Remembering Dawn Rollo: Daytime's First AIDS Victim

In 1988, daytime's first character with AIDS, ANOTHER WORLD's Dawn Rollo, died from the disease. On July 4th of that year, her fiance, Scott LaSalle, gave a speech in her memory at an AIDS benefit in Bay City. You can read it below.

I have a lot of statistics here, but that's not what this is all about. You know what it's all about. It's about you and me, and everyone of us everywhere. This disease has come into our lives and is effecting all of us, personally or indirectly, one way or another. It's an indiscriminate killer. It's taking human lives. It's taken pieces and chunks of our lives every day. Just think about it. It's taken away our music, our laughter, our hope, our friends, and our loved ones. I pray to God every day when I wake up no one remotely suffers the type of loss that I've gone through.

I lost someone who I loved and who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. And all through that all I could do for her is just be there for her. I'm sick and tired of just being there. We have to fight this thing and we have to fight it now so that someday and someday soon I hope and pray that we can look back and we can say, "Yeah, it was a living hell but we beat it." And we will beat it. We have to beat it. We have to beat this thing. I know that's why we 're all here today.

This is quite profound for the time. We hope a daytime soap will tackle this issue again soon.

You can watch a clip of Scott's speech here. You can watch a clip of Ronnie singing a song Dawn wrote before her death here.