Chapter 8
I never had a master plan that included a built-in compulsion to write. I really didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do with my life. I went to Antioch because my brother went there. I thought I’d major in physical education because I was interested in working with kids. This was a pretty amorphous thing, not really thought out or planned—but it constituted some vague objective, which, of course, the war put to an end.
—ROD SERLING
THE YEAR IS 1946. The place is Yellow Springs, Ohio.
By all appearances, he looks like any other college student with his stack of books and pens and papers, but he and the other GIs who returned from World War II are not archetypal college freshmen. They carry something unique yet indiscernible and, in those days, not fully defined. The condition will one day be known colloquially as “Battle Fatigue,” “Traumatic War Neurosis,” or, ultimately, “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.” But in 1946, my dad and these other young vets feel desperately overwhelmed by something then labeled “Shell Shock”—a condition still sometimes misinterpreted and for which treatment is, at best, primitive. Many vets suffer the aftermath—terrible insomnia, panic, and haunting flashbacks.
Monroe “Mike” Newman, a prominent economist and old college friend of my dad’s remembers those years at Antioch:
I first met your father in 1946 when, as a freshman, I was housed in a dorm room at Antioch that was a few doors away from his. The informal social structure in the dorm has to be understood. There was a group of veterans, older and better financed (thanks to the GI Bill) and the non-veterans (younger and generally poorer), of which I was one. Within the veterans group, there was a sub-group of combat veterans, to which your dad adhered. In present day terms, the combat veterans showed signs of PTSD. (One friend was by far the worst, depressed and frequently drunk.) Despite these allegiances, there was a high degree of personal interaction among the dorm residents and your dad soon became a dominant force. I recall him being very close to his mother. He was obviously very smart, never reticent, had strong convictions, was quick to angrily express them and seemed to have no patience with levity. Some examples:
A group was sitting on the floor in the dorm hallway, discussing the wisdom and ethics of the death penalty. Your dad came out of his room (looking tall since we were all on the floor) and told us we’d overlooked a key. (I think that was his word.) The key was that some part of the executioner died with each execution. Immediately, he returned to his room and slammed the door.
Your father’s convictions and anger were focused on anyone who did either of the following: Got a haircut from anyone but Mr. Pemberton, the only barber in town who would cut the hair of African-Americans. Did not go to the Old Trail Tavern but rather to the establishment across Xenia Avenue which did not serve African-Americans.
In the early fall of that first year at Antioch, my dad often goes to an infrequently used golf course and sits there alone. Sometimes he goes and drinks Southern Comfort. Sometimes he goes just to think, to turn down the noises in his head. But he soon realizes the isolation is only serving to augment his wounded thoughts. He begins to feel what he eventually describes as “a kind of compulsion to get some thoughts down and the desperate sense of a terrible need for some sort of therapy . . . I needed to get it out of my gut, write it down. This is the way it began for me.”
He changes his major from physical education to language and literature, and slowly, gradually, as time affords some distance from the war, some of the old, gregarious Rod reemerges. He is writing, directing, and acting in weekly productions on a local radio station. He begins to enjoy Antioch, of which he will one day say: “The freedom to speak, the freedom to reason, and above all, the right to question—this I think is tradition at Antioch.”
My dad is moved by the words of Horace Mann, the first president of the college. “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” Twenty years later, he uses these very words in a poignant Twilight Zone episode, “The Changing of the Guard.” British actor Donald Pleasence portrays Professor Ellis Fowler—“a gentle, bookish guide to the young,” who is being forced to retire after a long teaching career at a boys’ school. Convinced that his life has no meaning left and that, in fact, he has accomplished nothing in his lifetime and will quickly be forgotten, he resolves to commit suicide with an old pistol in front of a campus statue of Horace Mann, on whose base the quotation is inscribed. But then, mysteriously, he hears school bells and returns to his classroom to find the ghosts of some of his dead former students who convince him that the lessons from his teaching are what inspired each of them to their individual acts of heroism, courage, and self-sacrifice. When the ghosts depart, he realizes Mann’s words do apply to him, and he can retire, and live, in peace with himself. He tells his housekeeper:
I do believe . . . I do believe that I have left my mark. “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” I didn’t win them but I helped others to win them. I believe that now. So in that way—even in small measure—they are victories I can share.
I realize how much this episode reveals of my dad’s thoughts and feelings: the great appreciation he had of mentors and teachers, the struggle for self-worth, the fear of being forgotten, and the reverence for valor and sacrifice.
Throughout his life he kept in touch with his high school teacher and mentor, Helen Foley. In a 1968 Binghamton Central High School commencement speech, he refers to her as his “dear friend.” He even names a Twilight Zone character after her—a teacher in the episode, “Nightmare as a Child.”
At Antioch, there are not many coeds on campus my father does not know or has not dated by the time he first sees Carolyn Kramer from Columbus, Ohio. She is at Antioch despite the initial misgivings of her grandparents, who raised her after the death of her mother, when she was only two. Her grandmother Louise had wanted her to go to Wellesley, where both she and her daughter had gone. This, despite the fact that Louise’s father Edward had been president of Antioch in the 1870s.
My mother somehow convinces her grandparents, and soon their reservations completely dissipate as they see she is immersing herself in college life. Warren, her father, is not a part of this decision, having left her upbringing to her maternal grandparents.
One day my father is with some friends, out on the student quad, when my mother walks by. She has her books tucked beneath her arm. She sees him but pretends not to, mindful of his reputation as a “lady’s man.” Still, she is drawn to his rugged, dark good looks and perhaps, unwittingly, smiles as she rushes by.
I picture them, those early years, he twenty-two, she just eighteen. Her hair, dark, falls to her shoulders and shines in the early morning sun. She has her hand up to shield her eyes.
Her smile is shy, reserved, so unlike his. One day she’ll tell me that when she first sees him, he is pretending to be a monkey, an impersonation that becomes part of his permanent repertoire to the later delight of my sister and me. My mother thinks he is a bit of an idiot, but funny, and she hears from friends he is bright.
And him? What is he thinking? He is looking at her. She is stunning. Her skin slightly tanned, her hair in a headband. The way, he will tell me one day, he loves it. He doesn’t know who she is, only that her name is Carol.
My father makes it a point to seek out this striking girl, maneuvering himself into a situation where they can formally meet. They have coffee and make plans to get together for lunch, for dinner, another date, and then another. Soon they are inseparable.
They marry on July 31, 1948. My mother wears a simple ivory knee-length dress she has saved up for. My dad wears a suit that must have been secondhand because I cannot imagine he could afford a new one. The camera catches them on their way out of the church in Columbus. There, waving on the steps, my great-grandparents, my grandmother Esther, my uncle Bob, some friends, and my young parents waving back. Today, the framed picture hangs on the cottage wall.
The next photo captures my parents running through a shower of colored confetti, my father just ahead, holding my mother’s hand, pulling her along with him as they get into a waiting car parked on the street below.
I imagine my father is driving, my mother beside him. They are turned around, looking at the people left behind. Their hands, again midair, waving. A string of cans tied to the bumper, clanging as the car pulls away.
They spend their honeymoon and late summer months at the cottage. They drag stones from a pasture and some from the ravine below to build a terrace. When it is done, they put out a table that even then is slightly rickety, but will last for decades.
My mother writes captions for the pictures. In one, my dad is at the table: “first breakfast”: Another is of my mother knee-deep in the water of Cayuga Lake, hair piled high on her head: “Madam Butterfly.” In another, my dad at a typewriter: “Rod hard at work.” A few of the photographs are black and white, others in fading colors, and all are labeled, capturing these first moments of their marriage; a marriage that will last until my father’s death, twenty-seven years later.
When my mother informed her grandparents that she wanted to marry my father, they had some initial concerns; she was so young. My great-grandmother writes in her diary:
About a year ago Carol made it known that she had met a young man, also an Antioch student, and they wished to be married and continue their respective courses together. She seemed so “perilously” young that we had grave doubts about the wisdom of that step. But as time went on, and we saw how strong the attachment was on both sides, we felt that we had no right to obstruct this union. They were married last July. They are very busy and very happy. Carol is now Mrs. Rodman E. Serling and the more we see of Rod, the better we like him. He has an interesting mind and a warm, affectionate nature. They both definitely expect to graduate in 1950. Rod is specializing in radio and Carol in child psychology.
It has been written that my mother’s family disowned her because of her marriage to my dad, but this isn’t true. It was only her father who objected and as far as my mother was concerned he did not have a voice in her decision. Suddenly, though, deciding that he has a say, her father told her, “You are not to marry that black-eyed Jew.” Brought up in Mississippi, her father from a young age had been surrounded with prejudice. Clearly, he never changed and there was concern he might attempt to stop the wedding, but he did not show up.
My dad had an absolute antipathy toward any form of prejudice. He wrote about it throughout his career, and everyone who knew him acknowledges it. In 1967, he told a Los Angeles Times reporter, “I happen to think the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I’ve written, there is a thread of this: man’s seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.”
Decades later, in an interview with Linda Brevelle for Writer’s Digest Magazine, even more impassioned, he talked about how deeply, personally, it affected him:
Bias and prejudice make me angry . . . more than anything. Somebody sent me a copy of the American Nazi newspaper the other day—published in, I guess, Arlington, Virginia—there were words in it like “coon” and “kike” and things like that, and I was very distraught. That made me terribly angry. Viciously angry. Even to creating daydreams about how I could go there and bump off some of these pricks. But it’s short-lived. I’m much too logical for that. That ticks me off. I can’t think of anything else that really makes me angry.
At some point, both my parents must have forgiven my mother’s father. I recall Christmas gifts exchanged with Warren and him visiting us at the cottage. There is a photo of him standing behind me when I am about six. On the back of the photo, my mother writes, “Thought you might want this picture—perhaps the only one of your ‘grandfather.’ ”
Despite this documented presence, he leaves no lasting impression. In fact, if not for the photo, I do not even remember him being there. Ever. My only memory of this man who, I shamefully admit, was my grandfather is when he dies.
I am eight years old when I attend his funeral with my mother and don’t remember why my sister isn’t there as well. Standing outside in the cold Missouri air, I look at the people gathered by his gravesite. My mother’s half sister, Deedie, is weeping.
My mother is not.
When my parents first married, they lived on the Antioch campus in student housing set up to accommodate returning GIs with families, war surplus trailers without running water. In the photo album, my mother labels their home, “Trailer #10.” It is small, with a kitchen and a tiny living room with a couch that pulls out into a bed. In the corner sits a table that is moved to the center of the room when my parents and their friends play cards under the pale yellow light.
The ceiling has two hatches that open to allow in light and fresh air. One night, while my mother is out, my dad has one of his crazy ideas. He crawls on top of the trailer and, upside down, he hangs his head through the open hatch. He waits a long time for my mother’s return, and when she finally arrives he blurts from the ceiling, “Good Evening!” and scares the hell out of her. As my mother remembers, “In the darkness of the trailer he looked horrible and I screamed. He got stuck in the hatch . . . I thought he deserved it. Friends had to come and help him out.”
On weekends and evenings, my dad is writing whenever he can, typing frantically with two fingers. That spring, when he is twenty-four years old, he receives his first big break. Dr. Christian’s radio show wires him that his script, “To Live a Dream,” about a prizefighter dying of leukemia who wants to help a young fighter succeed, has won second prize. The show bills itself as “The only show on radio where the audience writes the scripts.”
The prize for the Dr. Christian contest is five hundred dollars and an all-expense-paid trip to New York City. My future parents leave after class on a Friday afternoon and arrive in midtown Manhattan at the Savoy Plaza. Earl Hamner, who will write eight Twilight Zone episodes and then the autobiographical series The Waltons, has also won. He and my dad first cross paths that day when both are presented their prizes on the show.
Years after my father died, Earl told me, “Your dad changed my life in so many ways and made it possible for me to have accomplished a rich and rewarding career in Hollywood.” In a tribute on his website he writes:
Rod, more than any other man in my professional life, had the greatest influence on me through his kindness, his encouragement, his example, and his unique talent. I have only one regret. I thanked him from time to time, but that afternoon when I heard he was hospitalized I said to myself, “I will call him tomorrow.” He died the next day, and I did not get a chance to say good-bye or let him know how very much he had meant to me.
Winning this contest for the radio show is a tremendous and defining moment for my dad, one he will never forget: “For the very first time in your life, somebody has given you money for words that you’ve written, and that’s terribly important. It’s a tremendous boon to the ego, to your sense of self-reliance, to your feeling about your own talent.”
Prizefighters will appear again several times in my dad’s works. In his book Patterns—four of his television plays and a personal commentary—my dad talks about the average fighter . . . “He is one of the vast army who never become champions and who are lost to memory as one by one they fall by the ringside.” He says, “What seems to give this idea the stature of tragedy is that the business of prizefighting never allows an alternate preparation for another field of endeavor. To be a fighter you have to live as a fighter. Everything you do, every action you take, every moment you live is part of and preparation for the next fight on schedule. And when your career is finished, the profession discards you.”
I recall a Twilight Zone episode he wrote for the first season titled “The Big Tall Wish.” It was broadcast on April 8, 1960, though I saw it much later.
The majority of the actors in “Big Tall Wish” were African American. As Marc Zicree wrote in The Twilight Zone Companion: “In 1960, casting blacks in a dramatic show not dealing with racial issues was something practically unheard of, but this was a deliberate move on Serling’s part.”
“Television,” my dad explained, “like its big sister, the motion picture, has been guilty of a sin of omission. Hungry for talent, desperate for the so-called ‘new face,’ constantly searching for a transfusion of new blood, it has overlooked a source of wondrous talent that resides under its nose. This is the Negro actor.”
The episode was about the relationship between Bolie Jackson, a has-been, broken-down boxer and Henry, a little boy living in his ghetto apartment building who adores him. Henry, believing in magic, wishes Bolie a win with “the big tall wish.”
In the opening narration my father says:
In this corner of the universe, a prizefighter named Bolie Jackson, one hundred and eighty-three pounds and an hour and a half away from a comeback at St. Nick’s arena. Mr. Bolie Jackson, who by the standards of his profession is an aging, over-the-hill relic of what was, and who now sees a reflection of a man who has left too many pieces of his youth in too many stadiums for too many years before too many screaming people. Mr. Bolie Jackson, who might do well to look for some gentle magic in the hard-surfaced glass that stares back at him.
In the locker room before the fight that could save his career, Bolie overreacts to a crooked manager, punches the wall, and breaks his right hand. The match is all downhill and he finds himself going down for the count. Watching on television, Henry wishes so hard that the reality is reversed and it is Bolie who wins the fight. However, when the triumphant Bolie returns home, he cannot accept the magic of Henry’s wish.
“If you don’t believe it, it won’t be true!” Henry pleads. But Bolie professes he is too old to believe in magic and the results are reversed. Bolie suddenly finds himself on his back in the ring as the referee completes the ten-count. This time, Bolie returns—injured, defeated, and dejected. But Henry still believes in him and still idolizes him: “You looked like a tiger even so. You looked like a real tiger. I was proud of you, real proud.”
In my dad’s closing narration:
Mr. Bolie Jackson, who left a second chance lying on a heap on a rosin-spattered canvas at St. Nick’s arena. Mr. Bolie Jackson, who shares the most common ailment of all men, the strange and perverse disinclination to believe in a miracle, the kind of miracle to come from a little boy, perhaps only to be found in The Twilight Zone.
When I see this episode years after it first airs, long after my father died, I am struck by the tenderness of the relationship between Bolie and this little boy. The program, although sentimental, has an edge of steel and never glosses over the harsh reality and struggle of day-to-day survival for the poor and marginalized. In the end, it is the magic between this little boy and a down-and-out fighter that triumphs:
Bolie Jackson went into his room and thought about what he would have to do next. There would be no more fighting, no more comeback . . . But tomorrow he and a little boy were going to the baseball game. “Tomorrow,” Bolie had told him, “we’ll get some hot dogs in the park, you and me.”