Rod Serling and me

From my high school yearbook. Rod Serling came back to speak to the graduating class before mine.

Rod Serling and I never crossed paths - he was a well-established writer by the time I came along - but in my tween/teen years, I lived around the corner from where he’d grown up and went to the same junior high and high schools, where I had some of the same teachers. And oh, did they ever love him! Their eyes sparkled when they talked about him; he was and would always be the golden boy. They all passed on some time ago, but I remember all the teachers fondly, and I will always stan The Twilight Zone.

He left us far too soon - heart disease. (My parents always said that if he’d gone to the hospital where my father had his bypass surgery (new and still rare in the early ‘70s), he would’ve lived much longer.)

Bonus: I walked by his family’s house on my way to the elementary school that was built after he lived in the neighborhood.