You have just entered the Twilight Zone thread....

I know, Naterdawg. That "aging" of younger men on television was by no mean limited to the TZ back then, though the show seemed to do it more than most. In the case of the Gig Young episode (Walking Distance) I think that to put it in the context of the time, Young's character was likely a world war or Korean war vet, a child of the Depression (even as he grew up in comfortable circumstances), was old enough to remember Prohibition. That's a lot of water under the bridge from an historical perspective. My sense is that back then,--that was my parents generation more or less--that history, real life history, functioned almost like a biomarker, and that events marked people for life, in good and bad ways, which enabled them to share their lives with others maybe better than we do today, in some respects, but also limited them. You were either horse and buggy or Model T, grew up with vaudeville or radio (often both). People were less likely to move around and didn't travel so much. In Walking Distance Gig Young wanted to revisit to the long ago and far away era of his childhood. Nowadays I think we're more likely to, if anything, use one's home town or old neighborhood, and the distance between the then and now, as something to feel good about ("you've come a long way, baby"). You can sort of see in Walking Distance that Young's life was sort of like his novel. He was living in chapter 10 and wanted to go back to chapters three and four and rewrite the narrative. That was a very different time from today (needless to say). In that sense he sort of was old.