Before He Created Star Trek Gene Roddenberry Was An L.A. Police Officer
Did You Know Gene Roddenberry, A Former L.A. Cop, Created Star Trek?
It’s always fun to learn what beloved artistic idols did way before they became our personal idols. Twilight Zone master storyteller, Rod Serling, worked as a radio ad man. Hammer Horror film veteran, Peter Cushing, was employed as a surveyor’s assistant in a surveyor’s office. He hated the job, but it gave him time to go on acting auditions and learn his lines. Before we knew him as the galactic rascal Han Solo and all around box office superstar, Harrison Ford practiced woodworking as a carpenter. Before becoming an Oscar winner for Ghost, Whoopi Goldberg trained as a cosmetician and found employment as a mortuary cosmetologist.
And what did Gene Roddenberry do before gaining Hollywood, then international fame? Before swooping about triumphantly engaged in the great 23rd century space race and flying high into the stratosphere as The Great Bird Of The Galaxy, Officer Roddenberry served the public as a policeman in Los Angeles, California.
Yup. Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry was a cop.
Roddenberry, the creative, spiritual father to Kirk, Mister Spock, Bones and the visionary behind that omnipresent pop culture juggernaut, the iconic Starfleet crew on Starship Enterprise, served his community as an L.A. police officer.
To Boldly Go Where No Other Policeman Has Gone Before….
From Planetary Foot Patrol To Space Based Security
Security assigned to Starfleet’s Starship, the USS Enterprise - called Red Shirts by fans - traditionally don’t fare too well in episodes. In fact, they consistently bite the extraterrestrial dust. In real life, our law enforcing Trek creator wore a blue shirt uniform over red, while working as a police officer.
This seems a logical extension going back to Roddenberry’s college years and subsequent military service. As a student at Los Angeles City College, he majored in Police Science, defined as the in depth study of the contributing disciplines involved in police work, including criminology, psychology, forensic science and criminal justice.
After working as a pilot for Pan American World Airways, Roddenberry became a police officer with the Los Angeles Police Department in 1949. For nearly 2 years, he was assigned to the traffic division, then was transferred to the newspaper unit. Policing ran in the family, as Gene’s dad moved the family from El Paso, Texas to Los Angeles, after his father landed a police commision in the City of Angels.
Roddenberry’s father had been friends with William Parker, who’d become the LAPD’s Chief of Police. Because of his dad’s relationship with Parker, Gene knew Parker since he was a boy. The two men started working close in the police department, with Roddenberry eventually becoming Parker’s speech writer in the LAPD’s Public Information Division.
The Police Officer Becomes A TV Screenwriter
Gene Roddenberry lived as a visionary. He saw the then new invention of television as not only the future of storytelling for the public in general, but the key to his own future career. He soon became a technical advisor to the TV show, Mr. District Attorney, and began submitting scripts to other programs. As he began to write more and more for television, he realized he had to choose between continuing his police work and his screenwriting pursuit. In 1956, he resigned from the Los Angeles police force.
Roddenberry continued writing for many television programs, including CBS’s Have Gun Will Travel, finally creating Star Trek, produced by Lucille Ball’s studio, DesiLu, in 1966. Broadcast on NBC, the show was cancelled after only three years in one of the most historic, infamous examples of a network not knowing what treasure it had, resurrected in syndication, then relaunched as blockbuster feature films and the mega hit sequel television shows, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager.
Shortly before the coming of Star Trek: The Next Generation, while giving an interview to the Los Angeles Times in 1984, Roddenberry explained that not only was his police career instrumental in landing screenwriting gigs, but that the logical Vulcan Science Officer also connected back to his time policing. Mister Spock (Leonard Nimoy) himself was based on his former boss - LAPD Chief of Police, William Parker.
Writer/Producer Gene Roddenberry led a dynamic, colorful life before gifting the world with one of pop culture’s most revered sci-fi vehicles, Star Trek. He completed 89 combat missions during World War II, flew under the Pan Am banner as a commercial airplane pilot, and patrolled the urban streets of Los Angeles, CA as an LAPD officer. It’s not a stretch to speculate that without his disciplined background - and certainly considering the importance of his police career - he may never have developed his greatest creative triumph, the launching of the dream infused flight of Captain Kirk’s Starship Enterprise.