Periodically, I return to obsessions I thought I left far in
my past. I have been a fan of Star Trek since soon after the original
series went off the air and into syndication. Born at the end of 1961, I think
I was just barely too young to get caught up in it during the original airings,
which began in September 1966 and ended in June 1969. I would therefore have
been four years old when it debuted and seven when it went off. Moreover, my obsession
with space really began with the Apollo 11 moon landing on 20 July 1969 –
ironically within weeks of Star Trek being cancelled. Just as I do
remember flashes of earlier manned space missions (most clearly, Christmas Eve
1968, popping firecrackers with my older cousins outside my grandmother’s
house, my uncle commenting that there were astronauts circling the moon right
then – Apollo 8), so do I recall flashes of earlier Star Trek episodes
on TV, but not clearly enough to know what episodes they might have been.
