Rod Serling 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.
89 Facts About Rod Serling
2.
Rod Serling was born on December 25,1924, in Syracuse, New York, to a Jewish family.
3.
Rod Serling was the second of two sons born to Esther, a homemaker, and Samuel Lawrence Serling.
4.
Rod Serling's father had worked as a secretary and amateur inventor before his children were born but took on his father-in-law's profession as a grocer to earn a steady income.
5.
Sam Rod Serling later became a butcher after the Great Depression forced the store to close.
6.
Sam Serling built a small stage in the basement, where Rod often put on plays.
7.
Rod Serling did not, and he talked nonstop through the entire car ride.
8.
In elementary school, Rod Serling was seen as the class clown and dismissed by many of his teachers as a lost cause.
9.
Rod Serling joined the debate team and was a speaker at his high school graduation.
10.
Rod Serling began writing for the school newspaper, in which, according to the journalist Gordon Sander, he "established a reputation as a social activist".
11.
Rod Serling was interested in sports, and excelled at tennis and table tennis.
12.
Rod Serling was interested in radio and writing at an early age.
13.
Rod Serling was an avid radio listener, especially interested in thrillers, fantasy, and horror shows.
14.
However, the United States was involved in World War II at the time, and Rod Serling decided to enlist rather than start college immediately after he graduated from Binghamton Central High School in 1943.
15.
Rod Serling wanted to leave school before graduation to join the fight, but his civics teacher talked him into waiting for graduation.
16.
Rod Serling enlisted in the US Army the morning after high school graduation, following his brother Robert.
17.
Rod Serling began his military career in 1943 at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, under General Joseph May "Joe" Swing and Col.
18.
Rod Serling eventually reached the rank of Technician Fourth Grade.
19.
Rod Serling competed as a flyweight and had 17 bouts, rising to the second round of the division finals before being knocked out.
20.
Rod Serling knew that he would be fighting against the Japanese rather than the Germans.
21.
Rod Serling sometimes went exploring on his own, against orders, and got lost.
22.
Rod Serling led the funeral services for Levy and placed a Star of David over his grave.
23.
Rod Serling later set several of his scripts in the Philippines and used the unpredictability of death as a theme in much of his writing.
24.
Rod Serling returned from the successful mission in Leyte with two wounds, including one to his kneecap, but neither kept him from combat when General Douglas MacArthur deployed the paratroopers for their usual purpose on February 3,1945.
25.
Rod Serling was wounded and three comrades were killed by shrapnel from rounds fired at his roving demolition team by an antiaircraft gun.
26.
Rod Serling was sent to New Guinea to recover but soon returned to Manila to finish "cleaning up".
27.
Rod Serling had been accepted to Antioch while in high school.
28.
Rod Serling's interests led him to the theater department and then to broadcasting.
29.
Rod Serling changed his major to Literature and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1950.
30.
Rod Serling wrote, directed, and acted in many radio programs on campus, then around the state, as part of his work study.
31.
Rod Serling joined the Unitarian church in college, which allowed him to marry Kramer on July 31,1948.
32.
The Serling family continued to use this house annually throughout Rod's life, missing only two summers in the years when his daughters were born.
33.
For extra money in his college years, Rod Serling worked part-time testing parachutes for the United States Army Air Forces.
34.
Rod Serling's last test jump was a few weeks before his wedding.
35.
Rod Serling volunteered at WNYC in New York as an actor and writer in the summer of 1946.
36.
Rod Serling then took odd jobs in other radio stations in New York and Ohio.
37.
Rod Serling then took charge of full-scale radio productions at Antioch which were broadcast on WJEM, in Springfield.
38.
Rod Serling wrote and directed the programs and acted in them when needed.
39.
Rod Serling won a trip to New York City and $500 for his radio script "To Live a Dream".
40.
Rod Serling began his professional writing career in 1950, when he earned $75 a week as a network continuity writer for WLW radio in Cincinnati, Ohio.
41.
Rod Serling sold several radio and television scripts to WLW's parent company, Crosley Broadcasting Corporation.
42.
Rod Serling submitted an idea for a weekly radio show in which the ghosts of a young boy and girl killed in World War II would look through train windows and comment on day-to-day human life as it moved around the country.
43.
Rod Serling said of his time as a staff writer for radio:.
44.
Rod Serling worked there for over a year before he could free-lance.
45.
Rod Serling moved from radio to television, as a writer for WKRC-TV in Cincinnati.
46.
Rod Serling's duties included writing testimonial advertisements for dubious medical remedies and scripts for a comedy duo.
47.
Rod Serling continued at WKRC after graduation and, amidst the mostly dreary day-to-day work, created a series of scripts for a live television program, The Storm, as well as for other anthology dramas.
48.
Rod Serling sent manuscripts to publishers and received forty rejection slips during these early years.
49.
Rod Serling continued to write for television and eventually left WKRC to become a full-time freelance writer.
50.
Rod Serling modeled the character of the boss on his former commander, Colonel Orin Haugen.
51.
Immediately following the original broadcast of "Patterns", Rod Serling was inundated with offers of permanent jobs, congratulations, and requests for novels, plays, and television or radio scripts.
52.
Rod Serling then wrote "Requiem for a Heavyweight" for the television series Playhouse 90 in 1956, again gaining praise from critics.
53.
Rod Serling was often forced to change his scripts after corporate sponsors read them and found something they felt was too controversial.
54.
However, when Rod Serling mentioned in a radio interview that it was inspired by the events and racism that led to the murder of Emmett Till, censorship by advertisers and the TV network resulted in significant changes.
55.
Rod Serling subsequently returned to the Till events when writing A Town Has Turned to Dust for 'Playhouse 90' but had to set it a century in the past and remove any inter-racial dynamics before it would be produced by CBS TV.
56.
Frustrated by seeing his scripts divested of political statements and ethnic identities, Rod Serling decided the only way to avoid such artistic interference was to create his own show.
57.
Rod Serling submitted "The Time Element" to CBS, intending it to be a pilot for his new weekly show, The Twilight Zone.
58.
The episode received so much positive fan response that CBS agreed to let Rod Serling go ahead with his pilot for The Twilight Zone.
59.
On October 2,1959, the Twilight Zone series, created by Rod Serling, premiered on CBS.
60.
Rod Serling hired scriptwriters he respected, such as Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont.
61.
Rod Serling drew on his own experience for many episodes, frequently about boxing, military life, and airplane pilots.
62.
Rod Serling sold the rights to The Twilight Zone to CBS.
63.
CBS asked Rod Serling to have more action and less character interaction.
64.
Rod Serling refused to comply, even though the show had received poor reviews and low ratings.
65.
Rod Serling made occasional acting appearances, all in material he didn't write.
66.
Rod Serling appears as a version of himself in a comedic bit on The Jack Benny Program; he appears in a 1962 episode of the short-lived sitcom Ichabod and Me in the role of Eugene Hollinfield; and in a 1972 episode of the crime drama Ironside entitled "Bubble, Bubble, Toil, and Murder", in which he plays a small role as the proprietor of an occult magic shop.
67.
Rod Serling returned to radio late in his career with The Zero Hour in 1973.
68.
Rod Serling hosted the program but did not write any of the scripts.
69.
Rod Serling's final radio performance was even more unusual: Fantasy Park was a 48-hour-long rock concert aired by nearly 200 stations in 1974 and 1975.
70.
Rod Serling taught week-long seminars in which students would watch and critique films.
71.
Rod Serling was one of the first guest teachers at the Sherwood Oaks Experimental College in Hollywood, California.
72.
Rod Serling was an outspoken antiwar activist, especially during the Vietnam War.
73.
Rod Serling supported antiwar politicians, notably US senator Eugene McCarthy in his presidential campaign in 1968.
74.
Rod Serling offers many valid arguments on behalf of both the defense and the prosecution.
75.
Rod Serling made his point that hate for a fellow being leads only to the ultimate destruction of the bigoted.
76.
Rod Serling took his 1972 screenplay for the film, The Man, from the Irving Wallace novel of the same title.
77.
Rod Serling was said to smoke three to four packs of cigarettes a day.
78.
Rod Serling spent two weeks at Tompkins County Community Hospital before being released.
79.
On January 9,2020, Carolyn Louise "Carol" Kramer Rod Serling died at age 90 and was buried next to her husband.
80.
Rod Serling began his career when television was a new medium.
81.
The first public viewing of an all-electronic television was presented by inventor Philo Farnsworth at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on August 25,1934, when Rod Serling was nine years old.
82.
Rod Serling was among the first to use both forms, turning his early television successes, "Patterns" and "The Rack", into full-length movies.
83.
Rod Serling stated that "Patterns" was a prime example of a drama that should be seen more than once, whereas a single broadcast was the norm for television shows of the day.
84.
Rod Serling was truly devastated by what his script had encouraged.
85.
Rod Serling is indelibly woven into modern popular culture because of the enduring popularity of The Twilight Zone.
86.
Some of Rod Serling's works are now available in graphic novels.
87.
Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone is a series of adaptations by Mark Kneece and Rich Ellis based on original scripts written by Serling.
88.
In 1994, Rod Serling's Lost Classics released two never-before-seen works that Carol Serling found in her garage.
89.
Rod Serling appears in the attraction through the use of repurposed archival footage, and voice actor Mark Silverman provides the dubbing of Rod Serling's dialogue for the attraction at both Hollywood Studios and the defunct version at Disney California Adventure in Anaheim.