Gene L. Coon, the other Gene of Star Trek
Every Trekkie and Trekker knows Gene Roddenberry, the creator and originator of the Star Trek franchise. However there are a lot of fans who don't know about another man who helped Trek just as much as Gene Roddenberry whose name just also happens to be Gene.
Gene was born on January 7th 1924 in Nebraska. He was talented from a young age even appearing on local radio as a kid. He later moved to California and joined the Marine Corps, doing state side work for them and later going to college and later serving in the Korean war. He later found work in news broadcast and writing often doing some work on tv screen plays mostly on action and western shows like Dragnet and Banaza and in 1957 he started writing for the show that would change things for ever.
Wagon Train started in 1957, it was about a wagon Train heading west in the 19th century each episode would have guest stars in addition to the regular cast it was a great source of moral lessons for the audience watching. Gene L Coon got a job on the show... A show that another man named Gene would take inspiration from.
In 1966 John D.F. Black left Star Trek and Gene Roddenberry needed a line producer to make sure the show was going smoothly. So after his first three choices were unavailable he hired Coon to be his line producer. Coon's job was simple but hard, make sure scripts were ready to be filmed. That met doing rewrites of scrips and at times writing scripts of his own to make sure everything got done. Gene liked Coon's writing work on Wagon Train, it was one of the inspirations for Star Trek, and Gene L. Coon was just the man for the job.
Coon got to work and his speed was amazing he was able to rewrite scripts at blazing speeds making adjustments he thought brought life into very dry scifi TV at times. Under his tenure the very basics that would become the Star Trek universe. He is credited with creating, The Klingons, The Augments, Kahn, the eugenics wars, Zefram Cochrane, The prime directive, and the United Federation of Planets itself. Perhaps though his most important contribution to Star Trek was the dynamic between Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Star Trek at times could be very dry and off-putting, it needed real "human" drama to back it. This is exactly what Coon did. In his rewrites and original episodes he always made the connection between Kirk Sock and McCoy real, the friendship between Kirk and Spock, the semi antagonistic verbal jabs of McCoy and Spock, in other words.... he made them more human.
His list of original episodes is a list of classics of the original series.
However the good times were not to last, at the end of season two he was exhausted, his writing was tiring him out along with his constant butting of heads with Gene Rodenberry, he left at the end of season two. He did however later write a few episodes from season three under and a pen name, the underated Spectre of the Gun, the timely Let This be Your Last battlefield and the horrible Spocks Brain.
Gene L. Coon never got to see his time in the sun unlike a certain other Gene. Coon a chronic chain smoker died in 1973 of cancer. He never got to see the resurgence, the popularity Trek had in the 1970s, he never got to see the movies or help in the TNG era. Later on Gene Rodenberry egotist as he so, took credit for a lot of Coon's work knowing that he was not alive to contradict him, his name has been largely forgotten outside of die-hard fan circles. Some people such as William Shatner in print and in person have said that he contributed as much as the Great Bird himself and I agree. So.... 102 years after his birth let's remember Gene L. Coon the other Gene of Trek.
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