A wonderful piece about fandom history, friendships, and legacies.

Dee called AO3 a “candy store,” and said the fan art she has seen, in particular, has been overwhelming. “I cannot get over the art,” she said. “We would have jumped at this. I would’ve given my right tit for all this art when I was in my twenties. Because you couldn’t reproduce it, you couldn’t send it out, but [now] there’s this fabulous art coming out every single day.”

Yes. Yes. Yes.  This is how it happened.  Excellent article.

Thanks to the author for permission to share this here, and for being just a really nice human being, and big thanks to the artist who did my mom’s portrait, above. -Zachary

Hi everyone. This is Dee’s son.  “Star Trek Grandma” or “Fandom Grandma” as she is known here.  My mom passed away earlier this week. 

She asked that one of her kids tell you when she passed rather than delete her site without any word. She wrote you a letter to say goodbye. I will add it when we go through her papers in the coming days.

She was an amazing lady. We feel lucky to have been her kids. We are glad you got to know her a bit. She always had lots of love to share. I’m not a big Star Trek fan but in her honor I will wish you all to “live long and prosper.”

Dee interview transcript, Jan. 24, 2018  (Part 3)

[Tell me about your experiences meeting Nimoy, Roddenberry and the rest of the cast.]

Leonard Nimoy was the only cast member I met when the show was still in its original run. When he was in Oregon in 1967, he came to the home of the president of my sci-fi club and chatted with us for about 45 minutes.

Gene had invited me to visit the set in 1966, but I didn’t go. If I had known that 50 years later Star Trek would still be around and I’d still be a fan, I might have tried harder to get there!

In 1970, my husband got a job that took us to Pasadena, which was lucky timing for me. The show was beginning its run in syndication and growing more popular, Trek fandom was beginning to consolidate through the first conventions, the founding of the Welcommittee, the proliferation of print zines, and the push to get the show back on the air. I fell in with a group of fans who were incredibly busy with all of those things, and there was such a buzz of energy and creativity when we met, because everything was new and untried and exciting.  Fans were basically inventing fandom as know it today, and for almost 4 years I was in one of two spots (the other was NYC) where most of the action was happening.  

Meanwhile, all the cast except Leonard were pretty much out-of-work actors — they were not movie stars back then — and living next to LA meant it was very easy to get to see them. They did not charge anything to come to fan events in those early years. Jimmy Doohan once came to my house when a bunch of us were meeting for the campaign to get the show back on the air, basically because we offered him home-made lasagna!

interview part 1

interview part 2

Early fandom interview: part 2

Dee interview transcript, Jan. 24, 2018

[How did your science fiction club evolve to the point that you were actually meeting the cast and crew?]

Well, I wrote the club newsletter. I didn’t know any better, so from the operator I just got the number of Desilu Studios, called up and said: ‘We’re X science fiction club, and we’re wondering if we can speak to one of the writers for an article about Star Trek.’

And, gosh, a few days later I get a call back: ‘Please hold for Mister Roddenberry.’ So I grabbed a pen and sat and we chatted for, I don’t know, 15-20 minutes. And he was so excited that we were so excited. That’s what I remember about that conversation. It’s like a fanfiction writer now. You create these OCs, and then somebody else sees what you’re trying to do, shares your excitement, and of course you’re going to want to sit and talk to them about your creation!

We were interrupting each other and talking a mile a minute, and that’s my first memory of Gene. I’m pretty sure in that conversation — if it wasn’t that one, it was one very soon after — he said to me: ‘Oh my god, come down to the studio, you can come down to the set. Write about what we’re doing here.’ Because he just wanted people to be excited about Star Trek. He wanted people to know about it. He wanted us to write about it. So it was all very accessible in those earliest days.

interview part 1

These are Joanie Winston’s photos, I believe. That’s Joanie on the far left in the second row (first photo) and in the blue on the right, sitting on the couch with George (second photo). That last photo, of Leonard and Nichelle goofing around, is typical of the organizer’s room antics in the early seventies, when the cast were not “celebrities” we gazed at from afar. They hung out and could be just as silly as any of us.

31-page Original Series guide for writer-directors interested in writing for Star Trek.

 Link: http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Star_Trek/1_Original_Series/Star_Trek_TOS_Writer%27s_Guide.pdf

Looks like the third edition followed by the first edition in one pdf. Characters and settings described as they were conceived by Roddenberry, Coon, et all back in the 1960s.

Thought I’d share this for the benefit of those who might be under the false impression that fandom is only for the young. This is me. We’d just moved to a new apartment, and I was excited to decorate my room with my latest con purchases. This photo was taken 42 years ago. I’m still here. And with any luck, you’ll be wherever the fans are in another 42 years. With a lot more luck, so will I.

he is so fucking cute

This whole interview is adorable.  You can see clearly that, going into season 2, most people had no clue what Star Trek was.  He had to explain who/what Spock is!  (On a personal note, this was filmed in Portland; I believe this was the visit to Oregon when I first met him. )

I was seven when I saw my Star Trek episode: the Lights of Zetar in 1969. I remember that because it scared me to death, and I didn’t watch Star Trek again until I was ten, when I became a fan for life. But I only just learned that the episode was co-written by, of all people, Shari Lewis, with her husband. So she was terrifying me on one show and delighting me with Lamb Chop on another. This is the best bit of Star Trek trivia I never knew.

My tiny piece of Star Trek history

In honor of Star Trek’s 50th anniversary and ST Mission NY starting tomorrow, I present my own tiny contribution to early Star Trek history. In the Feb. 2, 1976, Village Voice, James Wolcott (who went on to become a famous media and culture critic writing for Vanity Fair) used a ST con I’d attended as an opportunity for a scathing (and sexist) critique of fandom. He wrote stuff like:

and

Read the whole thing here.

Even at 14, I knew that basically what he was saying was, Yeah, Star Trek is pretty good for TV, but these overheated, embarrassingly uncool fans – especially the female ones – don’t really get it. Fandom is just a combination of hormones and adolescent maladjustment. 

These were the days when fandom wasn’t an accepted phenomenon affectionately seen as adorkable. It was considered truly shameful and nerdy in the worst possible way. And female Trekkies, like Beatlemaniacs before them, were worst of all: desperate, sexually frustrated, emotional, and out of control. 

So I took it upon myself to pen a response, and the Voice published it. I’m still pretty proud of this. Today, it would have been an ephemeral post online, one of thousands, but because back then responding meant writing, typing, mailing, waiting, and hoping for publication, I was (I think) the only response to Wolcott’s hatchet job. 

Since I’m committed to passing on to younger fans the things that I remember

I think it’s important to record that when I met Leonard Nimoy in 1967, I was totally checking out his butt.

And it was nice.

From my chat with a journalist: part 1

Dee interview transcript, Jan. 24, 2018

[What is your very first memory of Star Trek? Was it love at first sight, or did it take you some time to get “into” it?]

I started out in science fiction, before Star Trek was ever on the air. And in 1966, I was living in Oregon and was part of a women’s writing group, a women’s science fiction group. We were all writing, wanting to write. Some of the members of our group had written professionally, and some were trying to get scripts into Hollywood and so on, but we were all focused on writing. Science fiction in the 1960s was not considered the purview of women.

When Star Trek came out, I imagine [my science fiction club] was how I first heard about it, because I didn’t watch a lot of TV. I had this little black-and-white, eight-inch screen with the bunny ears.

I don’t know why the first episode that aired [The Man Trap] is so disliked, because my memory of it was of just being fascinated. Science fiction … on TV was considered for children. And this was not for children. These were well-developed characters, real plots that you could get into, you could imagine their plight, Bones had a love interest. And there was this Vulcan, who was just a member of this rest of the crew. It was startling, and I was absolutely riveted from that very first day. I had my science fiction club where we would go and talk about it.

[Did your sci-fi group watch?]

We all watched it; we were all excited that something was coming out on TV. Everyone was married, had kids, it was hard to get away to meet, so we would get on the phone and one person would call another and they would call another and this phone chain would go around talking about the episode. I wouldn’t say it totally evolved into a Star Trek fanclub, but pretty close, and we were all fascinated by The Vulcan, by the fact that there was this character that was an alien but serving with a human crew. It almost turned into a Vulcan appreciation sci-fi group, and speculating about what would an alien species be like, working with humans, is what caught our attention.

And by the second year, one member got a color TV and — oh it was a very big deal. In the beginning, we didn’t know that the crew had different colored shirts, or that shirts were related to what job they had on the ship. I remember an early story I wrote where all their shirts were green.

So she had a color TV and we started all watching at her house. And there were a lot of machinations that had to happen because everyone had families, everyone had kids. So one week we’d start planning for the next week. Who’s going take care of the kids, we need a babysitter. We need to collect money to pay the babysitter, and what are we going to do with our husbands? And we didn’t have access to our own money. We couldn’t get money out of our bank accounts without our husbands’ permission, so I remember looking under cushions to get change so that we could send our husbands out to go bowling or something so we could watch and not be disturbed.

It was so exciting. And to see the episodes where Kirk says “She’s a crewman” and where Uhura is working in “Who Mourns for Adonis?” under her communications panel and the way Spock talks to her [“I can think no one better equipped to handle it, Miss Uhura.”]. I can’t tell you. We were just electrified, because that was not the world we were living in, and that was the world we wanted to live in.

James Doohan, 1976 (source)

[Nichelle Nichols, Gene Roddenberry, and DC Fontana]

Trek on…