Good old cigarettes. I'm sure this is no secret, but Rod Serling enjoyed five packs of non-filter Camels a day!

I can't even imagine someone needing that much smoke in their lungs over a one day period.

quote:

Originally posted by fjp451:
http://amsaw.org/pic1204-serling003A.jpg

That's it!

Yeah, the PBS American Masters episode on Rod Serling said he died in part "thanks to a million cigarettes." I posted on the Twilight Zone forum asking if this were possibly literal. Someone actually bothered to do the math. Must have been on an earlier incarnation of the forum, as I can't find it now, but I think we came up with an actual total of around 750,000 cigarettes--more than half a million, but well under a million.

So unless my arithmetic is off (a very good possibility), he smoked a cigarette thirty-five miles long!

Did you include filter tips in your calculation?

Phil,

Go back and check Doug's posting where he mentions non-filtered Camels! Straight, pure, repulsive tobacco smoke direct to the lungs.

It's sort of ironic, when you think of the bit of controversy Rod and Ray had, Ray's still alive and doing well and Rod's dead, for how many years? I don't think Ray ever smoked a day in his life.

quote:

Originally posted by biplane1:
It's sort of ironic, when you think of the bit of controversy Rod and Ray had, Ray's still alive and doing well and Rod's dead, for how many years?

Thirty-three. Just.

He was fifty. What a loss to the literary world.

Well, now that we've compleatly re-directed the original subject of this thread, what other pandemonium can we cause?

Try doing the math of how much secondhand smoke Ray inhaled. Take the number of years he and Maggie were married and divide by how much time he spent with her in enclosed spaces and how much she smoked around him as opposed to anywhere else.