Young Rod Serling Gave Hometown No Clue to His Sinister Bent

Witness a transformation: A witty boy growing up in an idyllic New York town in the 1930s becomes the master of macabre in television’s Golden Age.

He delivers packages for his father’s butcher shop, captains the debating team, stars in plays, writes patriotic newspaper editorials.

Graduation, 1942. He joins the paratroopers, is wounded in the Philippines. After college, he trades in his smile for a tight-lipped, somber look and becomes the spokesman for a bizarre dimension beyond imagination.

Young Roddy Serling is about to become the creator of “The Twilight Zone.”

Tales of Hysteria

Those who knew him growing up in Binghamton, 60 miles south of Syracuse, say that their Rod Serling was not the sinister narrator who introduced such tales of hysteria as “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” or “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”

“He was always gregarious and wasn’t a bit Edgar Allan Poe-ish,” said Helen Foley, Serling’s junior high drama teacher. “He was very funny and witty and charming.”

Fourteen years after Serling died following heart surgery in Rochester, a group of friends has formed the Rod Serling Foundation in Binghamton to keep his memory alive.

Serling was born on Dec. 25, 1924, to Samuel and Esther Serling. The family later moved to Binghamton, the city Serling disguised in “The Twilight Zone” as the perfect towns of Homewood and Willoughby.

His friends in Binghamton remember Serling not as a star but as the grinning boy who always showed up at the center of every group picture.

Former Binghamton High School classmate Jim Haley recalls how Serling would come to his house on his green bike to visit Haley’s sister, Pat.

“He’d always let me ride it to get me out of the way,” Haley recalls.

The foundation has about 150 members nationwide, but it’s not a fan club, members said.

“We don’t want to be called fans,” said Foley, who attended the ceremonies last October when Serling was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “Fans sounds as though we’re a bunch of clucks like those ‘Star Trek’ people.”

Although he was seven years older than Rod, Serling’s brother, Robert, remembers staging plays with the future TV whiz-kid in their back yard. They later collaborated on an early version of the script for Robert Serling’s novel, “The President’s Plane Is Missing.”

Other anthology shows in television’s infancy are long forgotten, but mention “The Twilight Zone” and everyone will rattle off a favorite episode, Robert Serling said in a telephone interview from his home in Tucson, Ariz.

Figuring out why the show captivated viewers “would be like describing the color red,” he says.

“Part of it was Rod’s voice and appearance, the way he set the mood,” his brother said. “Part of it was the O. Henry aspect, the unexpected twist, the surprise ending. And part of it was that Rod masqueraded a sermon in his scripts. He sent messages to people without them realizing they were being preached to.”

That was part of Serling’s appeal in television’s early years, when good writing with a point behind it was rare.

“He was a great observer of humanity,” classmate Bill Behan said.

“We often wonder what he’d be writing today,” said another classmate, Robert Keller. “If he were alive, I’m sure he’d have something in the running for the Oscars.”

After a brief stint as a radio copywriter, Serling began writing TV scripts in 1951. He sold more than 70 scripts before his drama “Patterns” was aired in 1955, winning him the first of six Emmys.

For the next four years, Serling could pick and choose what shows to write for. He did many scripts for “Playhouse 90,” which aired Serling’s second Emmy winner, “Requiem for a Heavyweight.”

Then, in 1959, he surprised the industry with plans for a science-fiction anthology series.

“Rod always tried to do more than entertain,” his wife, Carolyn Serling, said in a telephone interview from her home in Pacific Palisades, Calif. “He was a humanitarian and critic, and he found outer space and fantasy a good vehicle.”

Serling wrote 92 of the 156 “Twilight Zone” episodes and became its host after the producers’ first choice, Orson Welles, proved too expensive.

That brooding host was not the Rod Serling that classmate Sybil Goldenburg knew.

“He enjoyed the pretense of that persona, but it wasn’t him,” she said. “If his talent overtook his behavior, it was an affectation.”

Voice Attributed to Nerves

Nerves caused Serling’s hushed tones at first, his wife said. As he grew more comfortable before the cameras, he stuck with the menacing voice because it fit the show, she said.

Serling’s Binghamton friends lament that his other writing accomplishments are largely forgotten: a 1960s Western series starring Lloyd Bridges, an early draft of the script for “Planet of the Apes,” the 1970s series “Night Gallery.”

The pilot for “Night Gallery” gave Steven Spielberg his first directing job in 1969 in a vignette starring Joan Crawford.

In 1985, when Spielberg and company premiered “Twilight Zone--The Movie” in Binghamton, Serling’s old friends formed the foundation to honor the writer.

Besides sponsoring annual Serling film festivals, the foundation last Christmas laid a bronze plaque in a bandstand in a Binghamton park where Serling set the “Twilight Zone” episode “Walking Distance.” That episode starred Gig Young as a man transported back to his childhood in the idyllic town of Homewood.

Serling Stamp Urged

The foundation has a Serling exhibit in a local theater, sells Serling buttons and postcards and is lobbying the U.S. Postal Service to issue a Serling stamp.

Serling’s ties with his hometown included featuring Binghamton High School graduate Richard Deacon in “Twilight Zone” episodes. Deacon was best known as bald Mel Cooley on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

In the 1970s, Serling became disenchanted as producers altered his “Night Gallery” scripts. After the show was canceled, he spent his last years teaching at Ithaca College, 30 miles northwest of Binghamton.

He often returned to his hometown to talk to students. When Serling spoke at Binghamton High School once, “a kid told him, ‘You must have awful nightmares. You’ve got an awfully creepy mind,’ ” Foley said. “But he didn’t.”