[2] Love of Life began, as most other television serials of that era, as a 15-minute program, airing at 12:15 pm Eastern Time (11:15 am Central).

To accommodate the new in-house serial Where the Heart Is, on September 8, 1969, CBS moved Love of Life ahead 30 minutes to 11:30/10:30, restoring it to a full 30-minute runtime.

This helped give NBC a major win in 1971 as Hollywood Squares, Jeopardy!, and the serial Days of Our Lives all reached the top-five-rated shows among daytime network programs.

On April 23, 1979, CBS moved Love of Life to the 4:00/3:00 pm slot that had opened up when the network canceled Match Game.

In September 1979, a new, daily, syndicated version of Match Game was introduced; in some markets, the show was aired against or, on CBS stations, in place of Love of Life.

Many West Coast stations, such as CBS-owned KNXT (now KCBS-TV) in Los Angeles, did this, as well, keeping Love of Life in tandem with the other soaps by airing it at 2:30 Pacific time, after Guiding Light.

Within 10 months, CBS realized that the 4:00 slot did not work for Love of Life in light of affiliate tape-delays and pre-emptions, and subsequently cancelled the show.

Meg was the schemer and all-around "bad" girl, as well as the mother of "Beanie" (later "Ben") Harper, originally played by Dennis Parnell.

The show was painted black-and-white in this regard, which was evident in the tagline recited at the beginning of each of the earlier episodes: "Love of Life: The exciting story of Vanessa Dale and her courageous struggle for human dignity."

Under the reins of Claire Labine and Paul Avila Mayer, the show returned to the original "good Vanessa, bad Meg" theme.

In one episode, Meg called her son's newborn daughter Suzanne a "bastard", one of the first times the word was spoken on daytime television.

After Labine and Mayer left in 1975 to develop the ABC serial Ryan's Hope, the show lost the original intended focus.

Emphasis was increased on gritty story lines (for example, Ben, now played by Chandler Hill Harben, was nearly raped while in prison serving time for bigamy), but these were not warmly received by the audience, and the ratings dropped.

In 1976, Rick Latimer (Jerry Lacy) and his wife Cal (Roxanne Gregory) welcomed a young vet Michael Blake (Richard E. Council) into their garage apartment.

The final shot of the series was of longtime director Larry Auerbach, portfolio in hand, walking through the empty sets and out the CBS Broadcast Center Studio 41 gate, as Tony Bennett's "We'll Be Together Again" played.