When your kid goes to college in some distant town, you become interested in that town. My son Asher began attending SUNY Binghamton in 2019. Since then, I’ve visited the city twenty times, easily, every time collecting new experiences and information about the city’s history and culture.
Getting the most out of Binghamton hasn’t been easy. It’s not a place people talk about or the media makes a fuss over. It doesn’t have a noted food scene (unless you love spiedies, which I do), sports scene or world-class museum. The downtown is not bustling. The Susquahanna and Chenango slowly flow through the city, but there are more picturesque rivers. The valley the city sits in can be beautiful, particularly in autumn, but that beauty is obscured by a tangle of highways that bisect the area. In short, on the surface of it, Binghamton doesn’t have a lot going for it.
But it does have Rod Serling.
It was well into Asher’s freshman year when I discovered that Binghamton was the hometown of the creator of “The Twilight Zone.” I was walking around the downtown when a stumbled upon Binghamton’s ridiculously small “Sidewalk of Stars.” The city doesn’t have many boldface names to call its own. There’s Richard Deacon ( the boss on “The Dick Van Dyke Show”), Jim Hutton (Timothy’s actor dad) and cartoonist Johnny Hart (“B.C.” and “The Wizard of Id”). Rod is by far the most famous person to have called Binghamton home.
And Serling wasn’t the sort to shake the dust of his hometown from his shoes and never return once he had struck it big. Binghamton stayed with Serling his entire life. He visited often and stayed in touch with his high school English teacher, who had encouraged his writing. He also weaved his childhood memories there into several episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” including: “Mirror Image,” set in Binghamton’s beautifully maintained, art-deco-era Greyhound bus station (which I experienced early on, before I bought a car to makes visits to SUNY easier); “The After Hours,” set in a department store inspired by Fowler’s in downtown Binghamton, now Boscov’s; and, most significantly, “Walking Distance,” the fifth episode in the series and one of the best. It is also my personal favorite.
I loved “Walking Distance” long before I knew of its Binghamton roots. The episode aired on October 30, 1959. It stars Gig Young, a versatile film actor I always thought was underrated. (He’s best remembered today for his grisly end.) Young never caught many breaks in Hollywood, always playing second banana to more famous male stars. But he caught a break with “Walking Distance,” even if he probably didn’t know it at the time.
In “Walking Distance,” Young plays Martin Sloan, a burnt out ad executive who, running from responsibility and stress, pulls up at a rural gas station. He learns he is just a mile from the town where he grew up and decides to check in and see how the old burg is holding up. He finds it just like he remembered it—too much like he remembered it. For he has walked back into his childhood and soon meets his parents and a young version of himself. It’s a painful, wistful, nostalgic and heartbreaking story of lost innocence, which Young, director Robert Stevens and composer Bernard Herrmann handle masterfully. Serling wrote the script and the protagonist is widely viewed as being a version of himself. The opening narration goes:
Martin Sloan, age thirty-six. Occupation: vice-president, ad agency, in charge of media. This is not just a Sunday drive for Martin Sloan. He perhaps doesn't know it at the time, but it's an exodus. Somewhere up the road he's looking for sanity. And somewhere up the road, he'll find something else.
As I stood on the “Sidewalk of Stars” that first time, I was a little pissed at Binghamton. They had Rod Serling, one of the geniuses of early television, as a famous son and were doing nothing with it.
Serling had a special meaning for Asher and me. As my son grew up, I tried to counter his appetite for Marvel movies and video games by exposing him to old movies and television shows, just to show him how things had been done in the past. One show we watched, and he seemed to really enjoy, was “The Twilight Zone.” The episodes were inventive, eerie and self-contained. We got through three seasons before Asher grew impatient and moved on to other interests. (The more problematic fourth season featured hour-long episodes, rather than the usual half hour.)
As it turned out, my annoyance at Binghamton over its supposed neglect of Serling was unfounded. It’s just that the city’s affection for the writer is expressed in subtle ways and you had to look for its tributes.
Serling was born in Syracuse on Christmas Day 1924. His family moved to Binghamton in 1926 and settled into a modest house on 67 Bennett Avenue. This house was the first Serling landmark I found in Binghamton. There is no marker and the house is in poor shape. Someone lives there still today. It’s not a remarkable piece of architecture, but it does have the semi-spooky, too-perfect Americana quality you find in many episodes of “The Twilight Zone.”
I discovered there was a Rod Serling museum in Binghamton. Well, actually, it was a Rod Serling exhibit inside another museum, the Bundy Museum. The latter consists of the well-preserved Victorian home of Harlow E. Bundy, a businessman whose time-clock company eventually led to the creation of IBM. But Covid had shut the Bundy Museum down and I couldn’t get in.
One of Binghamton’s nicknames is the Carousel Capital of the World. Many years ago, George F. Johnson, the owner of the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company, which employed thousands in the area, donated six carousels to the “triple cities” of Binghamton, Johnson City and Endicott. It was one of the many ways Johnson tried to create a good life for his workers, hoping that such amenities would fend off any desire to unionize. The carousels, in various states of repair, still stand.
A year or so ago, my wife Mary Kate and I decided visit all six. We succeeded, though none were operating due to Covid. The biggest and most beautiful of the carousels is in the prosaically named Recreation Park, the centerpiece of the Binghamton park system. A closer look at the decorative panels at the top of the carousel made us realize that it had been redecorated as a tribute to Rod Serling. Each panel above the carousel horses depicted an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” including “Walking Distance.”
Why “Walking Distance”? Because the key scene in that episode takes place on a carousel in a park. Serling was evoking Recreation Park, which was indeed walking distance from his childhood home on Bennett Avenue.
Now, this was the sort of Serling tribute I had been looking for in Binghamton.
Some months later, my son, a film major, was shooting a student project in the park. It included a scene inside a nearby bandstand. As he looked through the footage, he noticed he had captured a plaque set into the floor of the bandstand. It reads: “Rod Serling. Creator of The Twilight Zone. “Walking Distance.””
Another lovely tribute.
Recently, the Bundy Museum finally reopened for business. When Mary Kate and I drove up for “Family Weekend” at Binghamton University, we made a point to take Asher to the museum. The house itself is beautiful and well worth visiting. It is part of a vaguely bohemian complex of buildings called a “campus,” including a darkroom for photography, a small theater where films are shown, a gift shop and a space that will become a coffee shop. They’ve also transplanted an old IBM barbershop into one of the buildings and an old bar and jukebox that previously stood on Clinton Street, a strip once famously crowded with more than forty bars.
But we were there for the Serling exhibit. It consisted of a single room, but did not disappoint. It’s a treasure trove of memorabilia from Serling’s career, including letters written by the writer, scripts, photos from the episodes and film posters. It is also a reminder of how huge a phenomenon “The Twilight Zone” was at the time. There is a “Twilight Zone” board game and “Twilight Zone” dolls. My favorite item was the a prototype of Talky Tina doll from the terrifying episode “Living Doll.”
Recently, I have learned that there are plans to erect a statue of Rod Serling in Recreation Park. That would seem to me to be the capper to Binghamton’s ongoing quiet devotion to the writer. (Though I would like to see a downtown street named after him.) I misjudged Binghamton on that day four years ago when I stood on the “Sidewalk of Stars.” It’s a modest, working-class city that does not naturally crow about its attractions. You have to do a bit of searching to suss out its heart. And I have, eventually finding excellent old-school restaurants and bars, hot pie, city chicken, bakeries, a nature preserve, the third oldest zoo in the United States, a historic bridge, myriad classic diners and, of course, the carousels and Bundy Museum.
A few weeks ago, my son told me that the Recreation Park carousel had finally reopened for business. He took the opportunity to take a ride on the amusement that had so made an impression on Serling. I will unfortunately have to wait my turn. The carousels are seasonal; they close around Labor Day. Their reopening will coincide with Asher’s graduation from Binghamton University in May. The ride will make a nice coda to my four years of Serling spelunking in Binghamton. And, maybe, as I go round, I’ll think of the end narration of “Walking Distance” as I do:
And perhaps, across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then, too, because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind that are a part of the Twilight Zone.
Odds and Ends…
I had a great time meeting some of the subscribers and Bar Regulars during my recent book-tour events at Book Larder in Seattle, Omnivore Books in San Francisco, and Now Serving L.A. in Los Angeles. Thank you all for coming out!… Old Fashioned Week begins on Oct. 14 and runs through Oct. 23… Bourbon Pub, a restaurant by chef Michael Mina in the San Francisco Airport, serves a very good Manhattan. The nachos are quite good, too… Le Loup in Nashville has a “Tributes” page to its cocktail menu, including such modern classics as the Paper Plane, Tantris Sidecar, La Perla, Trident and Black Rock Chiller… Longtime liquor brand ambassador Lauren Mote has a new book out called A Bartender’s Guide to the World… Drinks writer Amanda Schuster has a great new book out called Drink Like a Local New York: A Field Guide to New York's Best Bars. Buy it!… Alex Raij’s New York Basque restuarant Txikito is back and in fine fettle. Recommended are the Gildas, both hot and cold, the octopus and mushroom carpaccios, the olive oil-poached cod and the Txikitini, the house Martini which is made of vodka, gin, shochu, Cap Corse and ghuindilla.
I really enjoyed your writing today! I grew up outside of Buffalo, and can feel the particularities you mention about Binghamton in your words. Thank you!
Robert, I adored reading this newsletter entry. I went to Binghamton and I LOVE The Twilight Zone. Similar to you and your son, it was my dad who got me into it and if we aren't sitting next to each other for both the July 4 and December 31 marathons, we are at least talking to each other throughout the day over "what's on now." I lived close to Rod's house - on Riverside Drive!