One of the best stories Tom Phillips remembers about his mother concerned her answer to the question of why she never got married.

Irna Phillips adopted Tom in 1941 and his sister a year later.

"Why the hell should I get married?" Irna said. "If I want to get in a fight, I will call those buffoons in Cincinnati."

The buffoons in question were the sponsors for the radio and television soap operas she created and wrote.

One of those soaps, "Guiding Light," is going off the air today after 72 years and 15,762 televised episodes. Phillips created it for radio in 1937 and shepherded its move to television in 1952. She is largely credited with inventing the soap opera genre and by all accounts you did not want to mess with her.

"She was made up 100 percent of the things that make cookies tough," Tom was saying Thursday.

"Guiding Light" going dark today has sparked renewed interest in Phillips, and as it happens, an abundance of her papers are stored at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. There are scripts from "Guiding Light" and other shows she wrote, as well as correspondence with colleagues, listeners, viewers and advertisers.

Not in Madison yet, but coming soon, is Phillips' unpublished autobiography. Tom discovered it earlier this year in a box after his sister died in Los Angeles. He's read it, and after his wife and kids read it, he plans to send it here. Irna Phillips attended graduate school in speech at UW-Madison in the 1920s, as did Tom - in American history - in the 1960s.

According to Tom, the autobiography reveals his mother's thought process when creating "Guiding Light" more than seven decades ago.

Earlier she had created the first soap, "Painted Dreams," a feel-good drama about an Irish-American mom imparting homespun wisdom to her daughter.

In her autobiography, Phillips wrote, "I cannot pinpoint when the transition occurred, but somehow along the way I had made up my mind that any writing I did in the future would be based on reality and not fantasy."

She started developing "Guiding Light." Writing earlier this month in the New York Times, Barbara Kantrowitz noted of Phillips: "Her decision to create central characters who were often professionals - doctors, lawyers, ministers - became a convention that most soaps have followed, with emotional scenes often taking place in hospitals and courtrooms."

Kantrowitz continued: "'Guiding Light' brandished a social conscious streak from the start; its name comes from the reading lamp in the window of the show's original main character, the Rev. John Ruthledge, who preached racial tolerance and spoke out against war and the injustice of poverty."

Phillips' papers at the historical society include several letters from attorneys explaining the significance of opening statements, closing arguments and other legal nuances Phillips wanted to include in her scripts.

"She cared greatly about the authenticity of her stories," Tom said.

She was incredibly prolific. In a 2005 article about Phillips in The Common Review, Les White noted it has been claimed that Phillips "wrote more words per year than Shakespeare had written in his entire life."

Born in Chicago, where she spent most of her life, Phillips used pluck and talent to rise to the top of a male-dominated profession. Her other successes included creating "As the World Turns." Some said she was tough to work with, but proteges like Bill Bell and Agnes Nixon used her inspiration to become soap opera legends themselves, Bell with "The Young and the Restless" and Nixon with "All My Children."

Phillips died in 1973. White wrote that today she's "largely forgotten," while noting there's a historical marker near her home on Chicago's Gold Coast calling Phillips "the mother of the soap opera."

She was a real mother, too, not easy to know, even for her son, but endlessly interesting. It was clear Tom enjoyed talking about her Thursday.

"I thought she was pretty cool," he said.

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