(Originally published in the Philadelphia Daily News, March 28, 2008)
“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”. Rod Serling narration from the Twilight Zone episode “Walking Distance”
As I walked through a Sporting Goods store recently, I noticed a small sign stating that “Opening Day” for trout season in Philadelphia is Saturday, March 29. I smiled as I read it, because it conjured up pleasant memories from my youth of trout fishing, and opening days spent “back the crick” with my buddies.
The Wissahickon Creek (pronounced “crick” in Philly-speak) snakes through the northwest neighborhoods of Philadelphia, and it was an annual rite of spring for the young boys of Roxborough, Manayunk, and East Falls to prepare for opening day of trout season. I’m told that it was very much the same thing in the NE Philly neighborhoods surrounding Pennypack Creek.
My fellow fishermen in those days were the boys that I had grown up with, most of whom I’d known since I was 6 years old. We hung out under a Henry Avenue bridge, and called ourselves “The Bridge.” Other guys in the neighborhood mockingly called us “The Trolls.” It seemed as if our major goal in life back then was to make each other laugh, and we were pretty good at it, too. We made up amusing nicknames for each other, most of which were references to some unique anatomical feature we possessed. There was Curly, Freckle, Hair, Fly, Gut, and Chalk (because of his pale complexion). A lot of these nicknames centered on head sizes or shapes, so we also had Brick Head, Pineapple Head, Bucket Head, Globin, and Boulder.
We used to make up bawdy songs, with indecent lyrics that we would sing as we walked along the trails of the Wissahickon. We thought of ourselves as being great outdoorsmen simply because we knew how to light a fire with a magnifying glass and cook minute steaks in old pans we confiscated from our kitchens. Our plan was to cook the fish that we caught and pretend that we could “live off the land” if we had to, but most of us weren’t very good at fishing. Bucket Head and I once grabbed a dead trout that was floating downstream and fried it. Of course, we had no idea what we were doing, and didn’t gut and bone the fish. I can still remember my poor mother struggling to scrape the mysterious foul-smelling gristle from that old black pan. But, that was nothing compared to what I had to scrape the day after I ate it.
One of my buddies was really quite good at fishing, and we used to call him “Fisherman.” He could easily catch 25 trout in a single day. He was also smart enough to get as far away from the rest of us as possible. While we were busy un-snagging our lines, pushing each other into the creek, or throwing rocks in the water, Fisherman was 50 yards downstream catching trout and laughing at all of us. We didn’t care though, and in the naïveté and exuberance of our youth we thought those days would last forever. But, our fishing days together, and our adolescence, slowly began to fade with the passage of time.
I still enjoy hiking along the old trails of the Wissahickon Creek. Whenever I’m there, I am always amazed by its beauty, and thankfully, it has changed very little over the years. Walking along the banks of the Wissahickon is like stepping back in time. I’ll often stop and listen to the wind as it whispers through the towering trees. If I listen carefully, sometimes it carries with it the sounds of my past, and I can hear the laughter and singing of familiar young voices as an errant wish momentarily crosses my mind. Perhaps the past can sometimes be within walking distance.
I’ve decided I’m going to get my fishing gear together, and call Bucket Head, Fly, Hair, TK, Fisherman and some of the others from the old crew. So, if you happen to see some middle aged guys with fishing rods walking across Henry Avenue in the early morning hours of some Saturday this spring, and they happen to be laughing while singing a crazy song in unison, don’t be alarmed. It’s just the boys from The Bridge, and we’ll be heading “back the crick”.
AFTERWORD: Whenever I tell people who are from outside of the Philadelphia area my old neighborhood trout-fishing tales, I’m invariably met with a puzzled look, followed by, “I thought you grew up in Philly?” What they don’t realize is that the Wissahickon Valley, which I regard as one of our country’s best kept secrets, is a unique pastoral oasis in our large Northeastern metropolis. As a result of Roxborough’s close proximity to the Wissahickon Creek, it resulted in “Opening Day” of trout fishing season being one of the big annual events in our neighborhood. I received quite a few e-mails from Daily News readers in which they fondly recalled their trout fishing days along the Wissahickon. I also have many other fond memories of the Wissahickon, which include hiking with my father and siblings, and feeding the ducks with my young children, but one memory in particular is not so pleasant. When I was about 8 or 9 years old, I was fishing “back the crick” with my older brothers and my cousins. While we were leaving and climbing a steep hill, I slipped and badly sprained my ankle. I couldn’t walk or put any weight on it, and was in so much pain that I thought it was broken. My cousin Micky, several years older than me, put me on his back and carried me all the way home – a 2 mile journey that was frequently uphill over rugged terrain. I remember thinking at the time that he was the strongest guy in the world. At his father’s funeral in 2019, we tearfully recalled that day, and he told me that he has this article framed and displayed in his home.
Originally published in the June 13, 2012 Philadelphia Inquirer
“It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels’ mind whirled. It couldn’t change things. Killing one butterfly couldn’t be that important! Could it?
Eckels moaned. He dropped to his knees. He scrabbled at the golden butterfly with shaking fingers. “Can’t we,” he pleaded to the world, to himself, to the officials, to the Machine, “can’t we take it back, can’t we make it alive again? Can’t we start over? Can’t we-“
He did not move. Eyes shut, he waited, shivering. He heard Travis breathe loud in the room; he heard Travis shift his rifle, click the safety catch, and raise the weapon.
There was a sound of thunder.”
(From “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury)
As I read the final words of the story, my mouth was agape in astonishment as a chill ran up my spine. The written word had never had so profound an impact upon me. Although I was just 11 years old at the time, I knew that what I’d just read would somehow stay with me forever. The story was “A Sound of Thunder”, and I still regard it as one of the greatest science fiction short-stories ever written. It tells the tale of time travelers hunting a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but an arrogant hunter carelessly steps on, and kills, a butterfly with dire consequences for humanity. I read the story’s chilling ending over and over – at least a hundred times. I stared at the cool sci-fi cover art on the little paperback book for hours, and its title and author were permanently carved into my mind: R is for Rocket by Ray Bradbury.
To most, it was just another one of my big brother Jerry’s numerous $1.50 sci-fi paperbacks from the rotating book-display rack at Woolworth’s department store. But, to me, it was pure gold. I eagerly tore into the book’s other short stories and they captivated my imagination: astronauts fight for their lives after crash landing in the swampy jungles of Venus, an ancient sea creature rises from the depths of the ocean, drawn to the sound of a lighthouse fog horn, and astronauts come to the realization that the paradise planet they discovered has hidden dangers they never anticipated. These were just a few of the brilliant stories written in Bradbury’s unique poetic prose – a wondrous mix of science fiction, fantasy, suspense, and horror.
After that day, I was hooked, and if Jerry couldn’t find his other Bradbury books in his bedroom bookcase, he knew where they’d be. I read Bradbury’s other short story collections found in “S is for Space”, “The Illustrated Man”, “The October Country”, and “The Golden Apples of the Sun” so many times that I cracked the spine of the books. Over the years, Jerry and I would often talk about our favorite Bradbury stories, and whenever he had a new book released we would make sure we let each other know about it.
Although I had always liked to write, and would often tell my family and friends that “one of these days I’m going to write about that”, I never took it seriously until I read Bradbury’s book on writing, “Zen in the Art of Writing.” In it he wrote, “What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them? You fail only if you stop writing.” I remember feeling that he was speaking directly to me. I started to write on a regular basis shortly after I read that.
When I heard the news that Ray Bradbury had died, I felt like I had lost an old friend. I knew who I had to contact first, and I thanked Jerry for introducing me to Ray.
In his seminal novel “Fahrenheit 451”, Ray Bradbury wrote, “It doesn’t matter what you do…so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.”
A Ray Bradbury paperback book is such a small, exquisite thing, and it can change things all down the years and across time. And the stories within that book can touch and change lives forever – including the life of a kid for whom those stories resonated like a sound of thunder.
The Twilight Zone is regarded by many as one of the greatest television series ever produced, certainly the best anthology series, and made a star of its creator, Rod Serling. The show became deeply entrenched in American culture, and the SyFy Channel’s annual New Year’s Twilight Zone Marathon is watched by millions. As an unabashed Twilight Zone fanatic, for what it’s worth, the following are my top 15 TZ episodes.
#15 – Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? Great episode written by Rod Serling featuring a ‘double-twist’ ending as just after the actual three-armed Martian was finally revealed, another alien from Venus, and with three eyes to boot, shocks the viewers at the very end. Interestingly, in the original story, Serling had a stray dog adopted by the owner of the diner as the hidden alien. And, if you think that wouldn’t have worked, remember that the original form that the alien took in the 1982 movie remake of The Thing (starring Kurt Russell) was a dog.
#14 – Living Doll. Based on an idea by the great Charles Beaumont (who would write many classic TZ episodes) and written by Jerry Sohl, the creepy Talky Tina doll says things like, “I don’t think I like you”, and “I’m going to kill you!” to nasty stepfather, Erich (played by Telly Savalas, later to star in The Dirty Dozen as wacky A.J. Maggott, and after that as famed TV detective, Kojak). The ending is great as after the doll intentionally trips the stepfather on the stairs, causing him to fall and die, the girl’s mother picks up the doll and it eerily says, “My name is Talky Tina, and you’d better be nice to me.” A Fun Fact from The Twilight Zone Companion by M.S. Zicree – The voice of the doll was done by June Foray, also the voice for Rocky the Flying Squirrel on the epic Bullwinkle cartoon show.
#13 – To Serve Man.The teleplay was written by Rod Serling, but it is based on the short story by the great Damon Knight (if you’ve never read Damon Knight’s short stories, you should go on Amazon and order one of his short story anthologies immediately!) Many TZ fanatics regard the twist-ending of this episode to be the most shocking as the supposedly altruistic aliens are revealed to really only have one purpose for humans – to put them on the menu! A book with the title “To Serve Man” was ultimately decrypted and discovered to be a cookbook on the different ways that humans could be served as a meal!! The Twilight Zone Companion by M.S. Zicree reveals that Damon Knight would later say that “I thought the adaptation was kind of neat – it made me famous in Milford, Pennsylvania, suddenly everyone knew who I was.”
#12 – Five Characters in Search of an Exit.The teleplay was written by Rod Serling, but it was based on the short story The Depository by Marvin Petal. Great episode that leaves the viewer focusing on, and subsequently trying to guess, exactly where these five characters are, and by doing so, the viewer never focuses on actually what they may be. And what’s with that freaking bell they keep hearing!!?? The classic ending reveals that the five characters are actually toy dolls in a Christmas toy donation barrel. The unimaginative among us, upon watching this episode in 1961, might have said, “Well…that was a dumb premise.” But, who would have guessed that 34 years later a Disney film about toy dolls that come to life, Toy Story, would take the world by storm and become a multimedia franchise with 3 record-setting sequels?!
#11 – Eye of the Beholder.Written by Rod Serling. One of the most iconic of all TZ episodes, this particular one absolutely scared the living sh** out of me when I was a kid! My older brothers set me up and said I could take my hands down from covering my eyes as the supposedly horrific-looking woman under the bandages was finally revealed to be the beautiful Donna Douglas (Ellie May from The Beverly Hillbillies). Unfortunately, my relief was short-lived as the camera quickly cut to the horrible, terrifying, and truly scary faces of the surrounding doctors and nurses. I couldn’t sleep for days. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one for whom this episode left an impact. As recounted in The Twilight Zone Companion by M.S. Zicree, Producer Buck Houghton wanted to see what the viewers might think of the episode, and he screened it for a guy named Lud Gluskin, head of music at CBS, before it was televised. Houghton said that Lud was “a very imperturbable old German…sixty-five, and pretty hard to move. And at the end of that he said, ‘Jesus Christ!’…”
#10 – Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.Written by the great Richard Matheson. “Who’s that?”, you may ask – While Matheson wrote many TZ episodes, he is also one of the great sci-fi/fantasy/horror writers of the 20th century in his own right. He wrote I Am Legend, Duel, The Night Stalker, Stir of Echoes, What Dreams May Come, and Prey (that crazy 1970’s TV episode in which that terrifying Zuni Warrior doll attacks actress Karen Black), just to name a few. Again – grab a book of his short stories if you see one. This was another episode that frightened me as a kid, even though, as I look back on it now, the gremlin-monster on the wing of the plane that terrified William Shatner was pretty lame-looking by today’s standards. It’s still a very scary episode, and it was one of the episodes that was remade for The Twilight Zone Movie in 1983, with a much scarier gremlin thanks to a bigger budget and modern special effects. A funny story regarding the episode from The Twilight Zone Companion by M.S. Zicree – a few weeks after it aired, Rod Serling had worked with Western Airlines to set-up having a life-size poster of the gremlin secretly placed on the outside window of the plane seat that Matheson was going to sit in. The idea was that Matheson would take his seat, open the window curtains, and shockingly see the gremlin looking in at him. So, they had it all set up, Matheson was in his seat, the plane’s engines start up, but the propellers of the plane blew the poster off the window before Matheson opened the curtain! Oh well…it would have been funny.
#9 – The Howling Man.Written by Charles Beaumont. Again, like Damon Knight and Richard Matheson, Beaumont was a superb writer, although not as prolific. In this episode, a lost European traveler comes upon a seemingly kooky order of monks who have what appears to be a normal, sane man imprisoned because they claim he is actually the devil himself. The only thing weird about the imprisoned man is that he howls like a wounded wolf. The traveler eventually frees the man, only to realize the mistake he has made – for the monks were right!! With the limited resources of an early 1960’s TV show, they did a great job with the special effects in showing the freed man gradually transforming into the hideous devil. A shout-out to Beaumont for recognizing the often-forgotten Korean War in his script. When the traveler realizes the enormity of what he had done just prior to World War 2 and the evil he had released onto the world he says: “The evil that soon took the shape of the Second World War, the Korean War, the hideous new weapons of war. I swore I’d find him again, as Brother Jerome had done.” My Dad was a Korean War veteran, and too often it’s not mentioned in historical context, almost as if it never happened – a disgrace to the men who fought and died there. So, kudos to Beaumont for remembering that war in his script.
#8 – Mirror Image.Another classic episode written by Rod Serling in which a woman causes a stir at a bus depot claiming that she is being stalked by another woman, and that other woman is….herself! Actually…her double from a co-existing reality that wants to take over for her. A sympathetic man at the bus depot, played by Martin Milner – later of Adam-12 fame, pretends to believe her but instead ends up calling the police to have the “crazed woman” taken away to get psychiatric help. The ending is classic Serling as the man chases someone who has stolen his briefcase. As he is running after him down the street, the thief turns his head, and the man horrifyingly sees that he is chasing….himself! As revealed in The Twilight Zone Companion by M.S. Zicree, Serling got the idea for this story when he was at an airport in London and noticed a man who had his back to him, but was eerily dressed exactly the same as Serling, with the same height, and holding the exact same leather briefcase. When the man turned around, Serling said, “…he was ten years younger….but this did leave its imprint sufficiently to write a story about it.”
#7 – The Monsters are Due on Maple Street. Written by Rod Serling. After a meteor is spotted overhead by the residents of Maple Street, inexplicable things start to happen: lights flicker on and off, cars start by themselves, and phones ring for no reason. A young boy says it’s the start of an alien invasion and one of the residents may be an alien. This starts paranoid-driven and senseless suspicions among the neighbors that ultimately leads them to violently turn on each other. The classic ending reveals that the cause of the flickering lights and other malfunctions was, in fact, aliens who then conclude that the conquest of Earth should be easy: “Throw them into darkness for a few hours and then just sit back and watch the pattern…They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find…and its themselves. And all we need to do is sit back…and watch.” The episode was Serling’s commentary on prejudice in our society and he summed it up eloquently in his closing narration: “For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicions can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own – for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”
#6 – Time Enough at Last.The teleplay was written by Rod Serling but it is based on a short story by Lynn Venable. Bookworm Henry Bemis, with extremely thick eyeglasses for his poor eyesight and played by the great Burgess Meredith, sneaks off into the vault of his bank employer during lunchbreak to engage in his favorite activity – reading. While in the vault, there was an all-out nuclear war. When Bemis emerges from the vault and searches the ruins, he realizes that he may be the last man on Earth. As he is about to take his own life he notices the ruins of the public library, and believes that instead of hell, he may have just stepped into paradise as now he has all the time in the world – “time enough at last” – to read for the remainder of his days! In one of the greatest endings of all Twilight Zone episodes, the nearly blind Bemis has his thick glasses fall from his face and break on the rubble. “It isn’t fair”, a weeping Bemis says into the camera as he stands among the ruins of the library. As written in The Twilight Zone Companion by M.S. Zicree, the episode had such an impact on the American public that Meredith would say many years later that “I don’t suppose a month goes by, even to this day, that people don’t come up and remind me of that episode.”
#5 – Deaths Head Revisited. Written by Rod Serling. A sadistic former Nazi death-camp guard returns to Dachau prison to fondly remember his days there, just 15 years prior, where he tortured and killed thousands of the inmates. However, the former guard has a terrifying surprise awaiting him at the camp – the ghosts of the inmates he killed, who then put him on trial for his crimes. He is found guilty, and his sentence is that he will now experience all of the physical pain he inflicted on the inmates. This renders the former guard permanently insane. The doctor who finds the now incoherent, babbling guard angrily asks the question: “Dachau…why do we keep it standing?” Serling answers the Doctor’s question in what I believe is his greatest ending narration. It should be noted that Dachau was liberated by American soldiers, and Serling, a World War II veteran himself, knew that many of those liberating soldiers, only in their 30’s and 40’s when the episode first aired, would be watching. Quite a few suffered debilitating PTSD from what they found at Dachau, and I interviewed one of them for one of my essays, Don Greenbaum, as well as a survivor of Dachau, Ernie Gross. The ending narration stands the test of time and is now a great way to address the increasing and nonsensical claims that the Holocaust never happened. “There is an answer to the doctor’s question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. 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 to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone, but wherever men walk God’s earth.”
#4 – I Shot An Arrow Into the Air.Written by Rod Serling but based on an idea by Madelon Champion. The Arrow One, the first manned spacecraft, suddenly disappears off the radar screens after launch, and all contact is lost. It turns out that Arrow One crashed on an uncharted asteroid. Three of the eight astronauts have survived the wreck, but their precious remaining water is in short supply. One of the astronauts, Corey, played by Dewey Martin, intends to kill his fellow astronauts for the remaining water. One of the astronauts he attacked and left for dead cannot speak, but still indicates that he saw something over the hill before he died, and he scrawls a symbol of it in the sand before he dies. Corey, now the last astronaut remaining after he kills Commander Donlin, heads to the hill with the strange symbol. In an absolutely killer ending, Corey, to his horror, discovers the meaning of the strange symbol – it was a telephone pole. The Arrow One had not crashed on an asteroid…it simply fell back to the Earth and crashed into the Nevada desert. One of the highlights of the episode is Serling’s sudden mid-episode narration in which he mockingly urges “Corey, yeah, you better keep moving. That’s the order of the moment: keep moving.” I can still remember my older brothers hysterically laughing at Serling’s mocking of Corey, as they clearly wanted to see him get what was coming to him. Per The Twilight Zone Companion, Serling and Champion were in a social setting when Champion pitched the idea to Serling, who then paid Champion “$500 on the spot. But it never happened again.”
#3 – The Purple Testament. Written by Rod Serling. The setting is during World War II on the Philippine Islands in 1945. Lieutenant Fitzgerald, leader of an infantry platoon, realizes that whenever he sees an eerie glow in the face of one of his soldiers, that soldier ends up being killed. Fitzgerald is relieved to hear that he is being sent back to division headquarters so that he will no longer have to look at the faces of the men in his platoon. However, while he is looking into the mirror when shaving before his trip back to headquarters, he sees the eerie glow in his own face. He then sees the same glow in the face of his driver. After the two of them leave in their Jeep, the men of the platoon hear a distant explosion in the direction that the Jeep traveled. Nothing more needed to be said of their fate. Serling clearly drew upon his own experiences when depicting the men of the platoon as he was a World War II paratrooper who fought and was wounded in the Philippines. A crazy story associated with this episode from The Twilight Zone Companion is that on the day that it was first set to air, the actor who played Lieutenant Fitzgerald, William Reynolds, and the director of the episode, William Bare, were on a small plane flying from Jamaica to Miami. The plane’s engines died, and it went down in the ocean, killing one of the five people on board. Bare had two broken legs, but he and Reynolds decided to try and swim, on their backs, the 4 miles back to the Jamaican shore. While they were swimming, Bare said to Reynolds “You know what’s playing tonight?” Reynolds replied, “Yeah, The Purple Testament.” Bare said, “Bill, please don’t look at me.”
#2 – One For The Angels. Written by Rod Serling. An old man, Lewis J. Bookman (played by Ed Wynn), is confronted by Mr. Death, brilliantly played by veteran actor, Murray Hamilton (he later played the sleazy mayor in Jaws). Death informs sidewalk-salesman Bookman that his time on this Earth is up, but Bookman does not want to go until he makes his final “Big Pitch – a Pitch for the angels.” He convinces Death to let him live until he does this ‘Pitch’, but he actually has no intention of ever giving it. Unfortunately, Death has to take someone else in Bookman’s place, and after a little girl from the neighborhood is hit by a truck and left fighting for her life, Bookman terrifyingly realizes that she is the one chosen by Death in place of Bookman. He also learns that the time that Death will be taking her is midnight. Bookman realizes that if he can prevent Death from making his “appointment at midnight”, then the little girl will live. He then proceeds to try and distract Death from his appointment by selling him his various street merchandise. Bookman gives the pitch of a lifetime, and the distracted Death then misses his midnight appointment. The little girl lives, but it also means that Bookman must now accompany Death. In what many regard as The Twilight Zone’s most beloved episode, the emotional ending as Bookman and Death walk down the deserted street together always leaves a lump in the throat. Interestingly, per The Twilight Zone Companion, Serling actually wrote One For The Angels many years prior, just after college. In the original story, “an unsuccessful sidewalk pitchman tries to save his two-bit punk brother from a couple of hitmen by giving a pitch so beguiling that they will always be surrounded by a crowd.” Serling specifically wanted a story for the much-admired Wynn and re-wrote his old Angels story just for him. The re-written story proved superior to the original.
#1 – Walking Distance. Written by Rod Serling. An advertising executive, Martin Sloan, weary of his fast paced, busy, and unfulfilling life stops at a gas station outside of his boyhood home and decides to take a nostalgic walk to his old hometown, commenting that it is within “walking distance.” While walking through the town, he gradually realizes that he has somehow miraculously been transported back in time to when he was just a child. He confronts his parents, but they think he is some crazy kook and angrily shut their door in his face. He then tries to talk to himself as a young boy, to simply tell the boy to enjoy this wonderful period of his life. But, the frightened child runs from him, trips off of the merry-go-round and injures his leg, a pain that the elder Sloan immediately feels. In what many regard as one of the greatest scenes in Twilight Zone history, Sloan’s father confronts Sloan after reading through the contents of his dropped wallet. The father knows that this man is actually his son, Martin, who has somehow traveled back in time. Despite the fact that Martin is now the same age as his father, he still seeks his counsel – the same way, and with the same respectful deference that he always had in their father-son dynamic. After Martin reluctantly agrees with his father that he must go back, his father says, “Martin, is it so bad where you’re from?” Martin responds, “I thought so, Pop. I’ve been living on a dead run, and I was tired. And one day I knew I had to come back here. I had to come back and get on the merry-go-round, and eat cotton candy, and listen to a band concert. To stop and breathe and close my eyes and smell and listen. His father wisely advises, “I guess we all want that. Maybe when you go back, Martin, you’ll find that there are merry-go-rounds and band concerts where you are. Maybe you haven’t been looking in the right place. You’ve been looking behind you. Try looking ahead.” The episode is deeply personal for Serling, and most regard the character of Martin Sloan as Serling himself who was clearly suffering from the enormous responsibilities associated with maintaining the production and quality of The Twilight Zone. As revealed in The Twilight Zone Companion, Serling got the idea for this episode “while walking on a set at MGM when I was suddenly hit by the similarity of it to my hometown. Feeling an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, it struck me that all of us have a deep longing to go back – not to our home as it is today, but as we remember it. It was from this simple incident that I wove the story Walking Distance…”
(Edited version originally published in the November 27, 2016 Philadelphia Inquirer)
“The darkest night is often the bridge to the brightest tomorrow.” (Jonathan Lockwood Huie)
I was barely awake on that recent mid-summer morning as I started to read the text from Ed, one of my closest childhood friends. It had been sent hours before, while I slept. My heart raced faster as I read each word. “Oh my God!”, I uttered. My wife sat up in bed, alarmed by the pained expression on my face. “What?! What is it?!”, she asked. I was still trying to comprehend what I was reading and couldn’t respond. “It’s….it’s Ed’s little daughter, Julia. She was rushed to the hospital. She’s really sick. Something in her brain.” I immediately called Ed, completely forgetting that it was 5am in Los Angeles. As we spoke, for the first time in the 48 years that I’ve known him, I sensed fear in his voice.
In the days and weeks following that call, I couldn’t stop thinking about the terrible anxiety and heartache that Ed and his family were enduring, and how life, at times for all of us, can seem so difficult and unfair. I was occasionally overwhelmed with feelings of helplessness in knowing that my friend and his family were struggling and there was nothing that I could do.
It was also during this time that “The Bridge” seemed to be reaching out to me. Although I’ve driven over the bridge at Henry and Valley Avenues in Roxborough hundreds of times in the last 40 years, I hadn’t really given much thought to the teenage years that I’d spent there with Ed and the other guys from our “crew”. But now it seemed that each time I drove over it, something seemed to seep within my sub-conscience, a faint message tantalizingly close to clarity, yet elusive as the wind. Maybe it was just simple nostalgia, or perhaps little Julia’s struggle triggered in me that innate desire, shared by many of us, to return to a simpler time when there was no fear, a time when the pressures wrought by the complexities of life didn’t seem to exist, a time when Ed and I had yet to cross over the threshold from adolescence into adulthood. I cannot say. But something linked to the bridge seemed to be calling out to me with an indistinct message that lay just beyond the periphery of my understanding. I decided to go back to the bridge to see if I could find what that message may be.
As I walked towards the bridge on that hot summer day I wasn’t really sure of what I was looking for or what I’d find, but the memories of my days there suddenly flooded back. I remembered that people in the surrounding neighborhood thought that it was strange that my buddies and I “hung out” under a bridge, and called us “trolls”. We weren’t offended by the name, and actually reveled in the unique identity it created for us. The bridge had a 50 foot x 15 foot leveled, compacted-dirt ledge directly underneath its northern side with a 9 foot floor to ceiling headroom. It became our sanctuary that not only shielded us from the wind, rain, and snow, but also temporarily safeguarded our carefree teen spirit from the ever encroaching world of adulthood and responsibility.
I bounded down the old path that led underneath the bridge and my nostalgic visit to the past quickly became a sobering meeting with the present. It seemed darker and colder than I remembered. Spray-painted, bubble-letter graffiti, commonly found on old Philadelphia warehouse buildings, now adorned the walls. It also appeared that someone was living there as a chair was positioned in front of a still-smoldering fire-pit. There was an old coat, fast-food trash, jugs of water, and a large plastic container strewn around the dirt ledge. All remnants of our days there were gone, and my positive memories of the place where lifelong friendships had been forged were now tarnished by what it had become. It felt strange, yet oddly familiar, and as I looked at the empty chair, I couldn’t help but view it as an ominous warning of a life that may have been.
I walked up the path from underneath the bridge that day, convinced that there was no hidden message to be found there, but as I looked out onto Henry Avenue, I immediately noticed something very odd – there were no cars on the usually bustling roadway. In that silent, surreal moment, I looked across the empty bridge towards the other side, and realized for the first time just how sharply it curved around the bend. You couldn’t see what was on the other side of the bend, or where the road led – just like life.
It was then that I finally understood the elusive message: rather than being a sanctuary, the bridge was akin to a damp cellar in which we hid. It was only when we emerged from underneath it, and traveled on the road above it, did all of us finally reach the unique destinations that awaited us. Many of us were fortunate enough to bring new lives into this world, which brought great joy and meaning to our journeys. But Julia’s plight embodied the fear and heartache that can sometimes accompany us as we travel on the road of life. The key is to confront and overcome these obstacles, rather than try to escape from them.
Thankfully, the news from Julia’s doctors gradually improved with each passing day. It turns out that she has an AVM, a tangle of abnormal blood vessels connecting arteries and veins in her brain, but Julia’s case is highly treatable and she’s expected to make a full recovery. The last time that I spoke to Ed, the fear in his voice was gone and I was proud of the way he and his wife, Adrianna, bravely confronted what has to be every parent’s nightmare.
I drove over the bridge recently, and noticed thin wisps of smoke drifting up from below. It curled up and over the bridge, momentarily morphing into the ghostly apparitions of young boys and drifting far up into the sunlit sky until gradually fading away. I watched it disappear as I crossed the bridge, and rounded the bend, towards whatever destination awaited me on the other side.
AFTERWORD
As I write this in January, 2020, I’m happy to report that Julia has recovered quite well over these last 3 ½ years, and, now a vibrant, young teenager, is doing just fine. In regards to the Bridge, some of my friends thought that I was a bit too harsh in my assessment of it (ie:”…rather than being a sanctuary, the bridge was akin to a damp cellar in which we hid.”), as they have many fond recollections of our days and nights spent there. I have great memories of it as well, but metaphorically speaking, I still believe that the Bridge represented the path that we had to take in order to cross that sometimes scary gulf separating adolescence and adulthood. My friends and I temporarily stopped our journey, and went under the Bridge until we were ready to cross it. Looking back, perhaps I was a bit harsh – because we sure did have a lot of fun there before it was time to go!
More stories of growing up in Philadelphia, as well as the harrowing stories of America’s war veterans, and the triumphs of space exploration can be found in the new book by Philadelphia writer, Chris Gibbons: “Soldiers, Space, and Stories of Life”. Amazon.com link is below:
My new book, Soldiers, Space and Stories of Life, is now available for purchase in Kindle format at Amazon (link below). It will be available in book/print format by mid-August at my publisher’s website, and then in book/print format at Amazon in early September.
By Chris Gibbons – Originally published in the Philadelphia Daily News, August 7, 2007
I recently walked along a deserted beach, momentarily lost in my thoughts until I suddenly came upon a lifeguard stand. It was unoccupied, but as I looked up at the empty wooden seat my thoughts drifted back in time, and in my mind I could still picture the lifeguard.
It’s been over 35 years, but my memory of him hasn’t faded. I can still see him sitting on his stand, with long blond hair and white sunscreen on his nose, slowly twirling a silver whistle around his finger. And I’ll also never forget what he did on that hot summer day in 1972.
For a young kid from Philadelphia’s Roxborough neighborhood, summer was the smell of a freshly mowed lawn, or the squeak of high-top Chuck Taylor’s skidding on the asphalt during a game of wire-ball. Summer was the taste of a hand-me-down baseball glove as you chewed on its frayed laces during a little-league game. It was throwing rocks in the Wissahickon creek, playing wiffle-ball in the driveway, burning cap-gun ammo with a magnifying glass. It was looking up at the stars and wishing that life would always be this good.
To many Philadelphians, summer also meant the Jersey shore.
In July of 1972, my family vacationed in Ocean City. I remember running to the beach as soon as we arrived. The expanse of ocean that greeted me was overwhelming. I was one of 11 children and our home was crowded, but the ocean represented room, and freedom, and possibilities.
That was also the day I first saw the lifeguard. His incessant whistling, and arm-waving was the start of my disdain for him He reminded me of my teachers as he continually interrupted the fun with his shrill whistle: move over, come in closer, and stop throwing wet sand at your little brother.
One day, my little brother Pat and I were bodysurfing. The waves were unusually rough, with the two of us frequently getting tossed around by the surf. After getting pounded by a huge wave, I stood up, cleared the water from my eyes and noticed that I couldn’t find Pat.
I thought he’d been right next to me before the wave hit. Finally, I saw him. He was farther out than he should’ve been. I quickly realized that he was in water well above his head, and he was struggling. He was definitely struggling.
I started to swim out to him, but the water was too rough, and my skinny body wasn’t making any headway. Pat was being pulled out into deeper water as he must’ve been caught in a riptide. I began to panic and started to scream for help. I was thrashing around, and swallowing the salty seawater. Pat was clearly in trouble, continually going under and resurfacing. I was trying to scream, but was gagging so badly that I couldn’t.
I looked out again, and for the first time, I didn’t see Pat. My God, I thought to myself, my little brother has drowned!
Suddenly, something shot over my right shoulder. It knifed into the water just ahead of me, barely making a splash. It quickly emerged, arms and feet flailing like a powerful machine. It was the lifeguard, and he was moving like a torpedo toward my brother. I’ll never forget how quickly he got to Pat.
The lifeguard got Pat out of the water and back to the beach. Pat was OK, but he was spitting up water. A few people gathered around him and I knelt down next to him. We looked at each other and didn’t say anything.
We both had tears in our eyes, but for different reasons. He was a pain in the neck, but he was my little brother and I loved him, and he’d come within seconds of losing his life. You’re supposed to look out for your little brother, but I failed. I looked up at the lifeguard and hoped he could understand what I wanted to say, but couldn’t. I think he did.
In a heartbreaking twist of fate, just a few days after we returned from our vacation, my oldest brother Jack drowned in the Schuylkill River while swimming with friends. Nothing would ever be the same again for my family.
A house in a Philadelphia neighborhood wailed in sorrow that night, and the awful sound of it drifted across the hills of Roxborough. Some of the other houses heard it, and they began to sob as well. It was during that terrible night that a wishful image first came to my mind and continues to haunt me to this day.
It’s an image of a lifeguard stand. It sits on the banks of the Schuylkill River. Sitting atop the stand is a young kid, with long blond hair and white sunscreen on his nose, slowly twirling a silver whistle around his finger on a hot August day in the summer of ’72.
Chris Gibbons is a Philadelphia writer. gibbonscg@aol.com
More stories of growing up in Philadelphia, as well as the harrowing stories of America’s war veterans, and the triumphs of space exploration can be found in the new book by Philadelphia writer, Chris Gibbons: “Soldiers, Space, and Stories of Life”. Amazon.com link is below:
By Chris Gibbons – Excerpt from his book, Soldiers, Space, and Stories of Life. Originally published in the Philadelphia Daily News, March 13, 2006
The year was 1971, and the priest stood at the front of the church and looked out among the elementary school students of Philadelphia’s Immaculate Heart of Mary School. He had just read a story from the New Testament which recounted a miracle Jesus had performed, and he wanted to engage the students during his homily by asking a question of them. “Who was the most powerful man who ever lived?” he asked the students. A hand immediately shot up among the first-grade students. The delighted priest, surprised that such a young child was confident enough to answer, called on the young boy, and he stood up. I looked over and saw that it was my little brother Pat. “Tell us young man,” the priest proudly intoned. Pat confidently replied, “Joe Frazier!”
That story is now legendary in my family, and we always have a good laugh when we remember it. However, those who know my family well certainly understand my brother’s response. Just a few years prior to that day, my uncle’s friend had given me and my five brothers each a photo of a promising young Philadelphia heavyweight standing in a classic boxer’s pose. Handwritten on the photos were the words: “Keep on smokin’. Joe Frazier.” All of us were in heaven, and our lifelong love of boxing was born that day. We all believed that Smokin’ Joe had personally written those words especially for us, and the heroic status he achieved in our home was unmatched by any other athlete. We closely followed his career, and when he defeated Jimmy Ellis to win the title, we celebrated as if he was an older brother. However, we also all knew that there was one fighter who Joe had to defeat before he was universally recognized as the true heavyweight champion.
March 8, 2021, marks the 50th anniversary of what many regard as the greatest fight in the history of boxing. At Madison Square Garden, for the first time in heavyweight history, an undefeated champion, Joe Frazier, would face an undefeated former champion, Muhammad Ali. It was billed as “The Fight of the Century,” and legendary boxing announcer Don Dunphy called it the greatest night in the history of sports. Luminaries from the entertainment, sports, and political worlds were seated at ringside. Ali and Frazier received record purses of $2.5 million each, the Garden was sold out a full month in advance, and an estimated 300 million watched it on closed circuit television.
The pre-fight buildup was racially charged as Ali shamefully referred to Joe as an “Uncle Tom” and the “white man’s champion.” These statements were particularly painful to Frazier who was raised as the dirt-poor son of a South Carolina sharecropper. If anyone embodied the impoverished, discriminatory experience of many African Americans of that era, it was Frazier.
On the night of the fight, as they stood in the center of the ring while receiving the referee’s instructions, Frazier and Ali continued their bitter war of words that had started nearly two years before. Ali said, “Don’t you know that I’m God and can’t be beat?” Joe replied, “Well, God’s gonna get his butt kicked tonight!”
Fight of the Century
The fight itself was nothing short of spectacular. Joe and his trainer, Yank Durham, knew that they had to avoid Ali’s piston-like jabs and punishing right hand crosses in order to get inside and land Frazier’s vaunted left hooks to the head and body. They devised a plan to neutralize Ali’s speed and reach advantage, but Joe would have to take two in order to land one.
Joe came off his stool for round one furiously bobbing his head to avoid the jab. Surprisingly, Ali, who had defeated big punchers like Sonny Liston, Jerry Quarry, and Ernie Terrell, was not intimidated by Frazier’s power, and tried to end it early by standing flatfooted and exchanging with Frazier. Joe landed a vicious left hook to the head, and Ali quickly realized that he would have to capitalize on his speed advantage by sticking and moving. The pattern for the remainder of the fight had been set with Ali dancing and landing straight right hands and short hooks behind the best jab ever seen in the heavyweight division, and Joe pursuing in his familiar crouched stance while slipping as many punches as he could in order to get inside. Joe continually rocked Ali with his left hook, but he was absorbing a lot of punishment himself.
As the contest wore on, the battered faces of both fighters revealed the ferocity of the fight, with Frazier’s face a bruised and lumpy mess and Ali’s right jaw swollen like a balloon. It became a dramatic war of attrition. Frazier was staggered by Ali in the ninth round, and Ali was nearly out on his feet in the 11th. As the fight moved into the 15th and final round, Frazier was ahead on all scorecards, and he punctuated his victory by landing a picture perfect left hook that floored the former champion. Astonishingly, Ali got off the canvas and finished the fight on his feet. Frazier was awarded a unanimous decision victory.
Throughout the night, television shows were periodically interrupted with news of the fight, and our house erupted in joy when we heard the news of Joe’s victory. The fight was shown only on closed circuit broadcasts at select locations, and my brother Mike was fortunate enough to see a live broadcast. He captivated us for hours when he returned and gave a blow-by-blow description of the fight. He was better than Howard Cosell.
Unfortunately, Joe passed away in 2011. I’ve often wondered if he ever realized that so many Philadelphians regarded him as their hero, especially six white kids from Philly’s Roxborough neighborhood who never understood Ali’s racial taunts, and didn’t care if Joe was black, white, green, or blue. He was from Philly, and he signed those photos. That’s all that mattered to us.
I’ve often watched videos of that fight over the years, and I don’t think anyone could have beaten Joe Frazier that night. Well, maybe Jesus could have…maybe.
It’s difficult to convey to people who didn’t grow up in the Philadelphia area during the 1970’s the heroic and iconic status that Joe Frazier had in the Delaware Valley. When the news of his stunning loss to George Foreman in 1973 reached our home, my brothers and I were in tears. My brother Pat was so distraught that my mother kept him home from school the following day! But, that incredible night in 1971 when he defeated Ali in the “Fight of the Century” is still indelibly burned within my memory, which is remarkable when you consider that I didn’t actually see the fight until a year later when it was finally broadcast on TV by ABC Sports. Until that day I had relied upon the descriptions provided to me by my brother Mike, and the brilliant sportswriters of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Bulletin, and the Philadelphia Daily News. I recently read a clipping from the issue of the Daily News on the day after the fight. Sportswriter Stan Hochman’s prose from his article is pure gold as he poetically described the epic left hook from Frazier that floored Ali in the 15th round: “It came whistling out of Beaufort like the Suncoast Limited, screeching on invisible tracks, sending sparks into the night. Only the wail of the whistle was missing. And it crushed into Ali’s handsome head just like the locomotive it resembled.”
More ‘stories of life’, as well as the harrowing ordeals of America’s war veterans and the wonders of space exploration, can be found in the new book by Philadelphia writer, Chris Gibbons: “Soldiers, Space, and Stories of Life”. Amazon.com link is below:
Edited version was originally published in the February 20, 2015 Philadelphia Inquirer
It was the late autumn of 1902, Patricia Corkery remembered her Uncles telling her, and twenty-four year old coach William “Billy” Markward gathered his Roman Catholic High School basketball team together at the imposing gothic school building at Broad and Vine streets in Philadelphia. Markward, a Spanish-American War veteran, was starting his first year of coaching at Roman and had just received a disturbing letter from the scholastic league that Roman played in during that era. Although his initial reaction may have been to respond to the league on his own without discussing with the team, Markward also recognized the importance of teaching life lessons, as well as basketball, to his players.
The team was primarily comprised of poor Irish-Catholic boys from the inner-city neighborhoods of Philadelphia, and many were the sons, or grandsons, of immigrants. But there was one boy among them whose background was very different. John “Johnny” Lee was the son of a former slave, and he was one of the first African Americans to play basketball in that scholastic league.
As the boys sat, Markward, a former pro basketball player himself, towered over them and began to read the contents of the letter. It stated that the league was notifying Roman that they would be banned from the league if Lee, a “Negro” player, remained on their roster. Sadly, considering the racial discrimination that was common for that era, this stance was not unusual, but how the team responded definitely was.
In a letter to Roman’s Alumni Association detailing the incident, Patricia Corkery wrote that her uncle and team captain, John Corkery, was the first to stand up and speak: “If Johnny Lee doesn’t play, then I don’t play.” One by one, each of the players, including her other uncle, Maurice, stood up and said that they wouldn’t play as well. As he watched each of the boys pledge to stand with their teammate, Billy Markward, the coach who always stressed the importance of how to live over how to play, must’ve beamed with pride. “Roman stood with Johnny and the league backed down”, Patricia Corkery wrote.
From that moment on, a special bond formed between John Corkery and Lee. Through the years, both men remained active in Roman’s Alumni Association, and their friendship grew. Lee would never forget the courageous stand that Corkery and his other teammates took for him, and when John Corkery died in 1929, Johnny Lee was heartbroken. Patricia fondly remembers the touching scene that took place at her home every year on the anniversary of her uncle’s death. “Growing up in the Port Richmond area of Philadelphia in the late 20’s and early 30’s, my world was white-mostly Irish Catholic,” Patricia Corkery recalled in the letter. “Only one African-American crossed my path. It was once a year (John Lee) came to our house and I had to be on my best behavior. Always, I had to be dressed up and with my best manners for this visit. John Lee came to our house on the anniversary of my Uncle John’s death…and paid a tearful visit to the pictures of Roman’s team still on our walls.”
Over the ensuing years, Billy Markward would consistently turn down numerous college coaching offers and remained at Roman from 1902 to 1942, winning an incredible 20 championships. He achieved legendary status not only at Roman, but in the entire Philadelphia region, and the prestigious Markward Awards are presented annually to Philadelphia’s top scholastic athletes.
As for Johnny Lee, breaking down racial barriers became something of a family trait. Johnny’s granddaughter, Sister Cora Marie Billings, became the first African American to enter a community of nuns in Philadelphia, and the first to join the Sisters of Mercy. She also became the first African American in the U.S. to serve as the leader of a Church parish as pastoral coordinator for St. Elizabeth’s in Richmond, Va. “My great-grandfather (George Lee)…worked as a slave, owned by the Society of Jesus”, Cora wrote in the July 7-14, 2014 issue of America Magazine. “I know that our church and our world are not as they once were and they are not where I want them to be. But my hope is things will continue to get better.”
Lee himself served on Roman’s Board of Trustees, as well as treasurer of the Philadelphia Archdiocesan Holy Name Union. He was active in the St. Vincent DePaul Society, and, in 1955, Lee became the first African American to receive the prestigious Vercelli Medal of the Holy Name Society, the highest award given annually to the Archdiocese’s outstanding Catholic layman. He died in 1958 and Lee Park in West Philadelphia is named in his honor.
Another of Lee’s lasting legacies at Roman is readily evident when reviewing the success that the school has achieved in basketball since 1968. Largely due to the contributions of many great African American players during that span, Roman won an unprecedented 18 Catholic League championships, and their current team is nationally ranked.
When we look back upon this incident from 1902, we can appreciate just how far our nation has progressed in eliminating discrimination. However, the social unrest resulting from the recent incidents in Ferguson and New York are sobering reminders that far too often our society has a troubling tendency to split opinions along racial lines. Our inability to determine the reason why we continue to divide this way leaves us angry and frustrated, and we blame each other for this failure. Perhaps, before we can find an answer and move forward, we need to look back and remember the pledge that was made in the school at Broad and Vine streets over 110 years ago. For what the Roman Catholic High School basketball team understood back then, but what many of us fail to realize today, is that the primary reason for our failure is ignorance, and the first step in defeating it is to stand together and confront it.
Chris Gibbons is a Philadelphia writer. He can be reached at gibbonscg@aol.com
More stories of notable Philadelphians, as well as the harrowing stories of America’s war veterans, can be found in the new book by Philadelphia writer, Chris Gibbons: “Soldiers, Space, and Stories of Life”. Amazon.com link is below:
