This Sunday, December 25th, you’ll be traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead — your next stop, the Twilight Zone! Submitted for your approval, December 25th is Rod Serling’s birthday. In my opinion, Rod Serling changed the face of modern entertainment. Serling’s writing was crisp, clear, and imaginative. He was a man of his time. His career began during Eisenhower’s Atomic Age, ascended during JFK’s New Frontier, and peaked during LBJ’s Great Society. His stories were socially conscious and always ended with an allegory that was as chilling as it was enlightening.
Rodman Edward Serling was born on December 25, 1924, to a Jewish family in Syracuse, New York. He spent most of his childhood 70 miles south of Syracuse in the town of Binghamton. Serling was an American screenwriter, playwright, television producer, narrator, and on-screen host, best known for his ground-breaking anthology television series The Twilight Zone. Serling was the second of two sons born to Esther (née Cooper, 1893–1958), a homemaker, and Samuel Lawrence Serling (1892–1945) an amateur inventor and butcher at the family grocery store until the Great Depression forced the store to close. Rod’s older brother, Robert J. Serling (1918-2010), was a novelist and aviation writer who wrote at least eight novels and sixteen books of nonfiction. His novel The President’s Plane Is Missing was made into a 1973 made-for-TV film starring Buddy Ebsen.
Rod’s father built his son a small stage in the basement of the family home, where Rod would put on plays with neighborhood children acting out the characters. In elementary school, Serling was remembered by classmates as the class clown and most of his teachers described their pupil as a lost cause. However, his seventh-grade English teacher, Helen Foley, encouraged him to enter the school’s public speaking events after school. He joined the debate team and was a speaker at his high school graduation. He began writing for the school newspaper, and quickly gained a reputation as a social activist. The 5 foot 4 inch tall Serling was involved in sports, and excelled at tennis and ping pong, but was considered too small for the varsity football team.
Instead, Serling turned to radio and began writing at an early age. He excelled in writing scripts for thrillers, fantasy, and horror shows. While a teenager, Rod worked at a Binghamton radio station and continued to write but never had anything published. He enrolled in Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio after his senior year at Binghamton Central High School in 1943 during World War II. Instead, he enlisted in the 11th Airborne Division of the U.S. Army. Serling began boxing while in the service. He competed as a flyweight and had 17 bouts, rising to the second round of the division finals before being knocked out. Serling’s “Berserker style” sometimes resulted in his getting his nose broken multiple times in a single bout. Serling served for three years including combat in the Philippines. He would reach the rank of Technician Fourth Grade (T/4) during his tour and suffer at least two wounds in combat. For his military service, Serling was awarded the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, and the Philippine Liberation Medal. Serling’s final assignment was as part of the occupation forces in Japan.
Serling’s wartime experience haunted him for the rest of his life. During his time in the Philippines, he saw death every day— death caused by enemies and allies alike. Gordon F. Sander’s 1992 book Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man, describes a freak accident witnessed by Serling. The accident took the life of a fellow Jewish private named Melvin Levy. Levy was delivering a comic monologue for the platoon as they rested under a palm tree when a food crate was dropped from a plane above, decapitating him. Serling led the funeral services for Levy and placed a Star of David over his grave. Serling later set several of his scripts in the Philippines and used the unpredictability of death as a theme in much of his writing.
After the war, Serling returned to Antioch College where he studied theater and broadcasting. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature in 1950. He tried his hand at Golden Gloves boxing, with little success. For extra money during his college years, Serling worked part-time testing parachutes for the U.S. Army Air Forces, receiving $50 for each successful jump. Serling was once paid $500 (half before and half if he survived) for a particularly dangerous jump test and he earned $1,000 for testing a jet ejection seat that had killed the previous three testers. His last test jump came a few weeks before his July 31, 1948 wedding to fellow student Carol Kramer.
In the late 1940s, Serling took odd jobs at radio stations in New York and Ohio. In 1950, Serling began his professional writing career at WLW radio in Cincinnati, where he was paid $75 a week as a network continuity writer. One of Rod’s first ideas was a weekly radio show named Adventure Express. The main characters were the ghosts of a young boy and girl killed in World War II, who would look through train windows and comment on day-to-day human life as it traveled around the country — very Rod Serling-like. By 1951, Serling moved from radio to television, as a writer for WKRC-TV in Cincinnati.
In 1956, Serling wrote, “Requiem for a Heavyweight” for the Playhouse 90 TV series. It was a critical success and by the autumn of 1957, the Serling family was in California. During television’s early days, shows were aired live, but as studios began to tape their shows, the business moved from the East Coast to the West Coast. In 1958, Serling submitted his first Twilight Zone script to CBS, an episode titled “The Time Element,” but the network used the science fiction script for a new show produced by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. The script tells the story of a man who has vivid recurring nightmares of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The man visits a psychiatrist and, after the session, the twist ending (a device which Serling became known for) reveals the “patient” had died at Pearl Harbor, and the psychiatrist was the one actually having the vivid dreams. The episode received so much positive fan response that CBS agreed to let Serling go ahead with his Twilight Zone weekly series idea. On October 2, 1959, the series premiered on CBS.
Serling used his own experiences in many of his episodes, boxing, military life, and airplane pilots were among his favorite subjects. Rod also used his Binghamton hometown for many settings in his shows, although he referred to it as “Homewood.” The Twilight Zone incorporated Rod’s social views on racial relations, carefully disguised in the science fiction and fantasy plots of the shows. The Twilight Zone aired for five seasons, winning many awards and critical acclaim for Serling. Although it had loyal fans, The Twilight Zone had only moderate ratings and was twice canceled and revived. In 1964, after five years and 156 episodes (92 written by Serling), Rod decided not to oppose its third and final cancellation. In 1969, NBC aired a television series written by Serling known as Night Gallery. Those too young to remember The Twilight Zone may remember Night Gallery. Set in a dimly lit museum after hours, the series featured Serling as the curator. Serling’s character introduced three tales of the macabre by unveiling paintings that would appear in the subsequent story segments. Night Gallery generally focused more on horror and suspense than The Twilight Zone did.
Serling lived in California for the rest of his life but kept property in Binghamton and Cayuga Lake as summer homes. Serling remained active in politics, both on and off the screen, and he helped form television industry standards. He was known as the “angry young man” of Hollywood, clashing with television executives and sponsors over a wide range of issues, including censorship, racism, and war. Serling, a three-pack-a-day smoker, suffered a heart attack on May 3, 1975, and was hospitalized for two weeks and released. He returned to his home in the Finger Lakes and two weeks later, he collapsed while mowing the lawn. That second heart attack led to a risky open-heart surgery procedure. They opened him up to find that he had suffered an aortic dissection — his aorta had just come apart completely, partly due to years of heavy smoking. The ten-hour-long procedure was performed on June 26, but Serling had a third heart attack on the operating table and died two days later (June 28, 1975) at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y. He was 50 years old.
Serling remains indelibly woven into modern popular culture because of his The Twilight Zone legacy. The show has been rerun, re-created, and re-imagined since going off the air in 1964. It has been released in comic book form, as a magazine, as a film, and in three additional television series from 1985 to 1989, from 2002 to 2003, and from 2019 to 2020. Serling’s work inspired Disney’s popular ride “The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror,” which debuted at Walt Disney World’s Hollywood Studios in 1994. Serling himself appears in the attraction through the use of repurposed archival footage, introducing him to the children and grandchildren of his 1960-1970s TV show. In the event that these new generations of Rod Serling fans desire to learn more, or just in case you need reminding yourself, take a moment to revisit a few of Serling’s closing statements from his Twilight Zone shows and remember that, although written six decades ago, they can still find relevance today.
“The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” aired March 4, 1960. “It isn’t enough for a sole voice of reason to exist. In this time of uncertainty, we are so sure that villains lurk around every corner that we will create them ourselves if we can’t find them — for while fear may keep us vigilant, it’s also fear that tears us apart — a fear that sadly exists only too often — outside the Twilight Zone.”
“The Obsolete Man” aired June 2, 1961. “Any state, entity, or ideology becomes obsolete when it stockpiles the wrong weapons: when it captures territories, but not minds; when it enslaves millions but convinces nobody; when it is naked, yet puts on armor and calls it faith, while in the Eyes of God it has no faith at all. Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under “M” for “Mankind” — in The Twilight Zone.”
“The Shelter” aired September 29, 1961. “No moral, no message, no prophetic tract, just a simple statement of fact: for civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized. Tonight’s very small exercise in logic from the Twilight Zone.”
“Death’s Head Revisited” aired November 10, 1961. “All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes — all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.”
“He’s Alive” aired January 24, 1963. “Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare — Chicago? Los Angeles? Miami, Florida? Vincennes, Indiana? Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry. He’s alive. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He’s alive because through these things we keep him alive.”
“I am the Night – Color Me Black” aired March 27, 1964. “A sickness known as hate. Not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ — but a sickness nonetheless, highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don’t look for it in the Twilight Zone — look for it in a mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether.”
Should you desire to revisit Rod Serling for the holidays, you might want to dig up the film Carol for Another Christmas, Rod Serling’s 1964 take on Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella A Christmas Carol developed to promote the United Nations. The film was the only television program ever directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and featured an all-star cast including Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden, Pat Hingle, Ben Gazzara, Steve Lawrence, Eva Marie Saint, Britt Ekland (Sellers’ wife at the time) and Jaws’ Robert Shaw. Not exactly a holiday classic but a good snapshot of Serling’s time nonetheless.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
