Imagine, if you will, a Rod Serling show about a Russian playing for the Reds

Rod Serling is best remembered for his emotionless introductions of people in their most tense moments, setting up the unthinkable stories. His voice, calm, completely detached and devoid of feeling.

His daughter, Anne Serling, of course, remembers him differently. One of her many memories of her father is the frustration and irrational anger that can only be brought on by the love of sports. Anne in the car, her father driving around Los Angeles listening to his beloved Dodgers and when things didn’t go their way, he’d bang on the steering wheel.

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“My dad was a huge baseball fan,” Anne Serling said in an email. “He loved the Dodgers.”

He’d also place bets on games with a friend of his, she remembered.

Anne Serling knew of her late father’s love of the Dodgers and knew well his career as a prolific writer, having written a book, “As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling,” published in 2014. But until John Kiesewetter, a long-time journalist in Cincinnati, and Cincinnati Public Radio CEO Richard Eiswerth approached her in 2016, she’d never heard of “O’Toole from Moscow,” a TV comedy her father had written about a Russian playing for the Cincinnati Reds that aired just once on NBC on Dec. 12, 1955.

“I thought it sounded fascinating and I was thrilled that they had unearthed it,” Serling said.

Kiesewetter first heard of “O’Toole From Moscow” in 1989 and for nearly 30 years, he kept it to himself. A long-time TV writer at the Cincinnati Enquirer, Kiesewetter wrote many stories about Serling’s Cincinnati connections over the years, starting with a story in 1989 celebrating the 50th anniversary of WKRC, Channel 12 in Cincinnati.

Serling, who died in 1975, was from New York state, but went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, after serving as a paratrooper in World War II. He then worked at WLW radio and also sold scripts to WLW’s parent company, Crosley Broadcasting Company. He then went to WKRC, where he created a live series called “The Storm.” While at WKRC, Serling wrote a show called “The Twilight Rounds,” which was more or less a first draft of that would become “Requiem for a Heavyweight.”

Kiesewetter wrote about “The Storm” in 1989, but his research brought him to something that piqued his interest more – a 1955 episode of the live TV show “Matinee” on NBC that Serling wrote entitled “O’Toole From Moscow” that was about baseball – a love Kiesewetter shared with Serling.

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“I probably did eight, 10, 12 stories about Serling and his Cincinnati connections or books that had come out about Serling that had Cincinnati parts, but I never mentioned ‘O’Toole from Moscow,'” Kiesewetter said, “because it was always my dream to find this if the script existed and to put it on for a Cincinnati audience.”

That dream will be realized Wednesday night when Kiesewetter’s current employer, WVXU, will broadcast an hour-long radio drama version of “O’Toole From Moscow,” that Kiesewetter adapted from Serling’s original script and co-produced by the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music. It will debut on the Cincinnati Public Radio station at 8 p.m. both over the air (91.7 and 88.5 MMUB) and online at wvxu.org or on the app or smart speakers.

It’s probably not exactly what Cincinnati Post TV and Radio columnist Mary Wood had in mind in 1955 when she wrote for the Dec. 13 edition, “I hope it will be repeated for a night-time audience so the male baseball fans can share the laughs.”

Wood’s description of the story is as follows: “The story, delightfully fantastic, concerns two members of the Russian legation, one an ardent baseball fan (Kurt Katch) about to be liquidated, and the other a legation bodyguard (Chuck Connors). Reluctant to return to the motherland, the comrades run away from New York and land in Cincinnati – in the office of the manager of the Cincinnati Reds (Leo Duroches (sic)). The Reds are at a low ebb – eighth place – until Comrade O’Toole, former bodyguard, joins the team, winning game after game. The glory continues until the boys from the legation catch up with the truant comrades, only to find that Comrade O’Toole has become a new national hero in Russia.”

Instead of Connors, a former big-league player later known as the star of “The Rifleman” as the titular O’Toole, or former Reds shortstop Leo “The Lip” Durocher as the Reds manager, students from CCM under the direction of Richard Hess, will perform the roles. Anne Serling came to Cincinnati in November to record her part as the studio announcer and narrator, a nod to her father.

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“It took three days and I cannot fully describe what the experience was like,” Anne Serling wrote. “Sitting in that room, beneath those headphones I felt so close to my father – imagining him doing the same those many years before when he worked in radio. I never dreamed I would have the opportunity to have that experience again. I was so honored John asked me, particularly when I could read the actual words from my dad’s script – the stage directions John included.”

Kiesewetter said the script was 99 percent Serling, he had to add mostly stage direction and scene-setting.

“(When) they show a bar and when you see a bar on TV, you know it’s a bar,” Kiesewetter said.

That meant a line of dialogue or music in certain places – during a baseball tryout, for example, a player in the background yells, “Hey Skip, do you want us to hit now?” Or, to take the listener out of the ballgame, there’s a song for that. In this case, it’s played by John Schutte, the organist at Great American Ball Park.

“He also did it in a minor key that sounds really funky and is perfect for when the guys get arrested,” Kiesewetter said. “He did some other organ ballpark riffs we could use to be the musical cue when we had a ballpark or clubhouse scene.”

Kiesewetter, Eiswerth and master recording engineer Josh Elstro also had to find other sounds and music, the most challenging of which was the sound of a baseball being hit by a wooden bat, especially since the music and sound effects were added after the recording in November. Kiesewetter has a friend who coaches softball at Badin High School in Hamilton who told him that a couple of the team’s former players, Alex Holderbach and Zack Gray, were working out at the high school after the softball workouts. Holderbach, who hit six home runs for the Astros’ low-A Quad Cities team last season, proved to be the perfect sound for O’Toole’s massive blasts that dwarfed those hit by Ted Kluszewski.

“I went up there one night and stood behind the netting and recorded the sounds of a wood bat smacking a ball,” Kiesewetter said. “Because it was inside in a metal gymnasium, there’s a tinny echo to it, but it sounds explosive.”

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Wednesday night, which was supposed to be the night before Opening Day, the ball off of Holderbach’s bat will provide the sounds that so many are desperate to hear right now, and ones Kiesewetter had been dying to provide since he first heard of the show more than 30 years ago. It was something Anne Serling didn’t know about when she was approached by Kiesewetter and Eiswerth in 2016, but she knows just how her dad would feel to listen in on the airwaves in Cincinnati nearly 65 years after he first wrote his comedy about baseball and the Cold War.

“My dad would have been touched and humbled and so grateful,” Anne Serling wrote. “The love and devotion that each and every person – from John and Richard to all of the wonderful students and director and amazing voice coach; everyone involved, has been so touching. I was able to see a rehearsal and I just kept thinking… if only my dad could see this. He would have been beaming.”

(Top photo of Rod Serling with his daughter, Anne. Courtesy of Anne Serling)

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