As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling

WHEN I START LOOKING into colleges, my parents think Beloit College in Wisconsin would be the perfect place for me. My sister, by then, is at Ithaca College graduating in a year. I, like her, want to stay on the East Coast. I don’t want to be in the middle of the country where I know no one, but my parents are hoping I will choose Beloit and when I get accepted my dad writes to me at MacDuffie: “Listen Bunny, we were proud about Beloit but are not rushing you. It’s your decision.” Shortly after, he and I visit the campus together. We run through the rain and the puddles and the mud to get to the admissions building. Our guide, a junior, is pleasant and bright and says all of the right things, but I cannot get past the dismal gray or the explanation that it has just been a particularly rainy spring and that is why the campus (stuck in the middle of the country) looks colorless and dreary.

It takes a while to meet people and to make friends. I remember entering the school cafeteria and hearing a kid in a yellow shirt at a distant table laugh and say something like, “Yeah, her father is Rod Serling. She better go get her teeth sharpened.” It’s as if I’m back on the elementary school playground all over again.

I call home a lot that fall. Often my dad is preoccupied, sometimes distant. I can hear him exhaling his cigarette smoke and flipping through papers on his desk. I know he is busy, and he often quickly passes the phone over to my mother. He is hosting a radio anthology show titled The Zero Hour, a dramatic series that features many of the actors and actresses from The Twilight Zone. He is also doing the narrations for The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, a series that excites him because he is fascinated by the subject matter and by Cousteau himself.

He does some Public Service Announcements—Forest fire prevention and Environmental PSA’s—and continues to do commercial spots (Anacin, the bug spray called 6-12, a car wax, and beer). The irony of this is never lost on him; he is profiting from the sponsors he battled for so long in his early days of writing. I remember my parents discussing this, even arguing. I remember my mother telling him he needs to investigate the things that he is trying to sell to the public, and his acknowledging this, but commenting on how ludicrous it is that by recording a sixty-second television spot he can make more money than he can writing. Or, as he told his media class at Antioch, “I get $3,000 to make beer commercials and the same amount to teach for six months.” Regardless of this logic, I know he is conflicted, and one day says, “My crime has been committed, and there’s very little defense for it. I was not conned into doing the beer commercial. Rather, a sizable check was thrust in front of me and I plowed in with no thought to its effect or ramifications.”

When the commercials interrupted the shows your dad was screening he’d belittle all the actors appearing in the spots as “whores” and sometimes worse.

After graduation I became program director of radio station WTKO which was an Ithaca pop music station back in the day. You can imagine how surprised I was when I played a new commercial and heard your dad doing the commercial! Soon I saw him doing a commercial on television. I mentioned to one of the guys at the station how surprised I was because of how he used to talk about anyone involved in advertising. I said that if I ever saw Rod again, I’d ask him about it. I could be brave because I had graduated and didn’t think I would ever see him again. Well, just a couple of weeks later I was shopping at the Co-Op food supermarket in Ithaca one Saturday morning and saw your dad pushing a cart there. I took a deep breath. Should I really say anything to him? (After all, I knew he had been a boxer.) He was approaching the checkout and I decided to do it. I introduced myself to him again and said I hoped he wouldn’t be upset with my question about what changed his mind. Your dad was gracious as always and smiled. He said something like “I deserve this.” He went on to explain that one day he had a meeting with someone from an advertising agency and the guy handed your dad a piece of paper. He said, “Listen Rod, if you just read what’s on that piece of paper into a microphone, I’ll give you enough money to put one of your kids through college.” He said he read the paper, it looked innocent enough and he decided to do it.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

It upset me that such a great writer was doing that, so, being the outspoken person I was since I could talk, I got out my semi-broken typewriter and with the elevated trains roaring by my bedroom window in the rank apartment in which I lived in a Philly slum, I wrote my protest letter, never expecting a reply, of course, but glad I voiced what I thought, including that I might have to change my goal, because I couldn’t “sell out.” A couple weeks later, I received a reply from your dad, explaining that sometimes one had to do such things because of pressure placed on creative talent by the networks and he ended by telling me to stay in the business, because, maybe I would be one of the young men to change that. Needless to say, I was blown away that he answered, and, better, I decided to pursue my writing.

Dear Miss Grumple,

As must be obvious by the neatness of the typing, Margie is taking this via dictation. It’s being typed on Thursday the 15th—the day before sailing, and I’ve asked her to include it in the care package that she’ll mail to you after Thanksgiving.

All is well here and even a little exciting, what with the boat trip and you coming out here for Christmas. I’m phoning White Sun before I leave tomorrow to arrange rooms for us there so you can go back to Alfred in dead winter looking like Raisin’s daughter!

I’m conscious, honey, of kind of short shrifting you during our phone conversations. You do have an uncanny knack for phoning either in the middle of a vital scene or at a game-winning juncture of a pro football game that I bet on. But just because I quickly turn you over to Mom, my interest, love, concern is nonetheless real.

If I feel temporarily dismissed by my dad, or, as he says, “short-shrifted,” I do not remember this. I know, unequivocally, that in the long run and for the long haul, my dad is there. And so, three months later, while experiencing an abrupt and profound bout of depression that seems to come out of nowhere, I turn to him. I attempt to rein in these derailing emotions, capture them with words, and send them to him. I tell him how isolated I feel, that although I have friends and a boyfriend—a nice Jewish boy who is an extraordinarily gifted artist—something just feels wrong. I don’t believe I fit in here; the school is too much of a party school. I end my letter by saying I don’t know what I really want to do with my life, and feel afraid that what I am feeling seems beyond the angst typical of my age.

February 14, 1974

My Darling Little Raisin,

I’ve just received your note (or shall we call it blank verse?) and in part I was moved, and in equal part, I was a little disturbed. As must be obvious, I’m dictating this—not through laziness but as so often is the case with me, my mind works faster than my typing fingers, and this seemed sufficiently important to get it down properly and accurately to you . . .

It’s your depression that concerns me most. Your sense of sadness. Again, how does one refurbish the feelings of another to remind them of their beauty, their worth, their warmth and their simple humanity. All of which you have in abundance. Of course I’m prejudiced and biased and desperately one-sided in my analysis of you. I’m your father, and flesh not only builds up virtue and extols it—it also distorts it out of love and caring. But in truth, in examining you—Anne, the person—I know deep down that you are a very special girl. Sometimes the merit of your own sensitivity works against you, like welcoming a bright day that is so bright that it hurts the eyes.

That’s all I have to tell you. That you’re being thought of constantly . . . and worried about, as well . . . We want you to be happy more than anything on God’s earth.

There isn’t much involved in becoming a transfer student. I fill in the necessary paperwork to apply to Elmira College in Elmira, New York, for the following fall, majoring in elementary education. And on a June day, much like the one when my father and I first visited Alfred, I pack up my things, return the room key, and my dad lugs my suitcases back down all those flights of stairs.