How Ohio Shaped Rod Serling’s ‘The Twilight Zone’

In the fall of 1962, Jeanne Marshall was one of  20 students in a seminar titled “Drama in the Mass Media” at Antioch College in Yellow Springs. Although she was a published writer with clips in the Dayton Daily News and the Beavercreek News, she told the instructor, himself an Antioch alumnus, that she was a rank amateur.

“Jeanne, we are all rank amateurs,” the instructor replied. “Every one of us here. We may rise to professional status for a week or two, but we’re right back to being rank amateurs the next week.”

It was a bold statement considering the source: Rodman Edward Serling, who, at the time, was one of the most famous men in television.

Serling was the creator of the anthology series “The Twilight Zone,” which was on the verge of cancellation when he opted to come back to his alma mater as a writer in residence. (Indeed, like another 1960s show with science fiction and social justice themes, “Star Trek,” “The Twilight Zone” struggled with ratings during its five-year run from 1959 to 1964.)

Serling, the show’s executive producer, narrator and writer, returned to his alma mater for respite, saying, “This will give me a chance to relax and inhale a little bit.” But it was also a return to where it all began. 

Rod Serling became a pop culture icon for his involvement with “The Twilight Zone,” which remains his most notable work 60 years after it went off the air. But before that show and following it, he was a prolific writer of scripts for radio, television and the movies.

His writing career started with his time at Antioch College, and his first stop — prior to New York, which was the center of television broadcasting in the 1950s before Hollywood supplanted it in the 1960s — was Cincinnati. There, Serling honed his craft as a writer for local TV and radio projects and started to sell scripts that led him to his place in television history.

“Without Cincinnati, you don’t get to the next level of Rod,” said TV critic Mark Dawidziak, whose books include one titled Everything I Need to Know, I Learned in the Twilight Zone. “Cincinnati is the door that leads to everything else.”

Rod Serling wearing Antioch College sweatshirt (photo courtesy of Rod Serling Memorial Foundation)

Rod Serling was born on Christmas Day, 1924, in Syracuse, New York, and grew up in nearby Binghamton. He applied and was accepted to Antioch College (the alma mater of his older brother Robert, who would himself go on to have a successful writing career as a journalist and novelist) but joined the Army the day after he graduated high school in 1943. 

Serling’s experiences with the 511th Parachute Infantry in the South Pacific were harrowing and no doubt influenced his writing. In fact, Serling used World War II, or war in general, as the setting for multiple works, including several episodes of “The Twilight Zone.”

Following the end of the war, Serling returned to the United States and, using his GI Bill benefits, enrolled at Antioch College in Yellow Springs. Among his contemporaries, there was an Alabama native named Coretta Scott, who transferred from Antioch to the New England Conservatory of Music. While there, she met and married a systematic theology student at nearby Boston University: Martin Luther King Jr.

Serling, a sports fan and amateur athlete who boxed in the Army, switched his major to physical education because he liked working with kids. But he found that writing served as a tool to deal with his traumatic experiences at war. He was spurred on with the support of Carolyn Kramer, a student he had met at Antioch. Kramer, a Columbus native, was the granddaughter of Ohio State University’s first president. She and Serling married in 1948 at the First Unitarian Church of Columbus.

“I owe a lot to Antioch,” Serling recalled to the Dayton Daily News in 1956.

By then, Serling was already forming his writing career. In March 1948, Antioch’s literary magazine published “The Good Right Hand,” a story about a boxer facing an existential crisis after his career ends due to injury. Serling was also branching out into performing, with early cast experiences including a radio production of O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi” in Springfield. (Serling’s work really does seem to be the spiritual heir to O. Henry, another writer with a prolific output of stories that featured twist endings.) 

While a student, he also worked briefly at a Marion radio station — very briefly. Serling said in an interview years later that he was fired for badmouthing Marion native and 29th U.S. President Warren G. Harding in front of the station’s owner.

In 1949, a Serling-penned script was used for an episode of “Dr. Christian,” a long-running radio program. He also sold a script for “Grand Central Station,” another radio show. But by then, a new medium was taking hold.

Radio networks had started experimenting with a new technology called television in the 1930s, but it wasn’t until after World War II that the medium really took off. In 1950, it was estimated that 9 percent of households had a television. A decade later, it was 90 percent.

It was an experimental era for television. It was almost entirely live, which means, sadly, much of the programming of those days has been lost to history. In addition to series with regular characters, there were anthology series, presenting self-contained programs of an hour or longer (One of the most popular of these, “Playhouse 90,” was so called because episodes were 90 minutes.)

Even local TV stations were producing their own programming. WKRC in Cincinnati started its own show, “The Storm,” and on July 10, 1951, it aired an episode called “Keeper of the Chair,” tackling the morality of capital punishment. It was Rod Serling’s first TV credit. 

Rod Serling meeting with Bob Huber of WKRC in Cincinnati (photo courtesy of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation)

Serling had arrived in Cincinnati following his graduation from Antioch to work for WLW, a local radio station (at one point, one of the farthest reaching in the country). The station provided him opportunities to write for the air, but it was mostly lighter fare, not the dramas he wanted to tackle. He quit within a couple years to write freelance full time. He found a willing audience with “The Storm,” which at one point tried to package the show for national airing. Only one of Serling’s episodes of “The Storm” has survived: “No Gods To Serve,” a story of troops during the Korean War. (It’s available to view for free on YouTube.)

On Jan. 12, 1955, Kraft Television Theatre, an NBC anthology series, aired a program called “Patterns,” about ambition and back-room machinations at a corporation. (A year later, it was remade for the movies.) Serling wrote the teleplay and suddenly became a hot commodity. Charlton Wallace of the Cincinnati Times-Star referred to Serling as “Cincinnati’s one-man script factory.” In fact, during a six-day period in November 1955, no fewer than three Serling scripts could be seen on television.

In 1956, “Requiem for a Heavyweight” premiered on “Playhouse 90.” (It, too, would become a movie.) The production took elements from “The Twilight Rounds,” one of Serling’s scripts for “The Storm,” as well as “The Good Right Hand,” the story Serling wrote for the Antioch literary magazine. By then, Serling had left southwestern Ohio for Connecticut, so he could be close to New York City, the center of television broadcasting at the time. 

On November 24, 1958, three days before Thanksgiving, Desilu Playhouse aired “The Time Element.” Another Serling script, it was recycled from use on “The Storm.” William Bendix plays a psychiatric patient, telling his therapist (Martin Balsam) about recurring dreams of being at Pearl Harbor.

It’s regarded as an unofficial pilot episode for “The Twilight Zone.”

Although his travels took him to New York and then to Hollywood, Serling didn’t stay away from Ohio. He regularly returned to his alma mater and was an in-demand speaker. While at Antioch, he hosted a late-night movie on WBNS in Columbus as well. He never equaled the success of “The Twilight Zone,” but he continued to write, with movie credits that included “Seven Days in May,” “Planet of the Apes” and “The Man,” a 1972 movie where James Earl Jones portrayed the first Black president. His most notable television work after “The Twilight Zone” was “Night Gallery.” Like his previous show, he wrote some of the scripts and introduced the episodes.

Serling died June 28, 1975, at the age of 50. A three-to-four-pack-a-day smoker — he could be glimpsed with a lit cigarette during his introductions of “The Twilight Zone” and did ads for Chesterfield cigarettes — Serling had two heart attacks the previous month. He underwent open-heart surgery on June 26 and had a third heart attack while on the operating table, dying two days later.

Since then, he’s been heralded for his work. In 2009, a postage stamp was unveiled in Beavercreek that commemorated Serling. In 2024, his hometown of Binghamton dedicated a statue in his honor, and Yellow Springs, where Antioch College is located, has plans to unveil a historical marker during its film festival there in October 2025.

And of course, his work lives on. “The Twilight Zone” has become one of the seminal works of television, a regular staple on cable and streaming services. A movie was made in 1983 that featured segments heavily influenced by, if not outright remakes of, episodes from the 1960s written by Serling himself. A revival of the television series followed in 1985, and the show returned twice more in the 21st century: for a season in 2002, hosted by Forest Whitaker, and for 20 more episodes on streaming in 2019, hosted by Jordan Peele. 

“I just want them to remember me a hundred years from now,” Serling said less than four months before his death in what turned out to be his final interview. “I don’t care that they’re not able to quote any single line that I’ve written. But just that they can say, ‘Oh, he was a writer.’ That’s sufficiently an honored position for me.”

For more Ohio inspiration, sign up for our Ohio Magazine newsletters.

Ohio Magazine is available in a beautifully designed print issue that is published 7 times a year, along with Spring-Summer and Fall-Winter editions of LongWeekends magazine. Subscribe to Ohio Magazine and stay connected to beauty, adventure and fun across our state.