The Twilight Zone: "The Changing of the Guard"

Edited to include photo 9-29-20

 

Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, "The Twilight Zone" was a popular television show. Several episodes stand out in my mind from those old shows, but one in particular frequently pops into my mind. The episode, "The Changing of the Guard," starred English actor Donald Pleasence, a favorite actor of mine, as an old professor at an all boys school who is forced into retirement by the school administration after five decades of teaching. His life had been devoted to teaching literature, and as he thinks back on all of his years, he feels he hasn't really accomplished anything; that he gave young people a lot of empty, meaningless phrases they memorized for the moment, but then forgot.

The professor decides to end his life that evening, and he takes a pistol and goes to the statue of Horace Mann in front of the school. Mann, a prominent American supporter and reformer of education of the mid 1800s, had espoused public education to help potentially elevate all children, not just the privileged few of families with the money to pay for it. The professor reads the inscription of a quote from Mann, "Be ashamed to die until you've won some victory for humanity." The professor tells himself he's ashamed to die, because he's failed. As he prepares to take his life, he hears the school bell ringing, which prompts him to go into his classroom to find out why. There he finds the desks full of students from his many years of teaching. The thing he can't understand is, all of these students had died at some point after they left school. One student approaches and shows the old professor the Congressional Medal of Honor he had been awarded posthumously for his heroic service on Iwo Jima in World War Two. He says how the professor taught him about courage. Another stands and tells how he was exposed to radiation and died, as he tried to find a cure for cancer, but that he always remembered a poem the professor had taught him. Others stand and tell similar stories, with one student speaking who died way back in World War One, but each recounts how the professor influenced his life. They then tell the professor they must go, and as the students fade off into eternity, the professor realizes that he was not a failure, and that he did accomplish something. He decides to accept retirement and this completes, "the changing of the guard."

Rod Serling was the creator of "The Twilight Zone" television series and he also wrote some of the stories for the show, including the story covered here. We lost the very talented Mr. Serling far too early, at the age of only 50, but his stories, and the stories of others adapted for the Twilight Zone, taught many a great lesson, so he won his victory for humanity. 

Photo is of "The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia" by Steven Jay Rubin, Chicago Review Press, 2018. It contains lots of facts and information about the series and the episodes.

WORD HISTORY:

Poem-The ultimate origin of this word is uncertain, but Greek had "poein," which meant "to create, to make." This then produced Greek "poema," meaning "something created;" thus, by extension, "a written work, a poem." Latin borrowed the word from Greek as "poema," meaning "poem." This gave French, a Latin-based language, "poeme," with the same meaning, and English borrowed the word from French in the 1500s.