ZONING IN: A FRESH LOOK AT ROD SERLING'S LEGACY

Things have changed a bit.

The Walk of Fame has turned into a wall, its founding daddy no longer runs the Rod Serling Film Festival, and the Recreation Park Carousel is the subject of a soon-to-be-released documentary. The first classes of “Fifth Dimension” fifth graders are now past traditional college age, and someone among them may be well on his or her way to fulfilling the program’s focal question: “Who will be the next Rod Serling?” And the dream of a brand new, state-of-the-art building to serve as a Rod Serling Museum has taken the form of an actual architectural design.

It’s a long way from wishing and dreams to reality- unless you’re in the Twilight Zone, where such distinctions are grey areas.

Ever since the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation was organized in the 1980s, there have been wishes, dreams, and a lot of dedicated work that has lured residents of Binghamton- and the environs of upstate New York- into appreciating their uncommon hometown hero. Is there anyone who doesn’t know that Rod Serling was an outstanding screenwriter, whose scripts, such as Patterns, and Requiem for a Heavyweight, led to his becoming the creator, executive producer, and host of the television series The Twilight Zone? Running from 1959 to 1964, its very name remains an iconic catch phrase. Andrew Polak, RSMF president, says it has been rewarding, “to see the Foundation grow from a local group preserving Rod’s legacy to a global web presence that reaches the entire world.”

The undeniable integrity apparent in Rodman Edward Serling’s writing was, according to every word ever printed about him, real and deep-rooted. Anne Serling, one of his two daughters, told Carousel that she believes it was in a speech he once gave in Washington that her father addressed something that pervaded all of his work. He said, “The writer’s role is to menace the public’s conscience.”

The 6-time Emmy winner was born in Syracuse on Christmas Day, 1924. The wellspring of both his creativity, and his convictions, was centered in the town to which he moved as a toddler with his parents and brother, and where he lived until the age of 18. Anne says she is not certain where or when he wrote the frequently quoted, “Everyone has to have a hometown; Binghamton’s mine.” But she spoke to Carousel (as she does in her memoir As I Knew Him: My Dad Rod Serling) about his annual summer pilgrimage back home- about driving past his old house on Bennett Avenue. “For whatever else I may have had, or lost, or will find,” he wrote, “I’ve still got a hometown. This nobody’s gonna take away from me.” “We couldn’t wait to get out of Los Angeles for the summer,” Anne says of the Serling family during her childhood. “Traveling east and reconnecting with friends…It was a magical time for us all.”

For years, Rod’s “lifelong friend” Robert Keller, a retired SUNY Broome professor, gave tours of familiar points of interest relating to Serling’s formative years and career:

- The plaque on Court Street outside Binghamton High School where he studied with his beloved teacher Helen Foley, now home to the Rod Serling School of Fine Arts.

- The Day of a Playwright exhibit in the lobby of the Forum Theatre on Washington Street, a panorama of his life.

- Serling’s star, which was the first of the Walk of Fame stars, now refurbished and transplanted onto the Wall of Fame in the Forum lobby.

- The plaque embedded in stone in the Recreation Park bandstand floor.

According to Keller, “He loved everybody and everybody loved Rod.” He remembers that, “Recreation Park used to freeze the pool for ice skating,” and describes a little boy who skated over to him and pointed out a girl named Mary. “If you skate over to her quietly and yell her name,” the boy said, “she’ll fall down.” So Keller did, and got the aforementioned result. “I came back and said, ‘Hey kiddo, that was pretty nice. What’s your name?’ He said, ‘My name is Roddy Serling. Do you want to come over [to my house] for lunch?’ That’s how our friendship started.”

Probably the most poignant and fun Rod Serling point of interest is the Recreation Park Carousel. Renovated in 2011, it has panels of painted images of Twilight Zone episodes created by Connecticut artist Cortlandt Hull. The documentary The Carousel is expected to make its film festival premiere early in 2016. Twenty-nine year old filmmaker Jonathan Napolitano recalls, “I wasn’t aware Rod Serling was from the city of Binghamton until I watched the episode “Walking Distance” for the first time. I was about 10 years old and I immediately looked up Rod Serling’s background when I realized the Twilight Zone was my ‘new’ favorite show. Has been ever since.” Just about every TZ fan is aware of the deep autobiographical connections between Serling and his moving depiction of loss of carefree contentment in that episode.

Fifth graders in all seven Binghamton elementary schools are still exploring the avenues of social justice through the use of TZ episodes in the 5th Dimension program. Top honor winners in the 2015 Rod Serling Film Festival (founded by Larry Kassan and now conducted by WSKG) will premiere on the web and via social media throughout October, and will be screened as part of November First Friday at the Forum Theatre. Andrew Polak says that time will tell whether the suggested Rod Serling museum, “will call Binghamton its home,” or whether that honor will regrettably go to, “some other lucky city.”

“I think my dad would have been deeply saddened that we remain a broken species,” says Anne of her father, who died in 1975. “That prejudice and wars and intolerance are still rampant, and that we don’t take care of each other or our planet as we should.”

She adds that he would have been intrigued and excited by social media, “and undoubtedly appalled by reality television.”

For more information: visit rodserling.com, Rod Serling Film Festival news at wskg.org, or follow ‘The Carousel’ documentary at facebook.com/thecarouseldoc.