The Nixon Era

Honoring The Legendary Legacy Of The Late Agnes Nixon.

- Mara Levinsky

The daytime community is mourning the passing of Agnes Nixon, legendary creator of ALL MY CHILDREN and ONE LIFE TO LIVE, who succumbed to complications of Parkinson’s disease on September 28. She was 93.

A Chicago native, the former Agnes Eckhardt was born on December 10, 1922, raised in Nashville, and graduated from Northwestern University. In 1951, she married Robert Nixon, who passed away in 1996; they had four children, Cathy, Mary, Emily and Robert, 10 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Nixon began her career under the tutelage of Irna Phillips, creator of GUIDING LIGHT and AS THE WORLD TURNS, working as a writer on the radio serial WOMAN IN WHITE and, on television, for ATWT, GL, ANOTHER WORLD and SEARCH FOR TOMORROW (she served as SFT’s first head writer). When she became GL’s head writer in 1958, she began cultivating her reputation for crafting socially relevant tales, like the 1962 story of Bert Bauer’s uterine cancer, inspired by the death of a friend from cervical cancer.

In 1965, she created ALL MY CHILDREN for CBS and Procter & Gamble. “I wanted more authority, more freedom,” she explained to Digest in 2010. “I wanted my own thing!” When CBS opted not to bring AMC to air, Nixon became AW’s head writer, crafting one of the defining romantic triangles in daytime history, Rachel/Steve/Alice. “ANOTHER WORLD was very low in the ratings and it became the most popular show in daytime,” Nixon told the magazine.