Eugene Wesley Roddenberry Sr. (August 19, 1921 â October 24, 1991) was an American television screenwriter, producer, and creator of Star Trek: The Original Series, its sequel spin-off series Star Trek: The Animated Series, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. 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 followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the Los Angeles Police Department, where he also began to write scripts for television.
In 1941, he joined the United States Army Air Corps, which in the same year became the United States Army Air Forces. He began training at Goodfellow Field (now Goodfellow Air Force Base) in San Angelo, Texas with other Civilian Pilot Training alums and graduated as a second lieutenant in September 1942, Class G. He flew combat missions in the Pacific Theatre with the “Bomber Barons” of the 394th Bomb Squadron, 5th Bombardment Group, of the Thirteenth Air Force and on August 2, 1943, Roddenberry was piloting a B-17E Flying Fortress named the “Yankee Doodle”, from Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides, when mechanical failure caused it to crash on take-off. In total, he flew eighty-nine missions for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal before being honorably discharged at the rank of captain in July 1945. While working on Star Trek, Roddenberry would spend much of his spare time at California’s Monterey Peninsula Airport with a group of aviation enthusiasts who flew World War II fighters.
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