by Edward Gross
What initially excited me was all the pictures, movies, and TV clips being shown. We now take four thousand cable channels and the Internet for granted.
In 1974, the party moved to the Americana Hotel, with the crowd swelling to over fifteen thousand, with an additional six thousand reportedly being turned away. The 1975 convention, back at the Commodore, limited registration to six thousand, which was the case in 1976 as well. Also in 1975, one of the Committee members, Al Schuster, splintered off and launched his own competing convention, which was also successful.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
The fact that the conventions grew bigger and bigger was shocking. We had about fifteen people working on the Committee, of whom only five actually did most of the work. That’s the way that goes—we had help from a friend who had access to a real computer, so we were able to computerize our mailing list long before anybody besides big companies ever dreamed of that, and we sent out a progress report, which is what the Worldcons do, saying, “Hey, look at this. We’ve invited this person to come, and he says he’s going to come.” We didn’t say how much we had to pay him. The first convention was such a success, in terms of reaching people, that when we started to do the second one, we got a lot of people coming back. So it was like you had three weeks off and then you started all over again for the following year’s convention.
DAVID LANGHAUS
The important thing for me was Gene Roddenberry said how happy he was to see us and how this may help to bring the show back. At the time, I felt he was just saying what we wanted to hear, but it was still great. Later, I went to the art auction and then the room where they sold fan memorabilia. I remember being unhappy that I couldn’t buy all the things I wanted, but I was able to get an original Enterprise engineering manual, a bust of Spock, and a Star Trek T-shirt, which I still have. The highlight of the convention was the original pilot and very first Star Trek blooper reel. Over the weekend, I had lots of discussions with other fans about how excited we were and how glad we were that we came. I was so excited to see Bill Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, and Nichelle Nichols in person. I remember in the later conventions how excited we all were when told about the animated Star Trek show and, later, the first movie.
But Star Trek conventions were not limited to New York at the time, with Bjo and John Trimble running Equicon in Los Angeles, which went from a sci-fi, fantasy, and film convention in 1971 to a Trek convention in 1973. Conventions would, of course, start spreading to other states as well and, later, other countries.
BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE
It started with a conversation at San Diego Comic-Con and continued at the 1972 Westercon (the West Coast Science Fantasy Convention). “Gee, wouldn’t it be nifty to have a large Star Trek con in California like the guys throw in New York?” So the idea grew into a reality with author William Tuning forming a committee, including us, to run the first Equicon in 1973. The name came from the time of the year, the vernal equinox (Easter weekend), hence, Equicon.
The first con was so large the fire marshal closed down registration. The local newspapers wrote up the convention as having “ten thousand screaming Trekkies”; the fire marshal said we had eight thousand people, about three thousand more than the hotel could handle.
The Equicons were a huge success for the attendees; in those early years, most of the Star Trek stars were not “audience-shy,” nor did they charge large fees as they did in later years. Most of them attended an Equicon or two. There were also many activities to keep everyone busy. The first Equicon gave two thousand dollars to the Sophia Salvin school for handicapped children, helping to start the tradition of Star Trek fans supporting worthy causes.
SUSAN SACKETT (assistant to Gene Roddenberry)
They were fan-run. Bjo always had an interest in fandom, so she had been to many of them and then she decided to run this thing which was called Equicon. I was put on the public-relations committee, and I had to contact a number of people. Then I was there at the reception table when people checked in for their talks. It was all done by volunteers; no one got paid. They barely managed to cover expenses. I was at the table when Gene arrived, and I looked up, and he had the blooper reel with him, and I said, “Follow me,” although I had no idea where it had to go. When I applied for a job with him, he did not remember that encounter at all, which was probably a good thing or I might not have gotten the job.
GERALD ISENBERG (producer, Star Trek: Planet of the Titans)
The conventions were really bizarre. I went to one with Gene and his wife, and I brought my kid with me, and I had become a judge for the costume contest. So we had Scotty on one side and I don’t remember who was on the other side, and this girl comes up with this weird costume and she was right in front of my face. She lifts up her skirt and flashes her crotch at me. My mouth dropped open and I turned to Scotty and I said, “Did you see that?” And he said that it happens all the time.
Like its East Coast counterpart, Equicon ran until 1976 and drew many thousands of fans who gathered to celebrate the show and listen to cast and crew speak. And although other conventions would spring up to replace them, it wouldn’t be long before these conventions would move away from being fan-run to being for-profit, licensed by Paramount to organizations such as Creation Entertainment, whose long association with Star Trek continues to this day.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
Things reached a point where we had to stop. First of all, it got expensive to mount these conventions, because they were big, which meant that we needed a major venue of some kind, usually at a hotel because people wanted to come in and stay for the weekend. We were there when nobody else was. The people on the show, the actors in particular, had a soft spot for us, because if it wasn’t for us there wouldn’t have been the other conventions for them to go to. And we did pay the guests toward the end, but nothing like the money they were getting from other conventions.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
The attitude from the guests about getting paid changed fairly quickly. They would say, “I’m giving you my time where I could be off someplace else getting paid.” We were distressed by this, but it’s quite true: there’s only so much time an actor has and this is his livelihood. He has to earn money while he can. Of course, some people were more difficult to deal with than others, but we managed.
BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE
Equicons were true fan-run conventions, not a commercial enterprise, so in spite of what some cynics say, we never made any profit. With luck, we made just enough from one convention to organize another Equicon for next year. We still meet fans who fondly remember those cons, some of whom met their spouses there, many of whom made film-industry contacts that led to entertainment-world careers.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
The conventions were not about being a business, though there were some people who thought it could be a business. There were certainly enough people attending, but things were becoming prohibitively expensive. But the bottom line is that—Al Schuster notwithstanding—no one who worked on the Committee ever did it for money. I figured out in the last year that if I’d gotten paid, I would have been paid the rate of about ten cents an hour for the time I put in. After five years, when we split up what was left, it came down to about eleven hundred dollars a person, because the money we brought in went right back into the convention. We clearly didn’t do it for the money.
DAVID GERROLD
I knew it was time for me to stop going to conventions when I showed up at one and there were thirty people selling Tribbles. You say to them, “You don’t have the right,” and they’d say, “Fuck you, you made enough money off Star Trek. Now it’s my turn.” This was the shift. In ’72 or ’73, you’d meet the fans, and they were grateful for the opportunity to meet the people who worked on Star Trek. By ’75 or ’76, the attitude was “We own Star Trek now. The studio doesn’t care. We do.”
The impact of these early conventions on the history of Star Trek cannot be underestimated, pr
imarily because it united fans around the country, serving notice to the world that the series and its fans weren’t going anywhere; that this was no flash in the pan.
Playing key roles in uniting the fandom were Jacqueline Lichtenberg, who created the Star Trek Welcommittee (which would eventually lead her along with Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston to write the 1975 book Star Trek Lives!); and David Gerrold’s 1973 nonfiction book The World of Star Trek.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG
I grew up in a professional news-business family. I learned to spot a news story before sixth grade. When I first heard Devra Langsham’s call for stories for the Spockanalia one-shot, I identified the news story that Trek had become. But newspapers just weren’t covering it. News magazines? Nope. Radio? Nope. TV news? No way. “What’s the matter with these people?” Well, if they wouldn’t, I would.
So I set out to write a short article and tried to peddle it to my local newspaper and put out a few letters. There were more zines and subscribers and readers and contributors than I thought, and the number kept growing as I tried to count them. There were people I actually didn’t know personally. Wow. That’s news!
So I put out a questionnaire and asked all the zine publishers to publish it. That’s how fandom worked before Twitter and Facebook. That’s when I realized that this was a book, not a newspaper article. To get all the zines, I put out a round-robin letter and asked each zine publisher to sign it with name and address and to pass it on to another zine publisher. Eventually, there were hundreds of zine publishers on my list when it got back to me. Trying to be sure that everyone knew everyone, I published the Directory of Fanzines. But I still needed the same information for a nonfiction book. In the end I got back enough questionnaires to fill a thirty-gallon garbage can, where I stored them for years until I had to throw them away.
It took five years to write that book. It took taking on two coauthors to get the job done. Once I had the contract, I went sort of white-faced as I realized the sheer volume of incoming mail, all wanting that Directory of Fanzines. So at a Trek con in New York, I called a meeting in my room and appointed one of the volunteers to head a Star Trek Welcommittee to introduce people to each other the way that the National Fantasy Fan Federation Welcommittee had welcomed me to science-fiction fandom when I was in seventh grade. I put a POB number in the back of Star Trek Lives! as the direct contact to the Star Trek Welcommittee, and the hundreds of volunteers answering thousands of pieces of mail kept the Directory of Fanzines current for decades. The Welcommittee grew as Star Trek Lives! went through eight printings and attracted new people into what was the prototype organized structure.
DAVID GERROLD
The first convention had been the only hint that something was happening. Then they were going to do one in ’73, which I went to, and six thousand people showed up. The following month in Los Angeles, people showed up there, too. That was the first real hint that this thing was not dead. But the studio said, “Three thousand people is no big thing.” You really needed to demonstrate a continuing phenomenon, which had not been demonstrated at that time. So my book was out there, and here were all these fans who did not know that other fans existed. But every fan who got the book got a list of fan clubs and things like that, and every fan found out about other fans. We kept the fan club and convention list updated, so that by the time the conventions started to peter out, we noticed that an incredible network of fans had been created. I don’t take credit for all of it, but I claim credit for triggering a large part of it, because I also helped the other conventions build up their lists. Once the process was initiated, it became a chain reaction, and toward the end of ’74 or ’75, we began to notice that the phenomenon had developed into something really big.
If attending a Star Trek convention and trolling the dealers room for Star Trek swag was not enough, fans could walk down East 53rd Street in New York to The Federation Trading Post, managed by Ron Barlow and Doug Drexler. A press release announced the New York store (once located at 210 East 53rd Street in Manhattan, now a towering office building): “The Federation Trading Post, the only retail store ever devoted to a television series, will open its New York branch … [It] will feature over three hundred different items from the highly popular science-fiction series Star Trek. In addition to the large assortment of unusual Star Trek posters, buttons, bumper stickers, magazines, books, model kits, etc., the avid Star Trek fan can lay claim to his own personal ‘Tribble,’ don a pair of pointed Vulcan (Spock) ears, dress up in an authentic Starfleet uniform complete with hand phaser, or just absorb the ‘sounds of Star Trek’ from the unique sound system running constantly.”
Ron Barlow related to All About Star Trek Fan Clubs magazine at the time, “Everyone that comes into the store realizes that the store is not just set up to make money, but it’s set up to encourage fandom. It’s set up to give them whatever hope they have in the show. We have a bulletin board which is a public-access board for any Star Trek fan to use. From time to time, we put up newspaper clippings, information that we’ve come up with for them to read. It saves us the time of explaining it, and all of the personnel working at the store are hard-core Star Trek fans, so if we don’t have the information, chances are very few people would.”
DOUG DREXLER (CG supervisor, Defiance)
Ron Barlow and I were huge Star Trek geeks, and I had a big collection of stuff. We used to print our own slides, which came from our personal collections. We started a museum in the back room and we put all kinds of props back there. We found a couple of guys in New Jersey who had a six-foot Klingon ship they made that was beautiful. We had a model of the bridge.
The thing is that for the first month and a half there was no business; it was dead. And we were getting worried. The local merchants were laughing at us, and I’m not kidding. There was one day when I was walking back to the place, and one of the merchants made a snide remark and giggled. I got in his face. I can’t believe I did that, because I’m not that kind of guy. “It’s Star Trek. You’re not just insulting me, you’re insulting Star Trek!” We managed to save enough money so that we could buy a thirty-second commercial on WPIX during Star Trek or Outer Limits. It was a thirty-second slide of Spock and us proclaiming, “It’s the only Star Trek store in the galaxy,” blah, blah, blah. That ran on TV and the next day there was a line around the block, and it stayed there for months and months. We would let in two people and let out two people.
When there would be a convention, we would take fanzines on consignment—we had a wall of fanzines. We had posters printed and slides made. The uniforms on Saturday Night Live that John Belushi and the others wore in a skit, those were from us. We became the center of Star Trek in New York. If someone had DeForest Kelley on a show, they would send over a PA and say, “We need props,” and we would loan them to them. But we’d get to go and meet these people.
DAREN DOCHTERMAN (conceptual artist)
None of the other kids in school knew about Star Trek or talked about it, so I thought I was the only one who liked it. Then when I found out about The Federation Trading Post in New York in 1976 or early ’77, my dad took me there one time saying, “There’s a place I think I should take you to that I think you might like.” I went in there and my head exploded. It was a store that was only Star Trek, and I’d never seen anything like that. I’d seen a couple of action figures in the Two Guys store when Mego put out the Star Trek action figures, and I had all of those, of course. But this was a whole world, and everyone in the store loved Star Trek. It was just an amazing thing to realize I wasn’t alone; there was this thing that I thought was all mine that I found out a lot of people loved. It’s a wonderful day when you learn that you’re a part of something bigger.
DOUG DREXLER
There was one night I’ll never forget. It was one of those steamy, rainy nights in New York and I ran out to get a cup of coffee. When I came back, my glasses were fogged over and I couldn’t see anything. My friend Mitch was working behind the coun
ter and says, “Doug, you should come over here, there’s someone that I think you should meet.” I walk over and I’m looking into somebody’s chest. I look up through my foggy glasses—and it’s Gene Roddenberry. He had heard about the store and wanted to come by and see it. He was really nice. He said, “The important thing is that you guys are doing a good job. You take care of everybody and you’re treating it well.” He was happy about the store.
The success of The Federation Trading Post led Doug Drexler—along with Allan Asherman and Geoffrey Mandel—to Paradise Press to produce The Star Trek Giant Poster Book, a magazine that totaled eight pages and featured articles on various Star Trek–related subjects. When unfolded, the magazine would become a 34-inch by 22.5-inch poster.
Additional merchandise that helped play a significant role in keeping the show alive in the minds of the public were action figures from the Mego Corporation; a series of eight Power Records albums featuring scripted audio adventures (and accompanying comic books) that served as a perfect entry point for children and featured new Star Trek stories to delight older fans; the publication of Susan Sackett’s 1977 book Letters to Star Trek, which is an intriguing look at the kind of exchanges taking place between fans and Gene Roddenberry; Bantam’s official publication of Bjo Trimble’s previously self-published Star Trek Concordance with its iconic episode cover wheel; the creation of one of the most famous sci-fi media magazines ever, Starlog; and the Columbia Records LP Inside Star Trek, featuring Gene Roddenberry and several cast members, which was the brainchild of Ed Naha, at the time the A&R rep on Bruce Springesteen’s classic Born to Run album, who would later go on to write The Science Fictionary as well as numerous films and television shows.
