‘Goodbye’ to an Original Star Trek Superfan, and ‘Thank You’ to Those Who Built Fandom
John Trimble, who organized the 1st "Save Star Trek" letter-writing campaign, dies at 87
Star Trek fans, in many ways, are a special lot: usually caring, intelligent, empathetic and nearly always eternally optimistic.
Star Trek fandom, by contrast, today looks much like any other modern fandom. It occupies virtual groups on various mainstream social media like Facebook and Reddit. And it shows up at comic-cons and related genre conventions across the country, and around the world.
It wasn't always like this.
Star Trek fans originally built our fandom from the ground, up. And it very much began as a labor of love.
Heck, as we mentioned here in just our last edition of Subspace Chatter, we owe it to these first fans that we have Star Trek to enjoy at all, because they’re the ones who saved the original series and convinced the network back for another season.
So it’s been with much sadness that we recently had to say “goodbye” to one of those first fans — and half of Star Trek’s very first power couple — John Trimble.
Trimble, who passed away recently at age 87, was — with wife Bjo — one of those who organized the letter-writing campaign that convinced NBC to renew classic Star Trek for a third season.
The Trimbles were already science fiction fans and first met Star Trek creator and executive producer Gene Roddenberry at the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland.
Bjo was organizing a fashion show at the con, and Roddenberry convinced her at the last minute to include some models wearing original Star Trek costumes before the series had even premiered.
In gratitude, Roddenberry invited the couple to lunch out in Hollywood. But more than lunch, the Trimbles would visit the classic Star Trek sets several times.
Such began a long, and loving, association with the franchise.
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The couple was on one of those trips when they learned that NBC planned to cancel the series after its second season due to low ratings.
Bjo and John knew that a show needed to last at least three seasons for syndication, and they talked it over in the car, on their ride home to Oakland, Calif.
They came up with a grassroots, letter-writing campaign, and — years before the advent of even copy machines — went to work on a hand-crank mimeograph.
It’s not actually known how many “Save Star Trek” letters the network actually received, but probably somewhere between the low end of 10,000 and the high estimate of 1 million.
Regardless, it worked, Star Trek came back for that fateful third, and final, season.
Of course, the Trimbles were correct and that third season was enough to propel Star Trek into that all-important syndication that allowed it to thrive enough for Roddenberry to bring it back — again and again — as Star Trek: The Animated Series, the original series movies, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. All of which paved the way for the entire franchise that exists today.
For the Trimbles — and many other of those early fans — the letter-writing campaign wasn’t an end, but only a beginning.
Bjo, in particular, would go on as a popular author, of one of the very first Star Trek reference books, Star Trek Concordance.
Their work — and the work of others — laid the foundations for Star Trek fandom.
This was the fandom of my own youth.
Long before social media — or even fan websites — fandom existed only through the endless cranking of those mimeographs which wound their ways through the US mail thanks to something called “self-addressed, stamped envelopes,” or SASEs.
This was a lot of work — a true labor of love — and it was coordinated by the dedicated folks at the Star Trek Welcommittee.
Running the Welcommittee was one of the first fans to get involved in the Trimbles’ original letter-writing campaign — and a truly sweet and lovely woman named Shirley Maiewski.
Shirley, who would come to be known affectionately as “Grandma Trek,” managed the Welcommittee as its chairperson, and — in a real way — was the beating heart of fandom for decades.
She lived with her husband in an old farmhouse in Western Massachusetts.
Also the place where I grew up and lived for much of my life, I was a young reporter for the daily newspaper in the region, and I was thrilled when I successfully pitched a feature article on Shirley for the paper’s weekend magazine back in the mid-’90s.
Getting paid to write about Star Trek was not only a thrill, but very much a welcome respite from the school board meetings and other such municipal minutiae that was my regular day job.
Not only did I spend a wonderful afternoon at Shirley’s home in Hatfield, but I was treated to an enthusiastic tour of the “Star Trek room” that housed her large and impressive collection of memorabilia.
She was every bit the kind “grandma” of her reputation.
More than that, one weekend I followed her to a convention in Boston where she was the fan guest and treated like both royalty and an old friend.
I will always remember actor Robin Curtis asking me to “be nice to” Shirley when I wrote my piece. I assured Saavik, herself, that I had no intention to do anything but treat her well.
Shirley passed away about a decade after I met her and now losing John Trimble, it seems like a good time to remember and pay tribute to these folks — many of whom are no longer with us.
And also to stop for a really heartfelt “thank you.”
Today, being a Star Trek fan is pretty easy. It’s all keystrokes, screentaps and fun cosplay.
But we would not have this to enjoy without all those early fans who came before, cranking the mimeographs, answering dozens and hundreds of pieces of mail — and perhaps most importantly — keeping hope and fandom alive when Star Trek needed it the most.
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