A Star Trek Convention

     It was shortly after Classic Star Trek left the original run airwaves that talks of new episodes and possible movies began. And without much discussion at all, the conventions just sprang up. Star Trek conventions began, and I think they are still going on. In 1976, there was a Star Trek convention in Toronto! And I went – with some of my friends from college and my brother Eric. It was held at the Royal York Hotel – which was very nice.

     As I recall, the convention took place on the whole second floor which was just meeting/ball rooms. Different Star Trek stars took turns in one room speaking to fans and often answering questions. James Doohan (Scottie), George Takei (Sulu), Nichelle Nicolls (Uhura), Grace Lee Whitney (Yeoman Janice Rand), and Mark Lenard (Spock's Father Sarek, and also a Romulan commander) - it was so exciting to see the real stars in person!      Afterward, there was a table in another room where the stars signed autographs – everyone was personable and had very positive attitudes toward their parts in the Star Trek phenomenon – 10 years after it had begun! James Doohan gave the most memorable appearance, I thought, at the convention. He wanted to touch everyone in the audience! So he walked through the aisles, and as we reached out our hands, he managed to touch us all – along with eye contact! I think the world of all of the performers who were at the convention – but it was Scottie who touched me!

     In the other rooms were other activities – there was one where science fiction movies were playing – I tried to watch 2001:Space Odyssey, but fell asleep; I'm fairly sure I saw Logan's Run – but I was not at the convention to watch sci-fi flicks, I was there to submerge myself in Star Trek. There were costumes and parades, and a trivia contest. The costumes and parades were not my thing either, but I was upset that I missed the question on the trivia test about which emotion did the emotionless Mr. Spock convey the most often? I put down fascination because it seemed like at least once an episode Spock was expected to raise one eyebrow and say “fascinating” - but the people in charge of the trivia contest said the answer was “pride” - I could have quibbled – but I would not have won the trivia contest anyway because knowing the numbers on the outside hull of the Enterprise or having star-dates for various episodes tucked away in my memory were not the things that attracted me to Star Trek or kept me enthralled with it for so many years – and so those trivia questions I would have missed on the test anyway.

     And of course, in one room there were tables and tables of Star Trek memorabilia that we could buy. This was before videotapes and dvds and tv channels that can bring up any episode on demand. So what to buy that would help me remember the show when the syndication finally stopped running (which still does not seem likely)? I purchased a few pictures that were scenes from various episodes – and I still have some of them – but they are yellowed, and anything can be brought up on the internet today in better colors than the original – I did not get them autographed, and should have.

But that was my Star Trek Convention experience – and I am glad to be able to say that I did it at least once!

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The By Gosh Man

      As we all know, William Shatner was Captain Kirk on the classic Star Trek series. There are so many things Shatner is known for – TJ Hooker, Rescue 911, Boston Legal – Denny Crane, the PriceLine commercials. But not many folks know about the commercials he did back in the sixties. Shatner is a Canadian. Buffalo is close to the Canadian border, so we would get a lot of the Canadian commercials on our channels – sometimes we could even pick up some Canadian stations – Sesame Street in French was always entertaining! Well, Canada had a thing about using only Canadians in their commercials, so it was not too surprising that they hired William Shatner to plug some products – he was rather famous, thanks to Captain Kirk.

     There was a commercial Shatner did for a Canadian grocery store chain called Loblaws. We had Loblaws in the States also. The commercial would come on, Shatner would talk about how wonderful the store was, and then he would mention the specials for that week, and finally he would finish up by saying, “Loblaws, where more than the price is right! But by Gosh, The price is right!”

      Star Trek was on Thursday nights. That first season, 1966, on Thanksgiving, I asked to be excused from my Grandparents' Thanksgiving table (after dinner) so I could go downstairs, the lower unit of the duplex, where my Uncle and Aunt lived – to watch Star Trek. I'm not sure if my brothers or two cousins joined me, but after a while, my Uncle John, who lived there, came down from the Thanksgiving dinner and promptly gave me his opinion about Star Trek and William Shatner. He said he used to watch Shatner on a television show in the fifties called Studio One the Defender. Uncle John said Shatner was a very fine actor on that show. But now he was doing this silly stuff. Can you imagine? My Uncle John called Star Trek silly!

     And then he called William Shatner the By Gosh Man! Such a fine actor lowering himself to doing commercials and performing such by gosh dialogue was silly too! Captain Kirk was the By Gosh Man!

     Over the years, I've tried to forget the silly in my Uncle John's opinion and remember the part about his thinking Shatner was a fine actor. I've never seen the Studio One Defender show, but I do like to recommend the movie The 10^th Level to others. I think the acting in it is Shatner's finest. However, when I think back on that first Thanksgiving and the two that followed – sitting in Uncle John's living room watching Star Trek – I remember vividly the commercials and the By Gosh Man.

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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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51 Dash Street

     Some of my oldest recollections are of spending days and nights with my grandparents in South Buffalo. They lived upstairs in a duplex – 51 Dash Street – a man named Charlie lived downstairs and owned the place. I always had to be quiet because Charlie worked nights and needed to sleep during the day. (Mom told me just a few years ago that who knows when Charlie worked or slept? It was most likely a fabrication told by my Grandmother to keep her children quiet and to keep them from ever having friends over – and it kept the grandchildren quiet too!)

    When I stayed over, I spent the nights in my Mom's old room. (Mom's old dresser drawers were, in my youth, filled with handkerchiefs and scarves and the smell of moth balls – I could spend hours playing with the accessories – I did not play with the moth balls). Sometimes I was sick and perhaps I was sent to my grandparents' so as not to get my little brother sick too, or maybe Mom just needed a break from tending to two little ones at home (Eric had not been born yet.) or maybe it was a treat for my grandmother to have me stay?

     I remember those mornings in South Buffalo – especially the summer mornings – the air from the open windows had an odor of what I now know was the pollution from all the Lackawanna steel mills; and the hum of traffic was so different from the sounds of North Boston, but not annoyingly so. Granny would make me a fried egg for breakfast. Fried eggs today make me think of Granny and how special she made me feel by frying an egg just for me – it had lots of salt and pepper on it, and the inside was a little runny – enough for the accompanying toast to lap up!

      Grandpa was still working back then, I think at Trico – the windshield wiper place, as a foreman. So days would be spent just with Granny. She had a desk with a rotary phone on it – when she talked on the phone, I would stand on another chair, lean over the desk and press the button on the phone that would hang up the call! I would giggle, and Granny would jiggle the button a couple of times and usually salvage the call.

     If we were going out, Granny would wash her face with Dove soap and then put on some make-up. Sometimes we would walk to the pharmacy which had stairs up to another half-floor – that was cool. And sometimes we got on the city bus and rode downtown. I don't remember the stores we went in or what she bought, but I do remember it was neat on the bus! I was out with my grandmother doing grown-up stuff, and the people-watching was so much fun!

     Except that complete strangers would smile at me.

     Why would someone who did not even know me smile at me? Smiling meant they liked me, but they couldn't have liked me if they didn't even know me, and if they did know me they wouldn't like me – so either way, I shouldn't have been getting any smiles. I did not return their smiles. And with Granny beside me, I felt safe.

     We were always back to Granny's in plenty of time to get dinner fixed and ready before Grandpa got home from work. Today the smell of sauteing celery always takes me right back to 51 Dash Street, and I can see perfectly the late afternoon sun coming through the window in the living room where I played while Granny cooked in the kitchen.

19 20150119   51 Dash Street

Automatic Washer

     In early childhood, I recall being so small and wishing I was one of the big kids. I would stare out the kitchen window on school mornings and see the boys and girls waiting for the bus. They were so cool! When would I be big enough to be one of them? In the winter the kids would stand there, and back then the school rules were that the girls had to wear dresses – and it would be so cold waiting for the bus, the girls would squat down to keep their legs warm! I couldn't wait to be one of those girls. (We did wear boots and occasionally leggings to school – so the legs were a little warmer at the bus stop).

     Mom used to tell the story of the time when I was about four years old. Dad had built a room onto the house that extended from the kitchen and connected with the garage that Dad also built.

back room and garage that Dad built

We called this extension the back room – the washer and dryer were there, and the stairs to the basement which were moved from their original location in the kitchen were there too.

     Next to the washer and dryer were a little desk and an easel with a chalkboard – a play area for me and my brothers. Mom said one day she went to the back room to do some laundry, and she saw me writing on the chalkboard. With my left hand I wrote the word Automatic, and then I moved the chalk to my right hand and wrote Washer. Mom was stunned with my letter writing and my seeming ambidexterity and my desire to learn and was sorry she had not taught me more herself. The philosophy at the time, according to Mom, was that parents were not supposed to get in the way of the teachers.

     The summer before my daughter Sarah went to kindergarten, I had enrolled her in a day care that not only believed in arts and crafts and playtime, but also did phonics and spelling. I would have loved the academic part of all that as a four year old! However, Sarah was so mad at me – she was already reading at home and at the day care, but she hated spelling! Why did she have to have spelling tests before she even had kindergarten! Why couldn't she just play? But when Sarah's daughter was four, just last year, Ms V wanted to spend her summer playing, but also learning things – she was hungry for it! She reminded me of someone who might want to write automatic washer on an easel in the laundry room.

     Today, I am not really particularly ambidextrous – I can only do a few things with my left hand, and from all the facebook quizzes – experts that they are, I'm very much left-brained, meaning right-handed. Thank goodness I eventually learned to write without having to change hands!

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Tar Bubbles and Stone Throwing

     The surface of the road of Valley Circle Lane outside our house was always interesting to me as a toddler and little kid. In the summer there were tar bubbles! They were so much fun to pop! I remember once being called into the house – probably for lunch or dinner, and I wanted to save some tar bubbles to play with later – so I put a few into the pocket of my lime green shorts!

      And then I forgot all about them. Mom found the tar on laundry day and I think this was one of those common sense moments – she just did not comprehend at all my reasoning for putting tar into my pocket!

     In the winter, the road would get a layer of ice on it that we kids could actually skate on. It seems weird to recall now that I once had ice skates! It was so cold those winters, and it seemed that the snow was much deeper back then – the piles of snow that Dad would make while shoveling out the driveway, I swear the drifts were as tall as he was!

     And other times of the year, still when I was of pre-school age, if afternoons got boring enough, I would throw stones at Becky, the girl who lived across the street on the other corner of Valley Circle Lane and Heinrich Road. And she would throw stones back at me – we weren't really trying to hit each other; we were just throwing!

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Sheba

     One of my mother's favorite stories from when I was very little was the one about my second birthday. Different relatives had stopped by to give me presents for my birthday.

My Uncle Bernie and my Aunt Norma

My Dad's sister, Norma, was my godmother, and Dad's brother, Bernie, was my godfather.
I remember them always acknowledging my birthday over the years. Uncle Bernie even called me once on August 31^st to wish me 'happy birthday'; I said 'thank you' and then reminded him that my birthday is actually September 30^th – he laughed and said he was close – it was the last day of some month! 

     Anyway, on my second birthday, my Dad's brother, Basil, stopped by with a package for me. I opened the box and inside was a toy - a stuffed dog!  It was supposed to be Tramp from the Lady and the Tramp Disney movie which had just come out. But I had not seen the movie or related the stuffed dog to any commercials I might have seen for the movie. It was a dog from my Uncle Basil, and Uncle Basil had a cocker spaniel who was beautiful, and her name was Sheba – so I called my new stuffed dog Sheba. And Sheba stayed on my bed from then until I moved away from home twenty years later.

     Of course, Mom's version of this story was just a little different. She said that after I pulled the dog out of the box, I set the dog aside and spent the afternoon playing with the box – just like all those cat videos you see on facebook these days. Well, Mom got a lot of laughs out of that story over the years.

     But truth be told, that box is long gone, and Sheba is still here - in my closet to these days. Her squeaker no longer works, and her coat is very shabby. However, she still has that same smiley expression on her face. It would not hurt her feelings if I got rid of her, but the sight of her reminds me of home and Uncle Basil and that I once was little enough to play inside a birthday box.

Sheba's expression has never changed

16 20150116    Sheba