Walking with a Ghost

 Submitted for your approval, a story of our times.

I am not sure how many of the readers of my blog are familiar with the late Rod Serling, mastermind of TV shows such as The Twilight Zone (which was first aired over 50 years ago in the United States) and Night Gallery, along with various movies he was involved in, including Planet of the Apes.

But the Twilight Zone was his masterpiece (in my humble opinion).  He was years ahead of his time in many of the scripts he wrote for the original Twilight Zone series, which was first televised in 1959.  He was also the narrator of the series.

For a minute, I imagine what script Serling would have written for the series if he was alive today.  He wrote The Twilight Zone scripts at a time of a cold war and the threat of nuclear attack.  Today?  

Not all parks in this country are associated with famous men.

Imagine, if you will, Serling (who died in 1975) returning to Binghamton one last time.  Sunday, I did.  I walked with his ghost.

These pictures from Sunday were taken during an annual music festival. It's never been named after Rod Serling.  Instead, it is named, and held in honor of, a Binghamton High School student who was tragically killed in 2019 on her way home from playing tennis at the park. 

I turn to Serling's ghost as we approached the park he loved.  "Why is it", I ponder, "that some of us are granted long and happy lives. Some of us are not. But all of us are granted heartbreak. As children, we can't see into the future.  And, would we want to be able to? What would you have thought if you knew what lay ahead in your life?  You fought in a World War that scarred you for life but also made you into the talented writer you became, still beloved by millions?"

The ghost of Serling remains silent, but I can see him shake his head in thought.

Arriving at the park, I marvel that I walk in Serling's footsteps nearly every time I walk in Binghamton, New York. I scan the crowd, looking to see if I know anyone.  I don't.  Others do, though.  They meet, hug, and talk.  Some sit together.

None of us knew we would live through a pandemic.  We are survivors, all of us, and we are here to enjoy an hour, or a day, of music.

"Look at this, Rod", I continue, pointing at a structure that looked like a series of towers.  "This is a brand new playground, because the old one was destroyed by fire in 2020.  The community that once raised you came together and raised money, and built a new one during the pandemic.  I can't imagine the scripts you would have written if you had lived through COVID.  If only." 

"This is the bandstand where you carved your initials as a boy, Rod.", I remark.  "Today, it's  being used by a band called Mike Davis and Laughing Buddha.  Don't you think they were good, playing mainly original music?"

My walking companion doesn't answer.

"You see the carousel, so beloved by you as a child, and used in one of your most famous Twilight Zone episodes.  It's still in the building you remember.  See, it's operating even now?  You can ride it right now, the music pumping, today's children laughing.   Their world is not my world, Rod, nor is it yours.  But some things are eternal."

For a moment, cares melt away and the music carries us into joy.  But then, the carousel stops and reality returns.

"I must leave you now", the ghost of Rod Serling says, "and return to the mystery all of us will enter one day.  I will leave you to continue to live your life. I am finished history.  You are history still being lived - for now. However,  I'll leave you with one piece of advice.  Know that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.  You live in extraordinary times.  Take advantage of them, because tomorrow is never guaranteed, and one day you will only be a memory. That is the fate of us all."

Let's end today with some music.

The original of the last song of Laughing Buddha's set, Led Zepplin's Immigrant Song.

Written in memory of Harper M. Stantz, May 17, 2002-March 13, 2019.

Zoned #AtoZChallenge

Today is the last day of April, and it's the last day of the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.  It's time to end our virtual journeying from Florida to Vermont and back again with a "Z" post.  

You'd think I would be at the Zenith of happiness today, but for some reason, I couldn't decide on a Z post until the last minute.  So I decided to end the Challenge with a post about the man most associated with the iconic TV show The Twilight Zone, actor, screenwriter, producer, Emmy award winner, and narrator Rod Serling.

But, wait!  Haven't I blogged about Rod Serling before?

Yes, I have.  But please bear with me.  And yes, I know that Rod Serling's name doesn't have a Z in it, but, for me, I will always associate him with The Twilight Zone. So, Z for Zoned it is.

Some of my posts about Serling:

Zone of Twilight 

Revisiting the Twilight Zone

A Spring Tour Through the Twilight Zone

Rodman Edward Serling was born in Syracuse, New York on Christmas Day, 1924.  He and his family moved to Binghamton in 1926 and he grew up on the West Side of Binghamton, New York.  His father owned a kosher meat market in Binghamton.

His boyhood home on Bennett Avenue is a private residence and not open to the public, and I am not including a picture (although you can see it in the article I linked to).

But these are pictures, taken today, of the junior high (now called West Middle School) he attended in Binghamton.

Here's another view of the school.

His childhood seems to have been rather idyllic. He spent many happy hours in a neighborhood park called Recreation Park, which had (and still has) a historic carousel installed in 1919.  Happy children still ride it each summer, at no charge.

 

Recreation Park Carousel June 2013  Hard to see, but figure on the right is Rod Serling

Upon graduation in 1943, Serling enlisted in the military and was plunged into combat.  He served three years in the Philippines and his combat nightmares never left him.

Serling returned after the war a changed man, like so many veterans.  Some of the darkness in his life came through in various Twilight Zone scripts, but so did the longing for the happiness experienced in his childhood neighborhood.  One such episode, the fifth episode of the Twilight Zone series "Walking Distance", is considered one of the greatest shows in network history.

His wife's family  had property in the small Finger Lakes town of Interlaken. As an adult, Serling's production company was called Cayuga Productions. (Cayuga Lake is one of the Finger Lakes).  Although Serling had moved to California,he and his family returned to the Finger Lakes/Interlaken area for vacations.

It was there that, in June of 1975, Serling suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized first, in an Ithaca area hospital, and later in Rochester, New York. Eventually, he died during open heart surgery at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester.  He was only 50 years old.

Now that we are at  the end of our April wanderings, I want to bring you to one final destination, Interlaken, New York, a small town in the Finger Lakes, and to its cemetery.

There, you will find the simple graves of Serling and his wife, Carolyn.

And, near the cemetery, you will find one last thing, if you come in the summer. You might just recognize this cornfield if you are a Twilight Zone fan.

A cornfield.

It's a good life.

Thank you for your readership during the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.  I hope you will keep reading my blog because I've enjoyed having you come along on my virtual April trip.

Zone (Twilight) #AtoZChallenge

 Rod Serling.  The Twilight Zone.  The writer and the show are so much a part of our culture that several catchphrases and its theme music immediately bring this show to mind even to young people.

It's been almost 60 years since its first episode aired on October 2, 1959.  It has never left television once in all of those 60 years.

True confession.  I have blogged about Rod Serling before.  I think I even used the Twilight Zone for a Z post before.  But this year this deserves all the publicity it can get.

Rod Serling, a very talented...and tormented... man, who wrote amazing TV scripts in the era of the Red Menace with messages so timeless they resonate today, has come home to Binghamton, New York, the city where I work..

 It is ironic, in a way, that one of his most famous scripts showed a man trying to revisit his childhood in vain.  Maybe he even thought about his love of books, as shown as this library take-out record.

Rod Serling once said this:

"Everybody has to have a hometown, Binghamton's mine. In the strangely brittle, terribly sensitive make-up of a human being, there is a need for a place to hang a hat or a kind of geographical womb to crawl back into, or maybe just a place that's familiar because that's where you grew up.

  "When I dig back through memory cells, I get one particularly distinctive feeling—and that's one of warmth, comfort and well-being. For whatever else I may have had, or lost, or will find—I've still got a hometown. This, nobody's gonna take away from me."

I've blogged about Rod Serling before, but, this month, another revival of The Twilight Zone has hit television, and the original series is once again in the news.

We think we know the man in black and white, smoking a cigarette, who intoned the following every week on the TV sets of the baby boomer generation and their parents:

"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition...."

Sorry, it wants to be sideways. 

Rod Serling went to West Junior High (now West Middle School) on the West Side of Binghamton. 

West Middle School, April 2019

 I exercise in his old neighborhood frequently.

After Rod Serling graduated Binghamton Central in 1943 he served in the Pacific Theatre during World War II as a paratrooper.   The combat service (including, it is said, seeing his best friend die in front of him) created permanent trauma that haunted Serling for the rest of his too short life.  A driven individual and a heavy smoker, Rod Serling died at age 50 with an unbelievable legacy few of us could ever aspire to.

Some episodes haunted me for years after I saw them.  "It's a Good Life".  "The Midnight Sun".  "The Hitchhiker". "Nick of Time".

Others were morality plays that still resonate today although as a child I did not know their true meanings.   "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street"  "The Eye of the Beholder". "The Obsolete Man".

And, of course, "Walking Distance".

Now, Jordan Peele takes the helm and my only regret is, if you don't have CBS All Access, you are missing it.  I'm missing it.  At this point in time I don't want to have to pay for an extra streaming service.

Just remember, it all started in Binghamton, New York.

With that, I end the #AtoZ Challenge.  Twenty six letters in thirty days.  My theme was "Finding America through Photos".

Did you participate?  Did you enjoy it?  Would you do it again, if you did participate?

Local Saturday - The Writer Once Without Honor

Is anyone reading this a Twilight Zone fan?  If you are, you are a fan of the writer (and so much more) Rod Serling.  I wrote the following post in October of 2009, during the 50th anniversary celebration of the first airing of the first Twilight Zone episode.

I wanted to share with you several pictures of what Serling's home neighborhood in Binghamton, New York looked like this past week. 

Carousel Building

Rec Park, the inspiration of the episode Walking Distance.

Rec Park Bandshell

And now, for the post from October 2009.

The Writer Once Without Honor in His Hometown

 Rod Serling.  The Twilight Zone.  The writer and the show are so much a part of our culture that several catchphrases and its theme music immediately bring this show to mind even to my 19 year old son.  Yet it is 50 years (and one day) after its first episode aired on October 2, 1959.  It has never left television once in all of those 50 years.

Happily, the paraphrase above of a quote from Jesus in the New Testament Book of Mark  ("A prophet without honor in his hometown...") may have been true at one time, but no longer is.   Rod Serling, a very talented...and tormented... man, who wrote amazing TV scripts in the era of the Red Menace with messages so timeless they resonate today, has come home.  It is ironic, in a way, that one of his most famous scripts showed a man trying to revisit his childhood in vain.

Rod Serling has now been honored in his hometown.  The hometown of which Rod Serling once said this:

"Everybody has to have a hometown, Binghamton's mine. In the strangely brittle, terribly sensitive make-up of a human being, there is a need for a place to hang a hat or a kind of geographical womb to crawl back into, or maybe just a place that's familiar because that's where you grew up.

  "When I dig back through memory cells, I get one particularly distinctive feeling—and that's one of warmth, comfort and well-being. For whatever else I may have had, or lost, or will find—I've still got a hometown. This, nobody's gonna take away from me."

We think we know the man in black and white, smoking a cigarette, who intoned the following every week on the TV sets of the baby boomer generation and their parents:

"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition...."

But what of the child who grew up in Binghamton?  Thanks in part to a conversation I had today with a man from California who upkeeps the Rod Serling Foundation website, I was able to walk in those footsteps.  It was humbling in a way to speak to a man who thinks so highly of a man that he has traveled four times to Binghamton to be here.  The same Binghamton that I am in five days a week, and take for granted.

During my journey, I also met people from Seneca Falls, NY and Cherry Hill, NJ who also came out to share the experience.  To so many, Binghamton is a "burnt out industrial town" but one of these people closed her eyes in delight in Rod's childhood neighborhood and exclaimed her happiness in seeing it.

So here is my tribute to Rod Serling.  I'm not even going to say "submitted for your approval". 

First, here is the home where Rod Serling grew up.  I've passed it doing my exercise walks (disclosure:  I do not live in this neighborhood but I love walking in it) and never knew its history.  As the address and a photo of this home exist on a Rod Serling website, I feel comfortable in posting a picture but will not give the address-it is privately owned.

This is the junior high (now West Middle School) where Rod Serling first met Helen Foley, the English teacher who influenced the boy who became the writer.  I took two pictures to highlight some of the Art Deco architectural details both in the windows above the entrance doors.

The next stop was Recreation Park, just a few
blocks from where Serling grew up, home to a bandstand where Serling carved his initials as a boy.
I didn't take a picture of the bandstand, but I did of the building housing the historic carousel.

Binghamton is known as the "Carousel Capital" and myself and my son took many rides on the same carousel. The carousel, which normally doesn't run after Labor Day, was running today to celebrate.  (Sorry, the picture isn't very good.)  They were showing the episode inside the carousel building on a couple of TV's and, although it has been years, I immediately recognized it because I've had such emotional responses when I've seen it.

A live recreation of this episode will air on our local PBS station tonight.

It will be an emotional experience for us who know the true story.  Which I do now.  I was told that even, after Rod Serling was famous beyond imagination, he would come back to his childhood neighborhood on Binghamton's west side and walk those streets.  Trying to find....something.

For what it is worth, the "Walking Distance" episode was not filmed in Binghamton (nor were any other Twilight Zones, although Serling came back to Binghamton many times) and the carousel in the episode was not this carousel.  It was filmed in Hollywood, according to the Serling expert I spoke to.

This is Binghamton High School (then known as Binghamton Central High School before Binghamton lost so much of its population in the 80's and 90's)

 Next, is a Rod Serling portrait inside of Binghamton High School.

I skipped the Serling star in the Binghamton Walk of Fame downtown, as I pass it so many times that it is an ordinary object to me.  Perhaps that's why prophets are without honor in their hometowns.  We know the famous celebrity as an ordinary person.  One who carved his initials into a city bandstand as a child.

Or even...the thought I had as I passed the boys room in Binghamton High...oh, never mind.

Thank you to Broome County Transit whose special hybrid shuttle bus transported us to some of these sights.

So, what was the rest of the story?

This child of Binghamton grew up.  After Rod Serling graduated Binghamton Central in 1943 he served in the Pacific Theatre during World War II as a paratrooper.   The combat service (including, it is said, seeing his best friend die in front of him) created permanent trauma that haunted Serling for the rest of his too short life.  A driven individual and a heavy smoker, Rod Serling died at age 50 with an unbelievable legacy few of us could ever aspire to.

Some episodes haunted me for years after I saw them.  "It's a Good Life".  "The Midnight Sun".  "The Hitchhiker". "Nick of Time".

Others were morality plays that still resonate today although as a child I did not know their true meanings.   "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street"  "The Eye of the Beholder". "The Obsolete Man".

And, of course, "Walking Distance".

Rod Serling said, at the end of the "Walking Distance" episode of the protagonist Martin Sloane, the man who found out he could not go home:

Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives—trying to go home again. And also like all men perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone.

Day 5 of NaBloPloMo.

Binghamton Bicycle (Race) - Local Saturday

Welcome to day two of the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

Starting yesterday, over a thousand bloggers are blogging daily in the #AtoZChallenge throughout the month of April (except on Sundays), starting with A and devoting each consecutive day to another day of the alphabet.

My theme is "Days of our Lives".   It encompasses anything that touches my life, or the lives of those I love. Ideally, it must have at least one of my iPhone photographs in it.

Normally, on my blog, Saturday is devoted to "Local Saturday".  Today, I want to take you to a bicycle race that takes place in the small upstate New York city of Binghamton, New York every August.

My spouse won it one year - sort of.  But, before I tell that story, a little about the race.

It is called the Chris Thater Memorial Race.  This year it will be held August 27 and 28, once again in honor of Chris Thater, a 23 year old cyclist who was struck and killed by a drunk driver in 1983.  It's a series of races - bicycle races, a 5K run, a fun race for kids.

The event has been held for over 30 years now. It's a wonderful way to honor the memory of a young man taken from us too soon.

For the first 25 years, it was held in a beautiful West Side neighborhood near Binghamton's Recreation Park, near where Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame grew up.

The racing course was so beautiful and green (and hot).

The races were held during the day, and there was plenty of room to park, walk around and enjoy the races. For several years, there were live rock performances by local bands.  You could even get close up to the racers, as they prepared to race.  Some were amateur (I know one of them at her day job), some from this area, some were professionals from all over the world.


Here, one of the racers describes her experience in 2012, when these pictures were also taken.

We would walk along the race course, and finally take our places near the finish line for the last race, the money race with the professional racers.

And then someone would cross the finish line.

And with that, it's time for the story of how my spouse (sort of) won the 2012 Chris Thater.

Several minutes before the final race ended, one of the announcers would poll the crowd, asking who they thought would win the race.  In 2012, my husband named someone.

And he won!

What did he win?  A chance to meet the winner, here (spouse is on the right) as I stood by, thrilled.  One of his 15 minutes (well, more like five minutes) of fame.

In our house hangs his other prize - a poster, signed by the winner.

Alas, in 2014, the race was changed - moved to downtown Binghamton, the races reconfigured, a Cross Fit challenge added, the music and greenery deleted.    A new generation of race goers will treasure their own memories.

But I will always remember the year my husband, by a lucky guess, won a bicycle race.

Zone of Twilight

Z - the final letter in the alphabet. It's the last day of April, and the last day of the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

It's the last day of writing a post based on the day and the letter of the alphabet it represents.  The last day of repressing my almost-boiling-over desire to blog about Spring.

But wait.  There's one more post needed, for a word beginning with "Z".

The choice is obvious.  It's time to honor the Zone.

The Twilight Zone, that is.

As I write these words, I wonder how many people reading this post (given that I have a number of international readers, and readers who weren't born when this show aired on U.S. network TV) remember Rod Serling.  How many would recognize these words:  "Submitted for your approval".

Rod Serling on the cover of a classic TV Guide

We remember him well in Binghamton, well enough to have a local museum partially devoted to him.

I want to submit this post about a TV show called The Twilight Zone to you for your approval, because I have come full circle in my theme of America the Beautiful.  But don't expect me to show up at the end of this blog post, smoking a cigarette.

On the last day of this Challenge, I mention Binghamton, New York, the city where I work, the city where I lived for a brief time many years ago..  This was where Rod Serling, the man responsible for The Twilight Zone and other TV shows, grew up.  I've blogged about Rod Serling's childhood neighborhood and the junior high and high schools he went to.

This and above photo taken at Bundy Museum of History and Art Binghamton, NY, with permission

I've blogged about the park he played in, which Serling incorporated into several Twilight Zone episodes.   I can even show you an old library circulation card with his oldest known signature.

But I haven't blogged that much about the Twilight Zone TV series itself.  These shows, first broadcast between between 1959 and 1964, had a big influence on me.  Even as a child (I was born in 1952), I knew there was something special about this TV show that was unlike the normal run of Westerns and variety shows filling TV schedules in those years.

And, somehow, Serling kept coming back to the beautiful Binghamton and upstate New York of his childhood again and again in these shows.

There was always a twist in the story.  They were stories that made you think, made you question, made you angry, made you wonder.   Nothing was ever what it seemed, in the Twilight Zone.

The original Cobra Phone featured on the Twilight Zone, Bundy Museum

 Many featured actors and actresses who were either already famous or would become famous played roles on The Twilight Zone.  Burgess Meridith.  Cloris Leachman.  Charles Bronson. Elizabeth Montgomery.  Robert Redford.  William Shatner.

Here is a sample of episodes for your approval. (Note, if you click links, you will find full length videos. Some are 30 minute shows and others 60 minute shows.)

Eye of the Beholder: A deformed woman is awaiting the results of her plastic surgery...surgery she hopes will make her beautiful, like the people around her....

The Hitch-Hiker - a young woman survives an incident with her car and continues a drive cross country, where the same hitchhiker keeps trying to hitch a ride with her, over and over...

It's a Good Life - I still get chills when I see a cornfield.

Living Doll - why you should never mess with your children's toys....

The Monsters are Due on Maple Street - if you think you live in a neighborhood where everyone cares about everyone else, think again...

Time Enough At Last - what would you do if you were the last man on Earth?

Walking Distance - what happens when a harried man tries to return to his childhood?  (People who know Binghamton will recognize a certain park and carousel...)

The Midnight Sun - the Earth's orbit has changed, and the Earth is heading towards a fiery end - or, is it?  This is one of my personal favorites.

This is a Zone you may or may not want to enter. But if you dare (I've included links above to several full length episodes available on IMDb above), you will be richly rewarded.

Tomorrow - back to my regularly scheduled blogging except for May 4.  Stay tuned!

Another Revisit to The Twilight Zone - with Gratitude

I am traveling back in time, once again, to October of 2009, when I first wrote this post, and an update in September of 2011, after a devastating flood hit my neighborhood, and others in the Binghamton, New York area.

We are coming up on the 3rd anniversary of that flood.  There has been recovery, but there is still a lot of pain.

There is a lot to be grateful for - that we surived, that there hasn't been a flood since despite flood producing rains going all around us.  But, still there is the anxiety, always in the back of our mind:  how long will our luck hold out?

It might have made a good episode for The Twilight Zone. I wonder what Rod Serling might have thought, if he was alive and still living in Binghamton in 2014.

Enjoy the double post from 2011 and then 2009.

Did you know that Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame grew up in Binghamton, NY?  Did you know that The Twilight Zone TV show, seen by my generation as a new show, and generations since as reruns, aired 52 years ago this past October?

I am honored by the fact that I do much of my exercise walking in Rod Serling's boyhood neighborhood; that in a manner of speaking I walk in his footsteps.


Now that Binghamton (and surrounding villages and town) is in a fight to recover from the devastating floods of last month, I sometimes find myself in a personal Twilight Zone. Just a handful of miles from Rod's boyhood home, I can walk through my neighborhood, and pass from a zone where people just had some water (or a lot of water) in their basements, to a zone where water touched and then receded, to a zone where everything is closed, abandoned, or just plain dark (some still covered in layers of mud) with active rebuilding. I can pinch myself and ask "Did this really happen?  Or was it just a figment of imagination?  And what will it take for us to recover?"

Let us take a lesson from Binghamton's native son.  All things are possible in The Twilight Zone.  We will rise again.

So now, submitted for your approval, a post from 2009.

The Writer Once Without Honor in His Hometown

 Rod Serling.  The Twilight Zone.  The writer and the show are so much a part of our culture that several catchphrases and its theme music immediately bring this show to mind even to my 19 year old son.  Yet it is 50 years (and one day) after its first episode aired on October 2, 1959.  It has never left television once in all of those 50 years.

Happily, the paraphrase above of a quote from Jesus in the New Testament Book of Mark  ("A prophet without honor in his hometown...") may have been true at one time, but no longer is.   Rod Serling, a very talented...and tormented... man, who wrote amazing TV scripts in the era of the Red Menace with messages so timeless they resonate today, has come home.  It is ironic, in a way, that one of his most famous scripts showed a man trying to revisit his childhood in vain.

Rod Serling has now been honored in his hometown.  The hometown of which Rod Serling once said this:

"Everybody has to have a hometown, Binghamton's mine. In the strangely brittle, terribly sensitive make-up of a human being, there is a need for a place to hang a hat or a kind of geographical womb to crawl back into, or maybe just a place that's familiar because that's where you grew up.

  "When I dig back through memory cells, I get one particularly distinctive feeling—and that's one of warmth, comfort and well-being. For whatever else I may have had, or lost, or will find—I've still got a hometown. This, nobody's gonna take away from me."

We think we know the man in black and white, smoking a cigarette, who intoned the following every week on the TV sets of the baby boomer generation and their parents:

"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition...."

But what of the child who grew up in Binghamton?  Thanks in part to a conversation I had today with a man from California who upkeeps the Rod Serling Foundation website, I was able to walk in those footsteps.  It was humbling in a way to speak to a man who thinks so highly of a man that he has traveled four times to Binghamton to be here.  The same Binghamton that I am in five days a week, and take for granted.

During my journey, I also met people from Seneca Falls, NY and Cherry Hill, NJ who also came out to share the experience.  To so many, Binghamton is a "burnt out industrial town" but one of these people closed her eyes in delight in Rod's childhood neighborhood and exclaimed her happiness in seeing it.

So here is my tribute to Rod Serling.  I'm not even going to say "submitted for your approval". 

First, here is the home where Rod Serling grew up.  I've passed it doing my exercise walks (disclosure:  I do not live in this neighborhood but I love walking in it) and never knew its history.  As the address and a photo of this home exist on a Rod Serling website, I feel comfortable in posting a picture but will not give the address-it is privately owned.

This is the junior high (now West Middle School) where Rod Serling first met Helen Foley, the English teacher who influenced the boy who became the writer.  I took two pictures to highlight some of the Art Deco architectural details both in the windows above the entrance doors.

The next stop was Recreation Park, just a few
blocks from where Serling grew up, home to a bandstand where Serling carved his initials as a boy.
I didn't take a picture of the bandstand, but I did of the building housing the historic carousel.

Binghamton is known as the "Carousel Capital" and myself and my son took many rides on the same carousel. The carousel, which normally doesn't run after Labor Day, was running today to celebrate.  (Sorry, the picture isn't very good.)  They were showing the episode inside the carousel building on a couple of TV's and, although it has been years, I immediately recognized it because I've had such emotional responses when I've seen it.

A live recreation of this episode will air on our local PBS station tonight.


It will be an emotional experience for us who know the true story.  Which I do now.  I was told that even, after Rod Serling was famous beyond imagination, he would come back to his childhood neighborhood on Binghamton's west side and walk those streets.  Trying to find....something.

For what it is worth, the "Walking Distance" episode was not filmed in Binghamton (nor were any other Twilight Zones, although Serling came back to Binghamton many times) and the carousel in the episode was not this carousel.  It was filmed in Hollywood, according to the Serling expert I spoke to.

This is Binghamton High School (then known as Binghamton Central High School before Binghamton lost so much of its population in the 80's and 90's)

 Next, is a Rod Serling portrait inside of Binghamton High School.

I skipped the Serling star in the Binghamton Walk of Fame downtown, as I pass it so many times that it is an ordinary object to me.  Perhaps that's why prophets are without honor in their hometowns.  We know the famous celebrity as an ordinary person.  One who carved his initials into a city bandstand as a child.

Or even...the thought I had as I passed the boys room in Binghamton High...oh, never mind.

Thank you to Broome County Transit whose special hybrid shuttle bus transported us to some of these sights.

So, what was the rest of the story?

This child of Binghamton grew up.  After Rod Serling graduated Binghamton Central in 1943 he served in the Pacific Theatre during World War II as a paratrooper.   The combat service (including, it is said, seeing his best friend die in front of him) created permanent trauma that haunted Serling for the rest of his too short life.  A driven individual and a heavy smoker, Rod Serling died at age 50 with an unbelievable legacy few of us could ever aspire to.

Some episodes haunted me for years after I saw them.  "It's a Good Life".  "The Midnight Sun".  "The Hitchhiker". "Nick of Time".

Others were morality plays that still resonate today although as a child I did not know their true meanings.   "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street"  "The Eye of the Beholder". "The Obsolete Man".

And, of course, "Walking Distance".

Rod Serling said, at the end of the "Walking Distance" episode of the protagonist Martin Sloane, the man who found out he could not go home:

Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives—trying to go home again. And also like all men perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone.

Summer Ramblings - Music in the Twilight Zone

Remember Rod Serling?  Remember The Twilight Zone?

Rod Serling grew up on the West Side of Binghamton. on a street named after the first mayor of Binghamton.  He played in a park called Rec Park.  Rec Park is a gem of a park, with lots of green, a swimming pool, tennis courts, statues, and a carousel that is perpetually free, thanks to the generosity of a long ago businessman.

In fact, our Triple Cities is considered the "Carousel Capital" of the country, with six operational Herschell carousels - all free to ride.

Each August there is a music festival, free to the public, in Rec Park.

People gather among the trees.

Local bands played in the bandstand where Serling carved his initials as a child.

The same bandstand, long distance.

In the distance, the building that houses the historic 1925 carousel. (Readers! Would you like me to blog more about our carousels?)

And, a peek at one of the carousel panels that pays tribute to Serling . This one shows Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man".

Do you have a local festival during the summer?