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    As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling
    As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling
    As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling
    Audiobook8 hours

    As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling

    Written by Anne Serling

    Narrated by Anne Serling

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    In Twilight Zone reruns, I search for my father in the man on the screen, but I can’t always find him there. Instead, he appears in unexpected ways. Memory summoned by a certain light, a color, a smell—and I see him again on the porch of our old red lakeside cottage, where I danced on the steps as a child.

    To Anne Serling, the imposing figure the public saw hosting The Twilight Zone each week, intoning cautionary observations about fate, chance, and humanity, was not the father she knew. Her fun-loving dad would play on the floor with the dogs, had nicknames for everyone in the family, and was apt to put a lampshade on his head and break out in song. He was her best friend, her playmate, and her confidant.

    After his unexpected death at 50, Anne, just 20, was left stunned. Gradually, she found solace for her grief—talking to his friends, poring over old correspondence, and recording her childhood memories. Now she shares eloquent, revealing letters and beautifully rendered scenes of his childhood, war years, and their family’s time together. Idyllic summers in upstate New York, the years in Los Angeles, and the myriad ways he filled their time with laughter, strength, and endearing silliness—all are captured here with deep affection and candor.

    Though begun in loss, Anne’s story is a celebration of her extraordinary relationship with her father and the qualities she came to prize through him—empathy, kindness, and an uncompromising sense of social justice. As I Knew Him is a lyrical, intimate tribute to Rod Serling’s legacy as visionary, storyteller, and humanist, and a moving testament to the love between fathers and daughters.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateApr 30, 2013
    ISBN9781469285139
    Author

    Anne Serling

    Before becoming a full-time writer, Anne Serling was an early childhood teacher with a bachelor of arts degree in education from Elmira College. She serves on the board of directors of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation and is involved with the Rod Serling School of the Arts “Fifth Dimension” program. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

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    Reviews for As I Knew Him

    4.5/5

    38 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serlingby Anne Serling"AS I KNEW HIM is, in many ways, a beautiful love letter from a grieving daughter to a father who was taken too soon." (from book reporter)Simply....Anne shares memories of her father.They are sometimes haunting, sad moments ...but often they are exceptional times of joy.With photographs correspondence, and story telling, we're led to observe and encounter her experiences of sorrow, joy, pain ,healingI laughed.... I cried.This heartfelt memoir is truly a labor of love.4 ★
    • 5/5
      The personal experiences. The entire sounded like a personal letter to Anne’s father. Loved it!
    • 4/5
      Having grown up in the 1960s, I never missed the Twilight Zone. Although not all of the shows were written by Serling, most (the best) were. They were more than “scary.” They were eerily mysterious. And seeing Rod at the beginning and the end with his cigarette in hand always added to the mystery. This book was really interesting. I learned a lot about a writer about whom not much was known. Turns out, his life was just about as All American as one can get: war hero, terrific father, gifted writer. My only criticism of the author is her insistence on using present tense verbs throughout the book. It was distracting and didn’t serve any apprent purpose. That said, it didn’t detract from my overall enjoyment of the book.
    • 5/5
      absolutely wonderful book about a very talented and fine man
    • 4/5
      Having grown up in the 1960s, I never missed the Twilight Zone. Although not all of the shows were written by Serling, most (the best) were. They were more than “scary.” They were eerily mysterious. And seeing Rod at the beginning and the end with his cigarette in hand always added to the mystery. This book was really interesting. I learned a lot about a writer about whom not much was known. Turns out, his life was just about as All American as one can get: war hero, terrific father, gifted writer. My only criticism of the author is her insistence on using present tense verbs throughout the book. It was distracting and didn’t serve any apprent purpose. That said, it didn’t detract from my overall enjoyment of the book.
    • 5/5
      “The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.” -Rod SerlingThe First AttemptMore than a week ago, I wrote a review for this book. I was about to post it. In fact, it was when I pressed Control-C that something went wrong with the program. It crashed. Of course, I write my reviews in a document program and I regularly save them, so no worries. But when I tried to reopen the file, something was wrong. There was nothing there. I inspected the file—it had been reduced to 4 kilobytes. I tried to bring it up on another computer, but the file had been replaced with nothingness. My initial reaction was, “screw that—I'm not rewriting that review.” It's not that it was a great review by any means, but it was rather lengthy and I have other things to do with my time. The lack of a review weighed on me, however.One of the many things I learned about Serling from this book was that he was a very hard worker. He made it in the business because he refused to give up. I give up too easily. So even though it's just a silly review for a book, a review that a handful of people will read, I'd decided to channel some of that Serling energy and make it happen. Perhaps it was for that lesson that my computer crashed in the first place. Wouldn't that put a whole Twilight Zone spin to it?…The Second AttemptAbout a week ago, I made second attempt. Nothing crashed. But everything about the review felt wrong. I failed miserably. And at this point, I have to wonder, what is the point of this rambling? Does anyone wanting to read a review about As I Knew Him really care about my difficulties writing this review? Probably not. But still I press on.….The Third AttemptWhat is the reason I'm struggling with this review? Sure, the first was out of my hands, but I hadn't been happy with it. Perhaps my disgust for the second attempt was coupled with the frustration caused by the first failure. Maybe I'm just going about this review all wrong and the fates are trying to tell me something. What could I do different?I'm going to avoid talking about the details of this book. If you're interested in Serling or his works, or in the life of a famous person who still resembled a decent human being, then you should consider reading all the details yourself. Also I'm not going to go into the “what works” and “doesn't works” of the book. I'm going to skip over all that and jump to the end.I really enjoyed As I Knew Him. I've always been attracted to something in the character of Serling, and now that I've read this intimate, heartfelt memoir written by his daughter, I think I get it: Serling really was something special. At a time when so many people turned a blind eye to injustice, Serling battled harder than many of his contemporaries to get his stories told. When he was censored, he sought ways to get around the censors, an action which resulted in his most notable work. But Serling was also a family man, an artist who put his work second only to his family. And these two characteristics were exceptional in a man who couldn't walk down the street without being recognized.I find inspiration in this. I want to put my family first, my art second, and make sure that there's little room for anything else in my biography.This is nothing like my original review, the one that possibly exists only in another dimension. Or my second review, the one that never gelled. They're both gone. What's left is this. I'm not even sure if you could call this a review, but it's all I'd had left to offer… It's time I move on.
    • 5/5
      AS I KNEW HIM: MY DAD, ROD SERLING is that rare hybrid of a book that succeeds magnificently as both memoir and biography. Because Anne Serling gives us not just an utterly human story of her own close relationship with her father, but also perhaps the most revealing and, again, oh-so-human portrait yet written of her dad as both a man and an extremely gifted writer and student of the human condition, who fought his whole life against racism and bigotry, and this was often reflected in his writing.Anne Serling's book is filled with the wit, wisdom and humor of her father, both from his TV and movie scripts, and from family anecdotes and stories that she shares. We also get a very close and detailed look at his childhood and adolescence, his WWII service as a paratrooper, his college years at Antioch College, where he met his wife, Carol. And then his rapid rise into the top tier of TV and film writers. I found myself constantly dog-earing pages of Serling sayings and bits and pieces from his hundreds of scripts. But I've decided not to share them here. Because, if you were a fan of The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery, as I was, then you know just how effective he was as a dramatist.Serling was only fifty when he died of heart problems, but man, did he pack a lot of living into those fifty years. A workaholic of sorts, he left a lasting legacy - in all those TV shows and screenplays, and also, I suspect, in the students he taught at various colleges later in his career. But I think what affected me the most deeply was Anne's own story of the devastating grief and sense of loss she felt at losing her father. She was just twenty when he died, and it took her years to get over it - if indeed you ever do get over that kind of personal loss. The final chapters are wrenchingly sad, and will most certainly hit home with anyone who has lost a beloved parent, whether they were twenty or seventy when it happened. I was sixty-nine when my mother died, at 96. I wept at reading of Anne's difficulties in coping with this grievous loss. It's never easy. Serling bore scars, both physical and psychological, from the war, and I thought often of the many books, both fiction and memoir, currently coming out of today's wars as I read of his early attempts at writing, especially when he said -"I was bitter about everything and at loose ends when I got out of the service. I think I turned to writing to get it off my chest ... Shrapnel wounds and mangled, bullet ridden bodies are not the only casualties of war. There are casualties of the mind. Every war produces a backwash, a residue of pain and grief."AS I KNEW HIM is, quite simply, a beautiful book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Bravo, Ms. Serling. Your dad would be so proud.- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
    • 4/5
      Interesting insights into the personality of the remarkable Rod Serling and the stories behind his famous " Twilight Zone" series. People in the Ithaca area will particularly like the descriptions of his life at the cottage on Cayuga Lake.