
Rodman Edward Serling (December 25, 1924 – June 28, 1975) was an American screenwriter and television producer best known for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his anthology television series, The Twilight Zone.
That show was heavily influenced by Serling’s World War II experience in helping to liberate the Philippines. (He had wanted to be deployed to Europe to fight fascism.) Serling’s writing was deep. For example, in his prologue to the 1960 Twilight Zone episode “The Purple Testament”, he said, “Infantry platoon, U.S. Army, Philippine Islands, 1945. These are the faces of the young men who fight, as if some omniscient painter had mixed a tube of oils that were at one time earth brown, dust gray, blood red, beard black, and fear — yellow white, and these men were the models. For this is the province of combat, and these are the faces of war.” He was wounded twice, and awarded the Purple Heart.
“I was bitter about everything and at loose ends when I got out of the service,” he said later. “I think I turned to writing to get it off my chest.” A heavy smoker, Serling died at just 50 from a heart attack.
(Photo: CBS)
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Randy Cassingham is best known as the creator of This is True®, the oldest entertainment feature on the Internet: it has been running weekly by email subscription since early 1994. It is social commentary using weird news as its vehicle so it’s fun to read. Click here for the site — basic subscriptions are free.
Comments? Sorry: Facebook retired their commenting system (they didn’t even bother to alert me). Just as well, I suppose, but sadly there is no way to recover the many hundreds of comments made on this site. Lesson learned: never rely on someone else’s site for prime functions, especially “social media”!
Since this site is mostly retired now (maximum of one new post per month), I did decide that since all comments are now gone that I would not attempt to install any new commenting system. -rc
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