Star Trek’s Forgotten Encounter with NR

It was an unlikely mash-up of two 1960s happenings that each splashed color on the decadal canvas. Before, during, and after the run of Star Trek, the classic NBC television program, one of its most heralded scriptwriters moonlighted in the Books, Arts & Manners section of National Review.

Hard evidence for the mind meld emerged three years into my work on The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. In the back of an old soda warehouse in Altoona, Pa., among stacks of 663 boxes were 15 that contained my subject’s birth certificate, dance cards, photographs, tax returns, and letters. Correspondence between Meyer, a senior editor of NR, and Star Trek scriptwriter Theodore Sturgeon filled several folders in the collection.