Space may be the final frontier and make it acceptable to split infinitives – who else wants to boldly go where no one has gone before? – and we learned about these things because of The Great Bird of the Galaxy, Gene Roddenberry’s nickname. The franchise that made stars of people named Shatner, Stewart, Nimoy, and Nicholls (not to mention countless others), Star Trek has been in the popular consciousness ever since it debuted in 1966, making lifelong fans and Trekkies (like me!). Its creator, Gene Roddenberry, was born on this date, 19 August 1921.
Though Roddenberry was born in El Paso, Texas, he grew up in Los Angeles. Roddenberry briefly attended Los Angeles City College before he enlisted in the US Army Air Corps (the precursor to the Air Force) in 1941. Throughout World War II he flew bombers in the South Pacific before transitioning to a commercial pilot for Pan American World Airways (PanAm) until 1949, when he joined the Los Angeles police force, following in his father’s footsteps. While with the LAPD, Roddenberry wrote freelance scripts for shows like Dragnet, Highway Patrol, and Have Gun – Will Travel. He created his first show, The Lieutenant, which aired on NBC during the 1963-64 broadcast year and featured many guest stars who would later appear on Star Trek, including Majel Barrett – who played Nurse Christine Chapel in The Original Series (TOS) and Lwaxana Troi in The Next Generation (TNG) – Walter Koenig, who played Pavel Chekov, and Ricardo Montalbán (KHAAAAAAN).
In 1964 NBC bought an early version of the pilot of Star Trek titled “The Menagerie” (later reworked into “The Cage”), but it passed on taking it to series. Instead, the pilot got revised in 1965 – an almost unprecedented occurrence then or now – which included adding a new lead actor in William Shatner, and aired “Where No Man Has Gone Before” in 1966. The rest is history.
But it’s only history because of two important women associated with the franchise. The first was Lucille Ball. When attempting to sell the show in 1964, Roddenberry presented the original Star Trek draft to Ball’s production company, Desilu, who agreed to produce the show. Famous, of course, for her own comedic shows like I Love Lucy and The Lucy Show, Desilu Productions was one of the largest independent production companies in the US during its heyday. In addition to Ball’s comedies, the company had a hand in a variety of shows, such as the western The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, which ran on ABC from 1955 to 1961, police drama The Untouchables (ABC, 1959 to 1963), the game show You Don't Say! (NBC, 1963 to 1969), and numerous others. Perhaps the two shows with the longest current legacy that Desilu produced were Star Trek which NBC aired from 1966 to 1968, and Mission: Impossible, which aired on CBS during those same years. Suffice it to say, without Lucille Ball there may not have even been a Star Trek, let alone over a dozen shows and a similar amount of movies.
The other woman who helped Star Trek thrive was Betty JoAnne “Bjo” Trimble. Along with her husband John, the two started a “Save Star Trek” letter-writing campaign after NBC threatened to cancel the show after its second season. The two marshaled fans to write more than 110,000 (and possibly more) pieces of mail to NBC executives, who were so overwhelmed with the response that they greenlit the third and final season.
Afterwards that meant the show had enough episodes to enter into syndication, which is where it really thrived. That effort spawned the first convention, Star Trek Lives!, organized by a group of die-hard fans known as “The Committee” in 1972. The convention drew guests such as Roddenberry himself, his wife Majel Barrett, series writer Dorothy “DC” Fontana, and sci-fi legend Isaac Asimov. It also featured a NASA space display (moon rocks), an art show, and a “costume call,” better known today as cosplay. Star Trek conventions still occur regularly, drawing crowds of thousands from all around the world.
A letter-writing campaign was not all Bjo Trimble did for Star Trek, however. She was instrumental in helping the campaign to have NASA's first Space Shuttles named Enterprise, she appeared in an uncredited role as a crew member in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and she contributed to the first encyclopedic collection of data, the Star Trek Concordance, which, before the advent of the internet and the ability to add hyperlinks and instant browsing for information, contained cross-referenced details on every character, setting, event and device in every episode of the original Star Trek series.
The great series may have started with Gene Roddenberry’s vision, and without his birth on this date back in 1921, none of it would have come into existence. But it was the women behind the scenes who made Star Trek thrive. Now, go live long and prosper.