A Memory, Because of Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy at the Las Vegas Star Trek Convention 2011. Photo by Beth Madison, found on Wikimedia Commons.
Leonard Nimoy at the Las Vegas Star Trek Convention 2011. Photo by Beth Madison, via Wikimedia Commons.

I haven’t blogged on the usual themes in a while, but I didn’t want to save this one for Monday.

With lots of tributes going around the Internet on the day of his death, I just watched a video of Leonard Nimoy in which he explains where the Vulcan hand salute came from. Here is the video.

Growing up, I watched a lot of TV shows that I don’t remember. I remember which shows, but none of the episode content.

One that stands out is Star Trek which I used to watch with my dad. I had to watch the whole series as an adult to remember any of the episodes, but I know I watched them as a kid.

And then came college, when Star Trek: The Next Generation came out. Well, it actually started when I was 14, but I didn’t watch it until college. At the time, it was playing on several stations, several times per day. While flipping channels, I saw something just before a commercial break and I had to know what happened next. I was immediately hooked.

I didn’t watch sooner because Dad was loyal to the original show. He insisted that Kirk was the only Captain of the Enterprise. (Psst, hey Dad, what about Pike?)

It turns out, however, that we must have watched the pilot, at the very least. As the series finale approached, I had to rent the pilot to be sure I had seen it, as I knew they were closely related. And I remembered that the station was actually an alien, so I had obviously seen it before.

Back in those days, there were lots of smaller Star Trek conventions. A few ran in South Florida and for a few years, I went to all of them that were within a few hours’ driving distance.

At the time, I had a Star Trek themed bumper sticker. I remember it was green and said “My Other Vehicle is a Federation Starship”. I was driving south to Fort Lauderdale for one of the conventions and I noticed another car on the highway with a Star Trek bumper sticker. I passed the car, the car passed me, back and forth a couple of times.

We both pulled off at the same exit, as I expected, and pulled up next to each other at the traffic light. We looked at each other and I smiled and waved.

The guy in the other car waved with a Vulcan salute.

Whoops. I quickly changed finger position before the light turned green.

And I’m pretty the main actor at that conference was Tim Russ who played Tuvok, the Vulcan on Voyager. (Yes, I liked Voyager too.)

One of my favorite tweets today has a genealogy twist to it.

Leonard Nimoy’s Twitter account is retweeting many messages sent out today, but his final tweet…

Thank you Leonard Nimoy for the memories. Live Long and Prosper.

One thought on “A Memory, Because of Leonard Nimoy”

  1. Very sweet tribute, Banai. I too grew up on original Star Trek, mostly because of my father. I remember sitting in the movie theater with my mother, watching Spock die in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, both of us sobbing. To this day, I cry every time I see that scene. It will be worse now, I’m sure.

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