Eugene "Gene" Wesley Roddenberry Sr. (August 19, 1921 – October 24, 1991) was an American television screenwriter and producer who created the science fiction series and fictional universe Star Trek. Born in El Paso, Texas, Roddenberry grew up in Los Angeles, where his father was a police officer. Roddenberry flew 89 combat missions in the Army Air Forces during World War II and worked as a commercial pilot after the war. Later, he joined the Los Angeles Police Department and began to write for television.
As a freelance writer, Roddenberry wrote scripts for Highway Patrol, Have Gun – Will Travel, and other series, before creating and producing his own television series, The Lieutenant. In 1964, Roddenberry created the original Star Trek series, which premiered in 1966 and ran for three seasons. He then worked on projects including a string of failed television pilots. The syndication of Star Trek led to its growing popularity, resulting in the Star Trek feature films, which Roddenberry continued to produce and consult on. In 1987, the sequel series Star Trek: The Next Generation began airing on television in first-run syndication; Roddenberry was involved in the initial development but took a less active role after the first season due to ill health. He consulted on the series until his death in 1991.
In 1985, Roddenberry became the first TV writer with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He was later inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Years after his death, Roddenberry was one of the first humans to have their ashes carried into earth orbit. (Upon reentry, the ashes were lost into the Pacific Ocean.) Star Trek has inspired films, books, comic books, video games and fan films set in the Star Trek universe.
Eugene Wesley Roddenberry Sr. was born on August 19, 1921, in his parents' rented home in El Paso, Texas, the first child of Eugene Edward Roddenberry and Caroline "Glen" (née Golemon) Roddenberry. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1923 after Gene's father passed the civil service test and was given a police commission there. During his childhood, Roddenberry was interested in reading, especially pulp magazines, and was a fan of stories such as John Carter of Mars, Tarzan, and the Skylark series by E. E. Smith.
After completing high school in 1939 at Franklin High School in Highland Park, Los Angeles, Roddenberry majored in police science at Los Angeles City College, where he began dating Eileen-Anita Rexroat and became interested in aeronautical engineering. He obtained a pilot's license through the United States Army Air Corps-sponsored Civilian Pilot Training Program. He enlisted with the USAAC on December 18, 1941 and married Eileen on June 13, 1942. He completed training on August 5, 1942, and was then commissioned as a second lieutenant.
He was posted to Bellows Field, Oahu, to join the 394th Bomb Squadron, 5th Bombardment Group, of the Thirteenth Air Force, which flew the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. On November 15, 1942, the unit flew to Viti Levu in Fiji, where they patrolled the seas surrounding the island. A short time later Roddenberry and his unit was assigned to Espiritu Santo. During this time, Roddenberry initially served as a B-17 copilot and then as a first pilot.
On August 2, 1943, Roddenberry was piloting B-17E-BO number 41-2463, nicknamed "Yankee Doodle," when the plane had a malfunction during takeoff. He attempted to abort the takeoff but the B-17 was unable to stop and overran the runway by 500 feet (150 m) and crashed into trees, crushing the nose and starting a fire as well as killing two men: bombardier Sgt. John P. Kruger and navigator Lt. Talbert H. Woolam. The official report absolved Roddenberry of any responsibility. Roddenberry spent the remainder of his military career in the United States and flew all over the country as a plane crash investigator. He was involved in a second plane crash, this time as a passenger. In all, Roddenberry flew 89 combat missions and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal.
In 1945, Roddenberry began flying for Pan American World Airways, including routes from New York to Johannesburg or Calcutta, the two longest Pan Am routes at the time. Listed as a resident of River Edge, New Jersey, he experienced his third crash while on the Clipper Eclipse on June 18, 1947. The plane came down in the Syrian Desert, and Roddenberry, who took control as the ranking flight officer, suffered two broken ribs but was able to drag injured passengers out of the burning plane and led the group to get help. Fourteen (or fifteen) people died in the crash; eleven passengers required hospital treatment (including Bishnu Charan Ghosh), and eight were unharmed. Roddenberry resigned from Pan Am on May 15, 1948, and decided to pursue his dream of writing, particularly for the new medium of television.
Roddenberry applied for a position with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) on January 10, 1949, and spent his first sixteen months in the traffic division before being transferred to the newspaper unit. That became the Public Information Division, and Roddenberry became the speechwriter for the chief of the LAPD. In this position, he also became the LAPD liaison to the very popular Dragnet television series, providing technical advisors for specific episodes. He did his first TV writing for the show, boiling actual cases down to short screen treatments that would be fleshed out into full scripts by Jack Webb's staff of writers; he split the fee with the officers who investigated the real-life case. He became the technical advisor for a new television version of Mr. District Attorney, which led to him writing for the show under his pseudonym "Robert Wesley". He began to collaborate with Ziv Television Programs and continued to sell scripts to Mr. District Attorney, in addition to Ziv's Highway Patrol. In early 1956, he sold two story ideas for I Led Three Lives, and he found that it was becoming increasingly difficult to be a writer and a police officer. On June 7, 1956, he resigned from the LAPD to concentrate on his writing career.
Career as full-time writer and producer
Roddenberry was promoted to head writer for The West Point Story and wrote ten scripts for the first season, about a third of the total episodes. While working for Ziv, in 1956, he pitched a series to CBS set aboard a cruise ship, Hawaii Passage, but they did not buy it, as he wanted to become a producer and have full creative control. He wrote another script for Ziv's series Harbourmaster titled "Coastal Security" and signed a contract with the company to develop a show called Junior Executive with Quinn Martin. Nothing came of the series.
He wrote scripts for a number of other series in his early years as a professional writer, including The Jane Wyman Show, Bat Masterson and Jefferson Drum. Roddenberry's episode of the series Have Gun – Will Travel, "Helen of Abajinian", won the Writers Guild of America award for Best Teleplay in 1958. He also continued to create series of his own, including a series based on an agent for Lloyd's of London called The Man from Lloyds. He pitched a police-based series called Footbeat to CBS, Hollis Productions, and Screen Gems. It nearly made it into ABC's Sunday-night lineup, but they opted to show only Western series that night.
Roddenberry was asked to write a series called Riverboat, set in 1860s Mississippi. When he discovered that the producers wanted no Black people on the show, he argued so much with them that he lost the job. He also considered moving to England around this time, as Lew Grade wanted Roddenberry to develop series and set up his own production company. Though he did not move, he leveraged the deal to land a contract with Screen Gems that included a guaranteed $100,000, and became a producer for the first time on a summer replacement for The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show titled Wrangler.
Screen Gems backed Roddenberry's first attempt at creating a pilot. His series, The Wild Blue, went to pilot, but was not picked up. The three main characters had names that later appeared in the Star Trek series: Philip Pike, Edward Jellicoe, and James T. Irvine. While working at Screen Gems, an actress, new to Hollywood, wrote to him asking for a meeting. They quickly became friends and met every few months; the woman was Majel Leigh Hudec, later known as Majel Barrett. He created a second pilot called 333 Montgomery about a lawyer, played by DeForest Kelley. It was not picked up by the network but was later rewritten as a new series called Defiance County. His career with Screen Gems ended in late 1961, and shortly afterward, he had issues with his old friend Erle Stanley Gardner. The Perry Mason creator claimed that Defiance County had infringed his character Doug Selby. The two writers fell out via correspondence and stopped contacting one another, though Defiance County never proceeded past the pilot stage. The project finally wound up as the NBC series Sam Benedict with Edmond O'Brien in the title role, produced by MGM. E. Jack Neuman took the creator's credit, claiming the character was based on real-life San Francisco lawyer Jake Ehrlich.