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This is Fresh Air.
I'm Dave Davies.
Our guest today.
Beth Macy is an award-winning reporter, author and chronicler of working class America, much of her work focusing on the Appalachian region.
Her first book was about a Virginia furniture factory owner determined to resist Chinese competition.
She followed with two books on the opioid crisis and grassroots efforts to fight it.
Her latest book continues her focus on working people in rural America, but this time through the lens of a personal memoir.
Macy grew up in the town of Urbana, Ohio, where she says she was one of the poorest kids in her class and felt it.
She writes that her childhood had its share of chaos, addiction and utility cutoff notices, but that she managed to escape poverty and forge a career in journalism because she got to college and completed a four-year degree.
Her book is a deeply reported look at the Urbana she left, where the factory jobs have largely disappeared, creating economic pressures that lead to family dysfunction, while social supports and educational opportunities have eroded.
She found it hard to communicate with family members and old friends who've embraced conspiratorial thinking.
The more time she spent in her hometown, Macy writes the more she recognized forces that were turning the community she loved into a poorer sicker, angrier and less educated place.
Beth Macy spent many years reporting for the Roanoke Virginia Times and has written four previous books, three of which were New York Times bestsellers.
Her book Dope Sick was made into a Peabody and Emmy Award winning Hulu series, on which Macy served as an executive producer and co-writer.
Macy's new book is Paper Girl, a memoir of home and family in a fractured America.
Well, Beth Macy, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Thanks for having me, Dave.
You know, most of your books have been these deeply reported studies on the impacts of many things on working people deindustrialization, the opioid epidemic.
This book is also deeply reported.
It's not just your memories, but it's a look at your family and the community you grew up in and left, and how they've changed.
What decided to make you take on this project, which is more personal?
It was really a moment that I had with my sister who is 13 years older at our mother's deathbed.
And it happened to be the Saturday after the election of 2020, the day they were counting the votes.
And my mom was in hospice.
She was 93.
She wasn't expected to live, you know, but a day or two longer.
And the hospice nurse's phone pinged and she goes, oh, they're calling it for Biden.
And my sister, who had never been political before but who was very evangelical, sort of shouted wait, it's fraudulent.
He won't win.
And I just was astonished.
I didn't realize how much we operated in different information ecosystems.
But there were some clues.
As I was driving home more often to see my mom, I noticed things like in Urbana, which was once we were very proud about it being an important stop on the Underground Railroad.
I would now see Confederate flags flying.
And I noticed that a lot of my friends were posting really political things on Facebook.
And even my own brother, who I was very close to, unfriended me at one point during Trump's first administration because of quote all the liberal crap I post.
Now I post.
I'm a journalist.
I post fact-checked articles, mainly from the Washington Post and the New York Times, some of which are articles that I've written myself.
And I was really stymied by that.
And so I decided, after mom's death, to figure out what, if anything, was left of my family, my hometown and my country.
And it took you a couple, three years to do this, right?
Yeah, about two years of going.
I would go home about for a week, a month, and like scores of interviews.
Okay, so let's talk about this.
You grew up in Urbana, Ohio.
It's a rural town, although most people weren't involved in agriculture.
Your mom, it seemed, was the rock of your family.
Tell us about her.
Absolutely.
So my mom was feisty, funny, gritty.
I was the midlife accident, the youngest by far of four.
And by the time I came along, my dad was a not very functioning alcoholic.
And so it was really on mom to do everything, to work.
She would work at Grimes Manufacturing, which was the nation's premier maker of airplane lights and navigational lights.
And she would work those jobs until the economy would tank periodically and she'd get laid off and then she would have to pick up under the table work like babysitting and waitressing really badly, she said.
And all the things that the folks that I later interviewed for books like Factory Man were doing.
And so I mean that was one reason I was drawn to tell the story of what was left behind by globalization then.
Because I had grown up with that same kind of financial precarity.
And as I started going back to Urbana for the book, I realized through interviews that the middle class, which had been very hardy, the schools which had been very good when I was growing up, weren't so strong anymore.
And so, as I began to peel the layers of the onion, I started to realize that people weren't showing up for work.
People weren't sending their kids to school.
The school folks were saying you know, it's really really hard to educate a large portion of the students because first we have to teach them.
What one person said was how to humanize.
Going back for a second.
You said your dad was an alcoholic who did not do so well as his later years went on.
And he was abusive to you at least once, right?
Oh, verbally abusive many times, physically abusive a couple of times.
It wasn't a great environment to grow up in, with the exception of my mom and my grandma, Macy next door, who literally owned our house and kept a roof over our heads.
But you know, when I talked earlier about the hollowing out of the middle class now, what was different back then is I had these friends whose parents were wonderful to me, who would give me rides home from sports practices and band practices and who would buck me up when I was feeling low.
And also because I had this incredible grandma next door who taught me how to read and write before I went to kindergarten.
I had the confidence, when I got to public schools and met these fantastic teachers, to know that I might be poorer than the rest of the kids, but they weren't necessarily smarter than me.
And I think that really helped me.
There was a family that made you lunch almost every day for a year or something like this?
Helen Wellman.
It would be egg salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, and then we'd go back to egg.
And her daughter, Tanya, would take me home for lunch every day.
And every little heartbreak I ever had, Helen was my counselor.
So it really was a community.
The book is called Paper Girl, which has a double meaning.
I mean you delivered papers as a kid to your neighbors, and you then spent many, many years working for a daily newspaper.
When did you start that?
Tell us about that, delivering papers.
Yeah, I started helping the Kellenberger boys who lived catty corner from me.
They were a couple of years older than me.
And I was like, this is a pretty good gig.
And they'd share their pay with me.
And I loved getting a little bit of pocket money.
And then I always wanted to buy my own clothes because I hated the things, like my mom probably couldn't afford nice clothes.
So I
So then I got my own paper route, so I could buy my own clothes and I could save up for the field trip to Washington DC, which would be my first time crossing state lines.
It was almost like I thought the atmosphere would change as the Greyhound crossed the state line.
And, you know, I just worked for things and I loved working.
And the great thing about growing up in Urbana then, when it had a solid middle class, was that I would deliver in my neighborhood to all kinds of people lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class.
You managed to go to college, to Bowling Green State University, and this was clearly a huge thing in your life.
You write that had you been born a decade later, you probably wouldn't have been able to go.
Why?
Because when I left for college in 1982, I remember filling out the financial aid paperwork.
My mom helped me.
Our family income was $8,000 a year, which put us in the lowest quartile.
And the Pell Grant is need-based, so we qualified for the full freight.
So that means I got my state tuition paid for, my room and board.
My textbooks were paid for and I always had two or three work-study jobs so I could have pizza and beer money just like everybody else and not feel like a food stamp recipient in the line at Whole Foods.
And it changed my life.
It just totally changed my life going to college.
Not that I made – great money as a newspaper reporter for many, many years.
It was paycheck to paycheck.
But what it did is it took me out of the environment I was raised in and it put me in a peer group of people, including my husband, who were solidly middle class and not having to deal with addiction, trauma.
Utility cutoff notices.
And it was just a peaceful environment that I hadn't before experienced.
You described your mom driving you to college that freshman year.
And she knew that this was going to change things, that you weren't going to be coming back, didn't she?
I think she did.
I've got this funny picture of her sort of half waving, half smiling, pretending to cry, saying goodbye to me.
And I remember saying on the way up, I was so nervous.
She could probably hear my stomach, you know, making weird noises.
And you know about half asked her to turn around and take me back because no one in my family had been to college.
And I remember her saying she had read, she was a great reader.
I read in a magazine somewhere that Your high school friends.
It's great to hang out with your high school friends, but your college roommate will be your best friend for life.
And she was trying to find like optimistic things to say, which was really cute, because she probably really didn't want me to go.
We were pretty close.
And you know, and then when I moved out of state for my first reporting job, which was in Savannah Georgia that was out of state at a daily newspaper she looked at me and I knew she was going to deadpan something.
She goes, I've thought about it.
You can't go.
And she at that point, I'm pretty sure she was certain that I would never come home again.
But, you know, we always visited and, you know, we didn't always get along 100 percent of the time.
We had that three day rule about house guests and fish.
That's about how long we could stand each other.
But we loved each other deeply.
One of my funniest moments in the book is a typewritten poem that she gave you after – I think you'd had this argument about – I guess she would complain about how short your visits were while you were visiting, which was maybe not the best time to bring that up.
Should we share that?
Sure.
Yeah.
It's called An Easter Greeting to My Mean Daughter.
So what had happened was it must have been like early spring of call it 1984.
And I was kind of having a hard time.
I don't know if it was boyfriend or whatever.
And I called home to talk to her.
And she's a recently widowed person still, you know, struggling to pay her bills.
And she just wasn't very sympathetic.
So I don't have the letter I wrote, thank God, because I wouldn't want to read it.
But apparently I wrote quite an over-the-top mean letter saying that you should be supportive.
So that Friday I drove home in my really, really used VW Bug and I arrived home.
She works second shift at the moment.
And she very kindly left me a crock pot full of chili.
She made the best chili.
And there was an Easter egg for me that she had bought from somebody at work.
It was a chocolate peanut butter Easter egg.
And this poem called An Easter Greening to My Mean Daughter.
Your nasty letter really hurt, but over it I've got.
I know you didn't mean it.
You know I care a lot.
And so at Easter time, let's try to nicen up a lot.
Remember, I'm your super mom and the only one you got.
And you are my special super kid, like which there is no other.
So happy Easter, Beth, from your bitchy, bitchy mother.
You mentioned that you got to go to school to get a four-year degree because you qualified for a Pell Grant.
What became of the Pell Grants?
Well, the Pell Grants are still in existence.
But what happened is college tuitions just began skyrocketing.
The federal government started cutting education in the 80s under Reagan, who had a secretary of education named William Bennett – who called the very notion of education as a portal to upward mobility.
He called it sociological flammary.
And as tuition started going up and state budgets were having shortfalls in the 90s, state legislatures were also defunding higher ed.
And the Pell Grants.
They rose a little but never commensurate with inflation, and the purchasing power of it just dwindled.
So now, if you're a kid like I was proportionally poor as I was then a Pell Grant would only pay about 30 of a state university cost.
And I wouldn't have been able to go.
Even 10 years later, I wouldn't have been able to go.
And my point in saying this is not only did it save my life, but I have paid that money back so many times through making more money and higher tax.
You know, paying more in taxes.
And we know that the typical Pell student pays that money back within 10 years time.
So it's so short sighted to have basically taken this option away from poor folks.
You know, I want to just note for readers that there's so much in this book.
You talk to a lot of people.
I mean academics and policy experts, to be sure, but friends family, business people, community leaders, a lot of them, including one person who was the county school attendance officer I guess what we used to call the truant officer.
You wrote along with her.
Brooke Perry was her name.
And through her you could see some of the dysfunction that in the lives of a lot of families and the kids that live there.
You want to just share some of what you observed there?
Sure.
I mean, first of all, the numbers of kids that weren't showing up to school.
This, of course, got really bad during COVID.
So we were still seeing some post-COVID stuff.
But I mean, the amount of miles she had put on her car, like 100,000 miles in four years on her car.
And just driving from one end of the county to the other and picking kids up, getting them out of bed, giving them alarm clocks, rescuing children who had been sexually abused and taking them to social services.
The things she saw curled my toes.
And one day I would try to do a ride-along with her almost every trip if she was available.
But one day she said, oh, we're going to go to a doozy.
And so she takes me to this gorgeous farmhouse surrounded by soybean fields way out in the country.
And she says, this is the family.
We have been trying to charge them with truancy charges for years now.
They won't even fill out the paperwork to homeschool.
They just tell us they're homeschooling.
And, you know, dogs had attacked her.
We get there.
She has to leave a notice saying she's been there.
But we have to call the cops to come out because there's a big sign right outside their gate that says it's a bullseye and it says if you can read this, you're in shooting range.
So they were basically what was called a term I didn't know at the time, sovereign citizens.
They don't believe in government.
They don't, you know.
They ride on our roads, but they don't believe in paying taxes or sending their kids to school.
And another time I was out with her taking a young girl who was being raised by her grandparents, which is also not uncommon, largely thanks to the opioid crisis and fentanyl and methamphetamine.
We were taking her to school.
And then it turns out a couple of weeks later, the girl turned on Brooke and beat her up.
And you know this woman.
I wasn't there for that, but I talked to her right after and I followed up.
And just like she was working so hard to help these kids.
Like if they would have a good week of attendance, she would figure out what it was they really wanted.
One wanted to go to Comic-Con conference in Columbus.
So Brooke takes the girl as a reward for going to school on her own dime.
And we know, because I've done the research, that it is these relationships that really make the difference.
It's not standardized testing.
It's relationships with teachers, with counselors, with folks like Silas' band director and people like Brooke and people like Christine, who was a counselor who said, you know, I have to teach them how to human.
And when she does that, it works.
What did she mean by that, teach them how to human?
Well, I didn't know what she meant either.
She was my very first call.
Somebody said you ought to call her because her job is to help kids figure out whether they're going to go into the military, they're going to go into the workforce or they're going to go to college.
And when I said, what's the biggest challenge?
She said you know, right at the start of the conversation she says well honestly, it's I have to teach them how to human.
I said, what do you mean?
She said, they show up to class.
They don't have a pencil.
You or I would have asked a friend for a pencil, to borrow a pencil.
Instead they kind of shrug and say to the teacher oh, I'm pencil, you know, rather than like asking nicely.
So it's just basic things.
And I found the same thing when I was hanging out at the Urbana Youth Center, where they're trying to teach them not only study skills but also some work skills.
Like people... teenagers who have never picked up a broom before.
You got to teach them how to sweep with a broom and things of that nature.
And, you know, to take your medicine when you're supposed to take your medicine.
And again, the successes that I see are when it's the relationship is truly invested in in like heart to heart way.
That's when folks can tend to start get better.
We need to take another break here.
Let me reintroduce you.
We are speaking with Beth Macy.
Her new book is Paper Girl, a memoir of home and family in a fractured America.
She'll be back to talk more after this short break.
I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
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You write about your siblings.
There are three.
You're the youngest of four.
All of them, I have to say, are quite interesting people to read about.
One of the most troubling stories involves your sister, Cookie, who is 13 years older than you.
Is that right?
She became a teenage mom, had daughters, had a couple of marriages and then eventually married a third husband recommended by her pastor in a fundamentalist church.
And you write that in 1983 Cookie's third husband sexually abused Cookie's daughter Liza, her daughter from a previous marriage.
How does she – what does she do?
Cookie.
She goes to her pastor who has helped her when she was a single mom and who she believes thoroughly.
And she asked him what she should do.
And she told me not long ago she went in.
They knew why she was coming in.
They were on the floor praying and they looked up at her and they said we believe her husband is a good man.
And that was it.
End of story.
And she still will tell you, I don't know if that happened.
I don't know if that did or didn't happen.
And Liza lives with this every day of her life.
She told me she thinks about it almost every day.
She says, he ruined my life.
So your family still had a relationship with Cookie.
I mean your sister, your mom's daughter, who had disbelieved her own daughter and chosen to believe her husband and pastor about the abuse.
What kind of relationship did you and your family have with Cookie after that?
Well, we had no relationship with her husband.
I've not seen him since 1985 or 6.
I don't even know what he looks like.
But I've seen Cookie, you know, once a year maybe while visiting mom.
And we have vastly different beliefs and worldviews, but we love each other.
You know, she loves my children.
And she's maybe not accepting of who they are as people.
They're both queer.
But she loves them.
And I was surprised recently.
I stopped in to visit her because she had bought a condo.
And I said, oh, there's my kids on your kitchen bulletin board.
She said, of course I put their pictures up.
I love them.
And we hadn't really spoken much since the interview because it was rough.
That's what I want to talk about.
For the book.
You wanted to interview Cookie about this and she agreed to talk to you on the record on tape.
Tell us about that conversation.
Well, so we meet at her oldest daughter's house, and I start out with things we can agree on.
I read her some letters that our hilarious mom wrote, and we laughed.
And we looked at old pictures.
She brought some photo albums.
I mean, I like to do that with people I'm interviewing.
It helps people remember things.
And then we got into the stuff with Liza and we had a fairly reasonable conversation about it.
She didn't really shy away from it.
And then it had gone so well.
I mean it had been like two and a half hours and I had to go meet my friend Betty for dinner and I'm packing up my stuff to go.
And I thought I'm just going to ask her about Max, because I had announced on, put a thing on Facebook that with the picture of my son Max, who was getting ready to marry his fiance Zach, and you know, and no one in my family liked it, except for my sister, terry one like nobody reached out, nobody congratulated me, and so i, and you know max, after he came out in college, stopped going home to ohio with me and he told me later it was because he was worried what cookie would say to him and that then i would have to go off on her and he didn't want that to happen.
So um So, as I'm packing up, I say you know Cookie, Max thinks you don't like him because he's gay.
And she says, I love him, but I don't like that he's gay.
And then kind of all my rural urban bridge training went out the window and my face turned red and I kind of lost composure.
And we start arguing about Leviticus and your theology versus my theology.
And then finally I take a deep breath and I say, I'm thinking of Mr. Rogers.
Use your words.
And I said, Cookie, I'm getting really mad.
I guess if we're going to have any relationship at all, we shouldn't talk about this.
And later, a little bit later, she says, well, did he get made fun of when he was in school?
And I said well, if you'll remember, when he was three and four he'd go to preschool wearing red ruby slippers and a cape.
He had me sew for him.
And she goes, yeah, I remember.
She said, well, did he get made fun of when he went to kindergarten?
And I said, yeah, he did.
And he stopped doing that.
And he became angry.
And anxious because he was having to hide who he was.
But I thought it's a crack.
It's a little crack of empathy because she's asking what it felt like to be him and to parent him.
And you know, I don't know if it makes a difference, but we've got to figure out ways, when we're talking to people who have different views, to start to be vulnerable around them too.
I should have said, you know, I did the best I could with what I knew at the time.
What would you have done?
So, live and learn.
But when you talk to her, I mean...
You talked about the abuse of her daughter by her husband, who she was still married to and living with.
And then later, when you were putting the book together, you honored a promise you had made to give her a chance to respond to what you'd written.
So in a phone call you read to her some of what you had written about the incident, about the abuse of Liza, her daughter, by her husband.
How did she react?
Well, she didn't say much of anything.
And then I could hear her sort of almost hyperventilating or crying in the background.
And she said, what should I do?
And I said well, if it were me, I would call up Liza and apologize to her for not believing her for all these years.
And she said, I don't know.
I don't know.
And it was like it was just sinking in that what Liza had reported maybe had been true.
And then the next day she texted me and she asked me not to put it in.
And I said, look, I'm not the perpetrator here.
The church and your husband.
Your husband and the minister that told you to ignore a suffering child are the perpetrators, not me.
And, you know, we haven't really talked about it since.
We've talked a little, but not a lot, which isn't unusual for us.
But you know, I'm interested in knowing what – in the initial interview for the book and then in the subsequent conversation and text exchange did she say she didn't believe Liza?
She didn't believe that her daughter had been abused?
She said she wasn't sure.
She said that – she kept saying, I was always there.
How could it not happen?
I mean, I have letters that the girls wrote me.
Oh, mom's at a prayer meeting this week in Nashville or whatever.
My mom isn't here.
I mean –
You're never always there with your kids, right?
But in her mind, this is the story that she believed.
To me, it was just like she was under the thumb of this misogynistic Christian nationalist men who were telling her what to do and what to think.
And her husband is still alive?
Yep.
They live together.
Yes.
Let's take another break here.
We are speaking with Beth Macy.
Her new book is Paper Girl, a memoir of home and family in a fractured America.
We'll continue our conversation after this short break.
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Urbana and the surrounding county, Champaign County right, our Trump country.
He probably knew this.
I wonder if – were you surprised when you started doing interviews, at the depth and intensity of the support he had there?
I was.
And I was really taken by how many people were believers in QAnon.
And the first time I went, I asked my old buddy.
We were both class clown.
He was the male class clown.
I was the female to drive me around town because he was a recently retired firefighter and he knew everyone in town.
And as we drove around the east in Urbana, he would just point out houses and he would go she's QAnon, he's QAnon.
And I was like, what?
Are you kidding me?
So I...
I invited one of the people that he said, who we both knew, out for coffee, and sure enough he wasn't wrong.
And, you know, I was just like listening to her say, Tom Hanks is a pedophile.
Michelle Obama is a trans woman, you know, just on and on with this crazy stuff.
And she would say, you didn't get the vaccine, did you?
Oh no, you did.
And the COVID vaccine.
And, um, I started to think my family's not so crazy after all.
Like.
The other person that I reconnected with was a ex-boyfriend named Bill that I hadn't seen in 38 years.
And I decided to interview him because a mutual friend had said he had gone from being the most liberal person we knew to spending four to seven hours a day uh, on the internet looking at Russian propaganda.
And that was a fascinating story.
So I started meeting with him.
I probably spent 10 hours.
I probably have 10 hours of recordings with him.
And just to see the progression.
He went from Bernie to Jill Stein and I tell you where I think he turned was.
He was a practicing Catholic and pretty active in his church and his deacon in the church had taken him out after hearing that Bill was going to vote not for Hillary but for Jill Stein and said well, you might as well vote for Trump.
And then he thought they were going out for beer.
So he felt like really ambushed.
And all of his friends were giving him a hard time.
And he just basically sequestered himself online after that.
And as I'm reporting on this book, then the Springfield story breaks out.
And lo and behold Bill, my ex, becomes the lead spokesman for the anti-Haitian contingent in Springfield Ohio, which is where he lived.
It's about 18 miles from Urbana.
And that was shocking, too.
It was like there he is on PBS NewsHour.
There he is on Blaze TV.
And you know, I think the last communication I had from him he was espousing, you know, great replacement theory beliefs and being really, really rude to me.
And I decided not to really engage with him anymore.
Now it's interesting that you also report that you talk to people who were, you know, affluent and educated folks in Urbana, people who were developers and the like, and many of them held these conspiratorial views too.
Oh, yeah.
They all said – it was like they all got together and decided we're going to say the election of 2020 was fishy and that the people who perpetrated the January 6th storming of the Capitol were really Antifa.
And –
You know, a woman I met who worked in the economic development office said she had to quit her church because everybody just assumed that the election was rigged and that everybody thought the same way she did.
And in Urbana, three out of four people did vote for Trump.
And I don't think everybody who voted for him is that far down the conspiracy rabbit holes, but it was a lot more people than I thought.
And some of them were old friends of yours.
Like I think, one of your very first friend was an African-American woman named Joy who is very active in her church now.
And you had some real back and forth with her, right?
With you sending her information about mainstream media and fact checking and all of that.
How did that go?
Yeah.
It was surprising as well.
I mean when she said that she didn't believe George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin, you know, I guess she believed that he had a little fentanyl in his system and that's what did it.
It wasn't a police murder.
You know, at one point she says that children are identifying as cats and taking litter boxes to school.
And I just kind of like leaned back in my chair and rolled my eyes and she goes, I know.
But how do we still love each other beyond what we can't understand or agree with?
And that's where we are.
How do we love beyond now in this nation?
One in five families are estranged because of politics.
There was a piece in The New York Times last week in The Daily, where they did a survey showing that 64 percent of Americans think we're too divided to be able to solve any of our problems and that our divisions actually are bigger concern now than the economy.
I mean, that's where we are now.
I had no idea that's where we would be when I started this project.
And I'm still very close to Joy.
I mean, she's a lay minister.
She conducted my mom's funeral.
I love her.
She was one of my, she and her parents, her parents were both educators.
She gave me a ride to school every day.
I wouldn't be who I am without her.
But her question, I think about it all the time.
How do we love beyond what we can't understand?
You spent more time in Urbana, I guess, over the last two or three years when you were reporting for this book than you had in decades.
Do you think you'll stay in closer touch with old friends that you had and new ones you made?
I hope I can.
During Trump's first administration, my brother, who was always really supportive of my kids and would come to all their plays and concerts and stuff, unfriended me on Facebook because of quote all the liberal crap I post.
And during this homegoing project, we became close again and to the point of at one point –
Tim leans over to me.
He's visiting us here in Virginia, and he's going to go to a Palmyra show.
That's my youngest kid's band.
My youngest kid is non-binary, who goes by the name Sasha.
And he said, well...
Tell me about this.
Does he still date girls?
And because I had done kind of the work on how to respond and have these conversations, I took a breath and I said well, they are dating a young woman now.
Yes.
And I sometimes mess up the pronouns, too, which is true.
I do still sometimes mess up the pronouns.
And but he was so kind about it and just curious that I went there with him.
And I think we like he showed me grace.
I showed him grace back.
And that's where we need to get back to in this country.
He now will drive eight hours to see a Palmyra show, which is just awesome.
Beth Macy, thanks for speaking with us again.
Thanks for having me again, Dave.
You're the best.
Beth Macy's new book is Paper Girl, a memoir of home and family in a fractured America.
Coming up.
David Bianculli has an appreciation of TV writer and producer Rod Serling, creator of the series The Twilight Zone.
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On October 2nd, the state of Ohio placed a new historical marker on the campus of Antioch College.
It commemorates screenwriter and TV writer and producer, Rod Serling, who graduated from Antioch after his military service in World War II and later returned to teach there.
October 2nd, not coincidentally, marked the 66th anniversary of the premiere of Serling's The Twilight Zone on CBS.
Our TV critic, David Bianculli, says both the man and his TV work deserve all the remembrances they can get.
Rod Serling's most famous anthology series premiered in 1959 and was canceled in 1964.
But even those born too late to watch it on CBS during its original five-season run were very familiar with it decades later.
Local stations showed reruns in syndication and kids would rush to their TV sets to watch it in the afternoons or sneak to watch it late at night.
Eventually, cable TV entered the mix with networks like the Sci-Fi Channel, presenting New Year's marathons of old Twilight Zone episodes, introducing Rod and his captivating ideas to an even newer generation of viewers.
But today, the TV universe is fragmented.
You still can watch every episode of the classic Twilight Zone on Paramount+.
But how many people, even those who subscribe to that streaming service, know it's there?
And Serling was anything but a one-hit, one-show wonder.
By the time he began hosting the Twilight Zone, he already had won three Emmys in a row for writing the live Golden Age dramas Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight and The Comedian.
And after The Twilight Zone, he wrote the screenplays for Seven Days in May and Planet of the Apes.
He also wrote a TV movie called Carol for Another Christmas for ABC in 1964.
The same year The Twilight Zone ended.
That show was so bold and chilling, yet has been so largely forgotten that many of you may never have heard of it, much less heard the excerpt I'll soon play.
Rod Serling was born on Christmas Day in 1924 and died at age 50 in 1975.
The Ohio historical marker at Antioch is one way of remembering Rod and his creative output.
Another way happened last month when the non-profit Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, with involvement from members of his surviving family, mounted its annual Serling Fest in Rod's hometown of Binghamton, New York.
The town's recreation park has long featured a carousel refurbished with images of Rod and from the Twilight Zone tied to his nostalgic Zone episodes inspired by Binghamton.
Last year, the Memorial Foundation erected a statue there in Rod's honor as part of Serlingfest.
And this year in September, the Foundation commemorated the 50th anniversary of Rod Serling's death and the centenary of his birth by inviting speakers to Binghamton to talk about his influence and legacy.
His daughter Anne, an author in her own right, was there.
So were Frank Spotnitz, who wrote for the X-Files, and Joseph Doherty, who wrote for 30-something and has a new book coming out about Rod Serling.
And so was I.
We all were there to celebrate Rod's accomplishments and his ideas and to point out why they were as important and topical as ever.
Several speakers quoted from or referred to Rod's first season episode.
The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street from 1960.
Serling had launched the Twilight Zone because he sensed correctly he could say things in a fantasy setting that he was prevented from saying at the time in more traditional TV dramas.
Maple Street was about how aliens from outer space agitated people in small-town neighborhoods merely by provoking them to mistrust one another.
At the time, it was a parable about McCarthyism.
But played at Serlingfest.
Serling's epilogue had an all-too-contemporary ring, especially if you imagine social media as a modern equivalent weapon of choice.
Here are the aliens observing their test subjects, followed by Serling's own observations.
And this pattern is always the same?
With few variations.
They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find.
And it's themselves.
All we need do is sit back and watch.
Then I take it this place, this Maple Street, is not unique.
By no means.
Their world is full of Maple Streets.
And we'll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves.
One to the other.
One to the other.
One to the other.
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout.
There are weapons that are simply thoughts attitudes prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy.
And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of 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.
I promised a taste of Carol for another Christmas, and here it comes.
Serling took the Charles Dickens story of Christmas Carol and adapted it to modern times.
His Scrooge-like protagonist.
A military leader who believed in isolationism was visited by ghosts who tried to persuade him that a peaceful future depended upon supporting other countries in their times of need.
Steve Lawrence, in a powerful performance, played the ghost of Christmas past, arguing his case.
Yeah, after 1918, we got sick of war, fed up.
All those American kids getting blown to pieces out of sight in foreign places with strange-sounding names.
So for the next 20 years, we closed our eyes and decided what we couldn't see wouldn't happen.
Right?
Of course, we don't want to take all the credit, do we?
I mean, we weren't the only ones playing shut-eye.
When old Adolf walked into the Rhineland, France didn't want to get involved.
Italy pulled down a window shade when Hitler took Austria.
England wasn't about to involve herself when Czechoslovakia went under.
And Russia kept their phone off the hook while Poland was destroyed.
And, before you knew it, everybody was singing Don't rock the boat, while it sank slowly to the bottom.
The things Rod Serling wrote about and warned about are anything but dated.
All these years later, you can still find and watch and think about the Twilight Zone.
And I hope you do.
David Bianculli is Fresh Air's television critic.
His most recent book is The Platinum Age of Television.
From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, how TV became terrific.
On tomorrow's show, Grammy Award-winning singer and musician Leve sings and plays some songs for us.
Her music is a hybrid of pop, jazz, and classical music.
She had rigorous classical training in Iceland, where she's from.
Her mother, who is Chinese, plays in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.
Leve has a new album.
I hope you can join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.
Bet you think you're so poetic, Quoting epics and ancient prose.
Truth be told, you're quite pathetic.
Mr Eclectic Alan Park, Did you ever stop and give a one?
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
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Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and John Sheehan.
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Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson.
Roberta Shorrock directs the show.
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
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