Did you ever get to meet any of the original TOS cast at any convention? Would love to hear stories if you have them!
Yes, I met all the original cast except Bill.
Oh goodness, I have so many stories it’s hard to know what to say here. But I get this question a lot, so I need to just start writing down memories as they come to me or I will never get a post out about this.
Jimmy Doohan (Scotty) gave the best bear hugs in the world. He was not just a cast member but a real Star Trek fan himself. He loved the show, he loved Scotty, he loved the fans. He was a regular con fixture in the ‘70s, and you must remember that back then there were lots of conventions that had maybe 70 or 80 people in attendance. He didn’t care about audience size ; if you invited him, and he was able to come, he came.
Back then everything happened in one hotel. The con would take over the ballroom and a couple of side rooms, and there was always a welcome suite that acted as organization central. The actors stayed in the same hotel as the guests. It was mostly very amateurish, just a handful of dedicated fans getting a smallish group of people together. Jimmy, George Takei (Sulu), De Kelley (Bones), and Walter Koenig (Chekov), could all be counted on to stick around and be pretty accessible all weekend.
George would always make an announcement that if anyone wanted to go running with him, to meet him in the hotel lobby (or wherever) at a set time. Then a group would get together early in the morning and go for a run. He was a pretty hardcore runner, though, so I think most people who went couldn’t keep up with him.
De always brought his wife Carolyn (I can only think of one time I saw him without her, and he apologized all weekend that she couldn’t make it). They were the sweetest couple, really warm to the fans and, what was especially nice, warm to each other. It was obvious they were best friends. And they’d been married close to 30 years by the time they were coming to those early cons.
De took a warm interest in fan work and read a lot of fanzines. He sought out authors and artists and would give in-person feedback on your work, always very encouraging, but also quite thoughtful. You could tell he’d read your work and thought about it. He had an ever-increasing set of humorous poems that he wrote for the fans, and he would read these at conventions. Reading his poetry to us was such a set feature that regular con-goers would recite some of his older work in chorus with him. It was very interactive and fun, and he would get so tickled that people liked his poems. It was the most charming thing you can imagine to see him get so pleased at the audience’s response to his writing that he would do that bouncy thing on his toes.
Walter always seemed kind of serious to me, but he was a great conversationalist. He was extremely well-read and could be counted on as a great person talk books with.
Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) was the goddess she was then, is now and always shall be. She didn’t hang around the way most of the guys from the cast did, and anyway I was a little in awe of and shy with her, so I never took much opportunity to talk to her.
I did see Leonard at numerous conventions over the years, but he was a special case, because by the time cons really got going, he had become so popular that it was just not possible for him to hang out the way the others did. In earlier days I’d had a chance to interact with him through his fan club, but I’ll write another post about that.
Mark Leonard, the original Sarek, was an occasional guest. He seemed very laid-back and approachable. Soft-spoken. It was wonderful to see him laugh.
JImmy was the one cast member I spent considerable time with, though only ever in the context of a Star Trek gathering. We first met at the beginning of the 70s when I was on a committee trying to get Star Trek back on the air, and were just very friendly after that. My oldest child has very fond memories of him.
The last time I saw him was perhaps a week after The Search for Spock had hit the theaters, in the summer of ‘84. He and his wife Wende were in St. Louis for a convention, and a small group of us went to dinner and then for drinks until some small hour of the morning. He was extremely warm, exceedingly funny, a great raconteur, and some of my fondest memories of those convention days are of drinking with Jimmy (and usually Wende) and a small group of friends in the after hours.
He always claimed that the character Scotty was 99% Jimmy and 1% accent (or something along those lines). I can attest he had Scotty’s love of a good drink, but he was both funnier and more irascible than Scotty ever was, in my opinion.