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The morning of Friday, June 11th, 1999 began unlike any other morning in my life to that point. I was living in a tiny efficiency in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the morning light was bright against the wall that hosted my bed. Before I could even identify that it was morning -- or that I was human being, for that matter -- a prophetic, three-word thought appeared in my mind. I might have even said it out loud, though no one else was there to hear it:
DeForest Kelley died.
It was as random a thought as I’d ever had, and anyone who knows me understands that non sequiturs and comically outlandish ideas are very much me, but the rudely direct and matter-of-fact thought, “DeForest Kelley died,” was one that had even me doing that head-tilted Labrador retriever thing, you know, like when you explain to him how to install sheet rock. It was a very clear, definitive thought, however, and it stayed with me through my coffee as I got ready to go to work.
My commute was a brisk fifteen-minute walk to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where I worked in a tiny development office above a gift shop. I was heading south past Bloomingdales when the thought resounded once again. “What a twisted thing to think,” I said to myself, smirking, “why the hell would that be the first thing to come to mind today?” I had been a Star Trek fan since I was four years old, watching re-runs on the carpeted floor of my parent’s Lawrence, Massachusetts apartment, always sitting too close to the TV, according to Mom. The triumvirate of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were the fantastic holy trinity to me since before I knew what NASA was, before anyone knew what a “Watergate” was, and long before anyone could Google the names of the actors who played the captain, the science officer, and chief medical officer of the Federation starship, “Enterprise.” I could tell you that DeForest Kelley’s character, Dr. Leonard H. McCoy, was the guiding conscience of Captain James T. Kirk, and the captain almost always referred to McCoy by the nickname, “Bones.” I grew up with him. The whole crew.
So, what a weird thought. “Deforest Kelley died.”
After punching in and making my way to my desk – packed into a room that dreamed of being a utility closet in another life – I logged in to my computer to collect my email, hoping to see a small workload going into the weekend. Before the ozone-smell of the bulky white CRT monitor firing up on my desk could fade, my office phone rang. My dear friend and fellow ‘Trekkie’, Kathy Meddings, from my home state of New Hampshire, greeted me on the line, and got right to the point.
“Don! Did you hear that DeForest Kelley died?” she asked anxiously.
This moment might have been the most interesting moment my brain has ever known.
There were two altogether different iterations of disbelief manifesting in my head simultaneously: one lightning fast, telling me “oh my God I’ve had some kind of telepathic out-of-body experience or something!” and the other, a glacially-moving, stinging grief that an icon of my life had passed away. In the other hemisphere of my brain, a giddy he-child was jumping up and down saying “tell Kathy! Quick! Tell Kathy!” It took a twentieth of a second to gasp, then try to spill the beans to Kathy that her friend in the big city hadn’t heard that, no… but he somehow knew about it the very instant he awoke.
I spoke while my overloaded neurons misfired. The outgoing sentence sounded as if an inebriated man tried speaking Klingon while taking a hard-hit ground ball to the groin. It was more of a long sneeze than English, but thankfully Kathy knew me well enough to know that I wasn’t having a stroke, but in fact I just had something really, really important to tell her.
The problem – I realized while wiping a bead of drool from my chin – was that I had absolutely no way to prove my telepathic event had really happened. If I had only stopped on my way to work to tell a coffee vendor what my first thought of the day had been, I’d at least have some kind of theoretical receipt that I told someone before I learned the news. Then again, the vendor might have noted that I could have heard or seen the news from the newspaper stand I’d passed fifteen feet earlier.
Disproving my claim, dammit.
“Kathy, the first three words in my mind this morning were ‘DeForest Kelley died!’” I insisted. “Honest to God, I can’t explain it, but before I even realized I was awake, that was my first thought.”
I was too submerged in frustration to absorb Kathy’s response, but I do recall that, as always, she was completely supportive. To this day, coming up on a quarter-century later, the closest I can come to proving my claim is the fact that I told Kathy about my foresight mere seconds into our conversation, thus relying on the notion that such a rapid exclamation was far too quick for me to reasonably manufacture such a story. And that she believes me.
Over the years, I have diligently tried to find a scientific explanation for my experience. The closest I have come to a credible theory is this: while I was sleeping, a neighbor’s television or radio was tuned in to the news, and it was playing loud enough for my subconscious mind to receive the information that Mr. Kelley had passed away. That way I wouldn’t remember receiving the news, but it would have been shocking enough so that my first thought of the day – and my first memory – was that tragic loss. Occam’s razor would suggest that this is the simplest and therefore the best explanation.
You know, I never really believed that, though.
So, at the conclusion of that June day at the end of the twentieth century, my wait began. Eventually, if there was something legitimate in the supernatural origins of that occurrence, would it not be reasonable to propose that one day it would happen again? When Leonard Nimoy or William Shatner passes, would I have the same strange wake-up foreshadowing? I didn’t believe it would, but much in the same way you don’t dare look under the bed once mom tucked you in, I’d just have to wait it out. And I never wanted Leonard or Bill to die. Nor Spock and Captain Kirk.
So. Twelve years later, it happened again. Well, almost. A little.
May 6th, 2012. I had been married for more than seven years, living in New Hampshire again, and I was now a dad. We had a small house on a dead-end street and no neighbors nearby, so therefore no nearby radios or televisions to subliminally hear while sleeping. And on the Sunday morning of 6th May 2012, my first thought of the day was another three-word idea of someone’s extremely recent doom.
“Gomer Pyle died,” it said. Seriously. That Gomer Pyle.
My initial reaction was a serious one, at least to a person groggy and not really wanting to deal with death. “I must have been visited by the ghost of television past again.” Only when I was properly caffeinated did I realize that the reaction was actually fairly witty. I might use that one again next time.
My next thought was that I should probably email Kathy Meddings to let her know about my morning mourning premonition before I did anything else. Again, this wouldn’t actually prove anything as I might have seen the news on television or online, but it would still be a written receipt of something to document my odd, infrequent supernatural ability.
I didn’t get that opportunity to email Kathy. When I logged into my desk computer (with a flatscreen, this time, and no ozone smell), the bulleted news item was there before I could get to the ‘compose’ button: Beloved Andy Griffith Show Star Dead at 83.
No. No way. No way, right? Where’s the phone? Do I even have Kathy’s number?!?
My wife wasn’t home, either. She was at church. For a moment, I thought about calling together my six cats for a conference. If every thirteen years, my morning breath was a harbinger of doom for some poor unfortunate 1960’s television personality, someone had to hear it.
But I had to be reasonable about this phenomenon. The logical thing to do, obviously, was to look up what network The Andy Griffith Show was on. Star Trek was on NBC, so if Andy was on NBC as well, there was at least one common link. If that tested positive, then maybe my sleeping brain had been tuning in to old NBC shows for a while as some evil entity tormented me about it. Thus I looked up what network the show was on.
And it was CBS. Not NBC. I was at a loss as to what to do next, so I decided to read the article.
Gomer Pyle, of course, was played by the extremely talented Jim Nabors. I anticipated reading about his comedic acting chops on The Andy Griffith Show as well as its spin off, Gomer Pyle USMC, not to mention his impressive vocal abilities. That’s when my illusion of a recurring magical ability came to an end. Mr. Nabors was alive and well. It was George Lindsey, who played Goober Pyle who had died. Goober was Gomer’s cousin on the show. I felt a sense of disappointed relief: Mr. Nabors was alright, my freakish ability was not deadly spot-on, and sadly, Goober Pyle was deceased.
But wait… had I mis-remembered which Pyle cousin I had identified at the point I awoke? Did I actually think Goober and not Gomer? No, I sighed. It was time to end the silly and lengthy preoccupation, so I snapped myself out of it with a brisk shake of my head, my own wet shaggy dog routine. My supernatural mental encounter was a fascinating one-time coincidence, with a teasing, eerie coincidence a dozen years later. It was the wrong Pyle, and there was no link between George Lindsey and Star Trek.
It took another nine years – until today, when I read Star Trek’s Wikipage to find the exact date of Mr. Lindsey’s death for this story – before I realized there was, in fact, a connection. Leonard Nimoy wasn’t Gene Roddenberry’s first choice to play the part of Mr. Spock, nor was Martin Landau, as I’d always heard. Multiple NBC executives and directors actually wanted DeForest Kelley to play Spock.
Roddenberry wanted a different actor. George Lindsey.
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