was always identified in those addresses as Springfield, U.S.A. In a late-1980s episode of As the World Turns a highway mileage sign showed Springfield to be 90 miles from Oakdale. In another late-'80s episode the teenage characters of Andy Dixon, Lien Hughes, and Paul Stenbeck mentioned going to a high-school basketball game between Oakdale and Springfield. The original setting of Guiding Light was Five Points, Illinois, followed by Selby Flats, California; the location changed to Springfield in 1966 when the show's core family, the Bauers, relocated there.

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