“Some mean boy on the school playground asked if I was ‘something out of the Twilight Zone,’ but I had no idea what that meant because I wasn’t allowed to watch much TV during the week - my mother’s rule.” “I knew he was a writer, but didn’t know what he wrote about until I was about 7,” she said. He was brilliantly funny at home and a great practical joker.”Īs a child, Anne had little knowledge of her father’s career.

My friends adored him and any apprehension they had about meeting him would instantly dissolve because he could make anyone feel at ease. “Although the war left scars, he was also a very positive, fun, down to earth person. “He was described as a tortured soul, but that wasn’t my father at all,” said Anne, who published “As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling” in 2013 (). In biographies after his death, the master storyteller of chilling sci-fi and fantasy tales was often described as dark and depressed, inaccuracies that led Anne “to set the record straight” in her own book about her father. But he is best remembered as the program’s stone-faced host, whose foreboding narrations introduced the show each week. He said writing was a way to get the war trauma ‘out of his gut.’”ĭuring the show’s five year run, Serling was executive producer and chief writer, penning more than half the some 150 episodes. “He later wrote plays for commercial radio, then television. “When he returned from war in the Philippines, he went to college and wrote for the campus radio station,” daughter Anne Serling recalled. “The Twilight Zone,” an anthology series that aired in the early 1960s, was created by Rod Serling (1924-1975), a veteran of radio and World War II. It’s been called one of the most influential programs in the history of television drama.

As i knew him my dad rod serling