BW - EP146—009: December 1973 With Rod Serling And The Zero Hour—Life After Radio Drama

Breaking Walls: The Podcast on the History of American Network Radio Broadcasting

Although The Zero Hour went off the air in the spring of 1974, the people involved didn’t stop working. Rod Serling always kept a full schedule. His final radio performance was part of Fantasy Park. A fantasy rock concert aired by nearly two-hundred stations in 1974 and 1975. Always a heavy smoker, on May 3rd, 1975, Serling had a heart attack. A second heart attack two weeks later forced doctors to agree that a risky open-heart surgery was necessary. On June 26th, Serling had a third heart attack on the operating table and died two days later at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York. He was just fifty. His funeral and burial took place on July 2nd in Seneca, New York. Elliott Lewis would continue in Television, before again working with Mutual on radio dramas at the end of the decade. Jay Kholos continued innovating, eventually forming the theater company, Orchard Street Productions, in 2001. These days he lives in Nashville, where Kholos writes music and scripts for his own productions, while Orchard Street also licenses musicals and plays for local, regional and North American tours.