Chapter 4
I EASILY IMAGINE MY dad as a little boy, because even as an adult there is something magically childlike about him, so endearingly silly, that I feel in some ways I know the boy almost as well as I know the man.
Frequently, he talks about his parents. He called his mother “Dearest.” He adored her, and she him, but it is his father, Sam, he will most often tell me about. It is the memories of my grandfather that make my dad stop midsentence, immobilized, and look away for a moment while he gathers back his voice. He doesn’t just miss his father; these aren’t merely transitory emotions. This loss, for my dad, is like an amputation. It is an almost constant, unvarying ache.
Sue Fisher Hersch, a close lifetime friend of his, told me once, “Sam worshipped your dad.” Clearly it was mutual.
I did not know either of my father’s parents. His mother, Esther, died when I was a baby; and Sam, long before. I’ve often envisioned their lives, their joys, regrets, their voices and personalities, more as an extension of my father than the other way around. In my grandfather’s face, there is a certain amused expression, much like my father’s, although physically, my dad looks more like his mother, her coloring, her tanned complexion, her black, wavy hair and dark brown eyes. I am struck by the similarities in a particular photograph of the three of them together, all turned toward the camera, grinning, the bull terrier—Tony—on my grandfather’s lap. I imagine the moments that follow. My father waving to his parents, running off to play, this boy with the sparkling brown eyes who in just a little time will go off to war with his friends and be forever changed.
When we sit outside in the sun together, my father tells me fragments of my grandparents’ past. He tells me what brought them to upstate New York, the deplorable conditions that drove his parents to leave Eastern Europe.
His mother Esther was born in Lithuania. Her father, Meyer Cooper, came to the States—leaving behind his wife and nine children—to escape famine and religious persecution and to earn enough to bring his family over. Since he did not have any trade or profession, his brother helped him buy a horse and wagon, and he started buying and selling scrap iron and discarded materials for a living. He continued his peddling for about three years, alone, covering the roads of Cayuga and Onondaga County between Auburn and Syracuse in upstate New York. Finally he accumulated enough money, and when Esther, my grandmother, was three, she and her mother and eight siblings came to America. By then Meyer had opened a meat market in Auburn, New York, which he was able to develop into a chain of successful grocery stores.
Meyer had a short, pointed beard and was very stern looking. Eventually he became successful and respected, but he always had trouble with English. He held picnics for his employees during the prosperous days of the business. Every year he made a speech that some didn’t want to hear, and they would go around the corner and shoot craps. Meyer found out about this, and one year before beginning his speech warned, to the amusement of all, “No crappin’ on the grass.”
Not much is known of my grandfather’s family except that he was born in Detroit. His father, Isaac, moved there from Russia and married a fifteen-year-old girl, Anna, who was deaf. They moved to Syracuse where Isaac owned a junk business.
Sam and Esther met in Auburn. When they decided to marry, they were given five hundred dollars as a wedding present and went to Panama for their honeymoon. Sam had been offered a job there as a stenographer for Colonel George Washington Goethals, who was overseeing the massive task of constructing the new Panama Canal.
The year was 1915. My grandparents were just beginning their new life together. They knew no one in Panama. One day Sam must have tapped a stranger’s shoulder, asking, “Please, we’re on our honeymoon, could you take our picture?” And waiting, he pulled Esther closer and draped his arm around her. There they are in black and white, palm trees in the distance. Esther is looking at Sam, not at the camera. Their clothing looks dated now. Their smiles are not.
A corner of the photograph has peeled away, a part of the image gone; some of the history lost. With Sam away working, it is not an easy time; Esther did not anticipate the extended stay. She is far away from her family and friends and, I imagine, lonely. I wonder, while my grandfather worked, did she send postcards home? Did she write, “The days are tedious; they are hot and long and hard”?
Esther, in fact, contracts yellow fever during their stay in Panama and almost dies.
They are gone for two years and finally move back to the United States, to Syracuse, New York, where Sam goes to work for his father-in-law. Esther is pregnant with Robert, my father’s older brother. But because of the residual effects of yellow fever, it is a difficult birth.
After Bob is born, the doctor gives them the crushing news: this will be their only child. He says it is impossible for her to carry another, and true to his warning, a baby girl is stillborn a few years later. Seven years later, however, the doctor is proven wrong.
December 25, 1924, Esther and Sam are rushing to the Good Shepherd Hospital. Hurriedly, they call a neighbor to watch Bob. A few hours later, a healthy baby boy is born. They name him Rodman Edward Serling.
Although Jewish, the family also celebrates Christmas, and my dad will one day say, “I was a Christmas present that was delivered unwrapped.”
Bob does not recall this arrival so idyllically. No one has time to put together his new toy, an electric train, that Christmas morning. His parents are still at the hospital, and only a neighbor is there to watch him. He sits on the floor, tears through the red wrapping, and attempts to put the train together himself. He connects the tracks, lines up the engine, baggage car, and two passenger cars, but because he doesn’t know what he is doing he shoves the rheostat too far, causing the cars to circle too fast, out of control, and they crash. Bob remembers, “My first realization that I had a brother was that I hated the little son of a bitch ’cause he’d wrecked my train.”
Eventually, though, Bob grows to adore his kid brother. In an interview he gives Marc Zicree for The Twilight Zone Companion almost sixty years later, Bob says: “Rod and I were fairly close as kids and we played a lot, despite the seven-year age difference. The two of us used to read Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, Weird Tales—all of the pulps. If we saw a movie together, we’d come home and act it out. Our bikes became airplanes with machine guns on them. We were always playing cowboys . . . Rod was about the greatest extrovert you could imagine. He was a good-looking kid. Very popular, very articulate, very outspoken. He had no arrogance—it was confidence. There’s a helluva difference.”
Sam continues managing his father-in-law’s store in Syracuse.
It is not the job he may have daydreamed about while staring out of a classroom window as a child, but he has a wife and two small boys to support, and although he is extraordinarily bright, he has never had the means to go to college. He is a voracious reader, though, often reading late into the night. One of his favorite books is The Education of Hyman Kaplan by the Jewish writer Leo Rosten, and some nights, sitting alone in his overstuffed chair, he laughs so loud he wakes up the whole family.
Shortly after my father is born, the family, along with the dog, “Tony,” move to Binghamton, New York, where Sam manages one of his father-in-law’s wholesale meat markets.
Every morning Sam leaves early to open up the market, kissing Esther at the door, sometimes in a dramatic pose or twirling her around, that makes my dad, standing there in his pajamas, laugh.
My father hugs his dad around the knees and runs to the window to watch Sam get into the car and wave before pulling away.
My dad told me that one day Meyer went to Sam’s store and told the secretary not to work late because, “Someone will come in and stick it up in you a gun,” which always made my dad laugh.
My dad goes to the Hamilton Elementary School. He carries his lunch in a brown paper bag—sometimes a cheese sandwich, or peanut butter, always with a pickle. He also loves chocolate egg creams and often shares them with his friends.
In his report cards he receives E for excellent in reading, spelling, and geography. In fourth grade he is not doing so well in drawing and receives only a “fair.” In writing, too, he seems to struggle and gets only “S” (satisfactory). Under citizenship he receives E’s in everything: manners, obedience, dependableness, respect for property, patriotism, and reverence.
He likes school. In all of the class pictures he is smiling somewhat impishly. Because he is short, he is near the front, tucked in close to his friends.
Esther frames most of these photos but keeps some in a baby book she calls “Roddy’s book,” where she saves all of the mementos: the notes, the cards, and a lock of his hair. Under “Milestones,” where it reads, “When did your baby first crawl?” she writes, “I never let my baby down to crawl.”
She dotes on her curly-haired son. She knits him socks from complicated patterns that last through decades. (I still wear them.)
Despite Sam’s long work hours, he makes time for the family to drive back to Syracuse, seventy miles away, to visit Esther’s brother Ben. The trip takes about two and a half hours, and once, when my father is about six years old, Sam asks Esther and Bob not to say anything during the ride. “Just let Roddy keep talking.” My father never stops from the time they get into the car until they arrive in Syracuse. He sings and talks to his parents and to Bob about everything he sees out the window without waiting for anyone to respond. He just keeps talking.
When I hear this family story, I think of my dad in his office in back of our house, dictating his script into the tightly clutched microphone, acting out every part, creating an extraordinary world of his own. One of these scripts will be a Twilight Zone episode titled: “The Silence,” in which a compulsive talker bets he can remain silent for a year.
These are joyful, almost idyllic days for my father, when industry, to some extent, shields the city from the desperation of the Great Depression. One of those industries is a shoe manufacturer, Endicott-Johnson. George Johnson, in addition to his other contributions to the Binghamton community, gives six carousels to local parks. His only stipulation is that at no time should money be charged for the “magic ride.” “Carousels,” he says, “contribute to a happy life and will help youngsters grow into strong and useful citizens.”
In spite of the influence of Endicott Johnson, International Business Machines, and others, my grandfather begins to worry about money. Although he tries to shield this from the boys, my father will remember hearing him in the bedroom above, his footsteps pacing back and forth, and some mornings he is gone, already at work, before my dad wakes up.
When my father is about twelve, he gets his first job, working in a local toy store. His employer writes in his job performance record: “Roddy: Nice kid, but plays with the toys too much.”
In school, my dad wants to play varsity football. He talks to the coach, who promptly discourages him. My father remembered: “The late and beloved Henry Merz tried to explain to me why I couldn’t get onto the varsity football team because he found it difficult to reconcile playing a quarterback who weighed less than the team bulldog.”
Inevitably I am always drawn back to his books and papers. I sit on the floor looking through his yearbooks, opening the pages to this growing, handsome child who will one day be my father. He is pictured in almost every extracurricular activity—the debate team, student council, the drama team, editor of the school paper and member of the honor society. He is always at least a head shorter than the other students and always looking back with that wide, captivating smile and those dark eyes I know so well.