June 28
On a Saturday, thirty-nine years ago, my father died unexpectedly three days after open heart surgery. The morning began much like this one—brilliantly sunny, warm---a day he would have loved puttering around the yard, lying in the hammock, looking out at the lake. But he was far from the cottage, far from the water, lying in a hospital, and on that excruciating afternoon, at 2:20, he was inexplicably gone.
Two memorial services were held simultaneously a few days later on both coasts. I share the following from Gene Roddenberry the creator and producer of Star Trek:
“The fact that Rod Serling was a uniquely talented writer with extraordinary imagination is not our real loss. These merely describe his tools and the level of his skill. Our loss is the man, the intelligence and the conscience that used these things for us. No one could know Serling, or view or read his work, without recognizing his deep affection for humanity, his sympathetically enthusiastic curiosity about us, and his determination to enlarge our horizons by giving us a better understanding of ourselves. He cared and, I suspect, perhaps too deeply too much of the time. He dreamed of much for us and demanded much of himself, perhaps more than was possible for either in this time and place. But it is that quality of dreams and demands that makes the ones like Rod Serling rare … and always irreplaceable.”

"My world and sense of ethics where hugely changed by this man. Thank you so much Anne Serling for sharing your father so generously with the world." Maxx Cunningham

http://www.amazon.com/As-Knew-Him-Dad-Serling/dp/080653673X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr&qid

Anne Serling January 26“Almost all of my father’s closing narrations end with the phrase, The Twilight Zone. The message of this episode, however, was clearly so important to him, so central to his passion, that he felt the need to go beyond the fantasy.
‘The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes—all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and remember, not only in The Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s earth.’”

Closing narration Twilight Zone “Death’s Head Revisited”
AS I KNEW HIM: My Dad Rod Serling