Frank M. Hursley (November 21, 1902 – February 3, 1989) and Doris Hursley (September 29, 1898 – May 5, 1984) were a husband-and-wife team who wrote American serials.
The couple were writers on the Western series Have Gun, Will Travel, but became famous in the soap world starting in 1957 when they began writing for CBS Daytime's Search for Tomorrow. They continued to write Search for Tomorrow even after the show that they created, General Hospital had premiered. Another married couple of television writer, Theodore and Mathilde Ferro, wrote the show in its early months.
They created the medical drama General Hospital, for ABC Daytime in 1963; it was the first serious effort by that network to create a daytime serial. Today, General Hospital is the longest-running daytime serial on American television. The duo head wrote the show until 1973, when they handed the reins to their daughter and son-in-law, Bridget and Jerome Dobson. In 1969, the Hursleys created and wrote the NBC Daytime soap opera Bright Promise that starred Dana Andrews as college president Tom Boswell. However, they soon left that series and it was eventually cancelled in 1972. The Hursleys retired from writing serials.
Doris was the eldest daughter of Socialist Congressman Victor Berger and held a law degree from Marquette University. Frank Hursley left his first wife, Madeleine, and their one year old son, Frank Jr., both of Detroit and became an English professor at the University of Wisconsin's Milwaukee Extension. After Doris's divorce in 1935 from her first husband, Colin Welles, she married Frank in 1936. The couple began writing for radio during World War II and moved from their home in Thiensville, Wisconsin to California in 1946.
Their daughter Bridget also became a television writer, creating Santa Barbara.
Famous quotes containing the word frank:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spierings Lizzie (1985)