The WSKG program OFF THE PAGE is
designed specifically as "a forum for writers from our
region". Since its inception in January, 2000 it has
presented hundreds of novelists, poets, playwrights, historians,
essayists... (the list goes on and even includes farmers and a
playground designer who wrote books). With very few
exceptions (mostly authors of books with special regional interest)
they are people living and writing within the WSKG coverage
area.
For the first time OFF THE PAGE
presents a program devoted to an author who is no longer with us.
If, as Walt Whitman said, the proof of a poet is that his
people absorb him as affectionately as he has them, we can
apply that idea to playwright Rod Serling. He belongs to
Binghamton as much as the city was a part of him. Even at his
most fanciful or bizarre, in works destined to a mass audience,
there are signs that Rod Serling never left home.
"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."
-- Rod Serling
On the 50th anniversary (October 3,
1959) of his creation of "The Twilight
Zone" on CBS Television Rod Serling is being remembered and in
some ways reconjured in the communities he called home. There
will be seminars and conferences at
Antioch College in Ohio, where he and his wife Carol studied,
and at Ithaca
College, where he taught. In Binghamton,
the Rod Serling Video Festival will be screening the PBS
American Masters program "Rod Serling: Submitted for Your
Approval" and at the Forum Theatre there will be a 12-hour
"Twilight Zone" Marathon. There will also be walking tours of
places that played a role in Serling's plays, including the
carousel at Recreation
Park that is the scene for "Walking Distance". And on
Saturday, October 3rd at 8:00 PM WSKG-TV will present live
performances of two "Twilight Zone" episodes set in
Binghamton: "Walking Distance" and "Mirror Image", and a new
half-hour documentary on Serling's life by Brian Frey.
OFF THE PAGE will highlight the events of TZ@50 and the
celebration of Rod Serling's life and work. Joining Bill Jaker will be Larry Kassan,
director of special projects for the Binghamton City Schools and
the Rod Serling School of the Arts and founder and director
of the Rod
Serling Video Festival, which annually honors the best video
work by children in grades K-12, and Anne
Serling-Sutton of Ithaca, who is presently writing a book about
her father entitled "Another Dimension", to be published in spring
2010. Also on the program is ,
Martin Grams Jr. author of the encyclopedic new work "The
Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic".
The program also includes an excerpt
of an OFF THE PAGE interview from January 2004 with Robert
Keller, professor emeritus of art history at Broome Community
College, author of the book "House Proud" and a boyhood friend of
Rod Serling. He tells of playing imaginative games with Rod
in the city's cemeteries, but also about the serious editorials
that Rod wrote for the Binghamton High School newspaper as the
Second World War was expected to soon take them away.
After returning from service as a paratrooper in the Pacific in
World War II, Rod Serling enrolled in Antioch College in Ohio and
his future began to take shape. As part of Antioch's
work-study curriculum, Rod spent his first few months of college at
radio station WNYC, which was then owned by the City of New
York. Thanks to the WNYC
archive we can hear excerpts from a couple of programs that
reveal Rod Serling was already a skilled radio actor. He
later did an internship at WMRN in Marion, Ohio, from which OFF THE
PAGE re-creates a deliberately silly portion of a teenage record
show. Serling's first fully professional job in radio was at
station WLW in Cincinnati ("The Nation's Station") and his
assignments as a staff writer left him dissatisfied and caused him
to turn to writing serious drama in his hours away from work.
The documentary report on Serling's radio career includes
interviews with John Michael Kittross, broadcast historian and
Antioch classmate of Rod Serling; Saul Marmer, a friend and
neighbor of Rod and Carol Serling during their Cincnnati days; and
Professor Michael
Sanders, director of electronic media communications at the
University of Cincinnati.
Submit questions, observations or personal memories of Rod Serling
and the "Twilight Zone" to OffThePage@WSKG.ORG.
