Goodbye, Jimmy

And then there were five. (Seven if you count Chapel and Rand.)

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original "Star Trek" TV series and motion pictures who responded to the apocryphal command "Beam me up, Scotty," died early Wednesday. He was 85.

Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. (1330 GMT) at his Redmond, Washington, home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease, he said.

The Canadian-born Doohan fought in World War II and was wounded during the D-Day invasion, according to the StarTrek.com Web site. He was enjoying a busy career as a character actor when he auditioned for a role as an engineer in a new space adventure on NBC in 1966. A master of dialects from his early years in radio, he tried seven different accents.

"The producers asked me which one I preferred," Doohan recalled 30 years later. "I believed the Scot voice was the most commanding. So I told them, 'If this character is going to be an engineer, you'd better make him a Scotsman.' "

Doohan also did a lot of the voices on the original television program, having been a linguist and a radio broadcaster prior to being cast. What's really amazing from the article is the following blurb:

At 19, James escaped the turmoil at home by joining the Canadian army, becoming a lieutenant in artillery. He was among the Canadian forces that landed on Juno Beach on D-Day. "The sea was rough," he recalled. "We were more afraid of drowning than the Germans."

The Canadians crossed a minefield laid for tanks; the soldiers weren't heavy enough to detonate the bombs. At 11:30 that night, he was machine-gunned, taking six hits: one that took off his middle right finger (he managed to hide the missing finger on screen), four in his leg and one in the chest. The chest bullet was stopped by his silver cigarette case.

I rag on the Canadians as much as the next conservative American blogger, but this guy was a bona fide Canadian hero.

I also remember the scene in Trekkies where Doohan talked about how a girl sent him a suicide letter, and he called her up on the phone, and told her that he was going to be at a Star Trek convention, and he wanted her to be there. Once the convention was over, he told her he'd be at another one on a certain date, and that he wanted to see her there, too. Somehow, this girl who felt that she was at the end of her rope kept coming up with the money to travel to these conventions and see Jimmy Doohan, who paid attention to her and genuinely cared about her. He stopped hearing from her for several years, and just when he'd given up hope of hearing from her, he got a letter or a phone call or something for her, informing him that she'd just graduated from college with a degree in engineering. The story made him tear up, and it about made me tear up.

Jimmy Doohan was a great actor, and a person who represented many of the things that are right with the world. Jimmy, my next pint's for you.