Rod Serling was one of my professors at Ithaca College. Any actual class time was full of stories, about just about any topic you might imagine. Mostly, though, they focused on TV and movies (He had a great one about Louis B. Mayer, a bit crude, but hilarious...) One summer a small class on writing for television spent its days on the back deck of Rod's new Cayuga lake home, a property adjoining the family's ancestral cottage. We were treated to Genny Cream Ale, and, of course more stories.
The only comment Rod ever made related at all to the service was his opinion of vets who would buttonhole people at parties and regale them with self-aggrandizing stories of their WWII experiences. He hated this, and said of those vets that they were "...suckling from the breast of Man's Greatest Inhumanity to Man."
The year before I graduated, Serling went in for quadruple bypass heart surgery, and died on the table. A candle that represented human kindness and wisdom, with the great talent to express these most reasonable views, was snuffed. And we miss him.
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