Classic Star Trek

     Okay, it was September of 1966. I do not recall the exact date, although I used to know it for trivia quizzes and because people expected me to know it – and I could look it up real quick on google right now to include it here, but I'll just come right out and say that I do not offhand know the exact date. I was turning 13 that month, and I was in eighth grade. It was a Thursday night on NBC – channel 2 in our neck of the woods. Star Trek began! I was an immediate fan!

     The first aired episode was The Man Trap – and a red-shirt from the Enterprise was the salt monster's first victim – the actor in the red shirt was someone I recognized from Guiding Light (my second all time favorite show!) - on Guiding Light that same actor played Roger Thorpe – so good-looking, usually up to no good, and involved with women he should not have been – and there he was on prime time – the first person killed on Star Trek!

     Even after all these years I can't tell you a well thought-out reason why I have always loved Star Trek. I've soul searched about it many times, and all I come up with is that I liked the characters and the dialogue and the futuristic setting which gave me hope that humans will still be around in 200 years.

     There are so many Star Trek stories I could tell. My Mom's favorite Star Trek anecdote was that at the end of each episode they would show scenes for the next week. I did not want to see anything ahead of time – I wanted it all fresh for me when the episode aired. So I would run upstairs to my bedroom to get as far away from the tv, which was in the living room, as I could - not see it, not hear it. The rest of the family would tease me about this – laughing as I ran up the stairs.

     When the original series was cancelled after three seasons, it began running in syndication, and I would watch it in the afternoons after school – I had seen all the episodes so many times that I knew dialogue, and scoffed at much of the silly stuff and talked passionately about the plotlines that I did take to heart. One of my recurring dreams in the early seventies was that I was watching an episode of Star Trek that I had never seen before. That dream never came true, but the subsequent movies and spin-off television shows came close, and have been mostly satisfying these past 49 years.

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