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The Country Doctor DeForest Kelley • 1920 – 1999 from an emergency room nurse in Atlanta who owes him a career |
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HELLO
My name is Christina Chappell. I'm thirty-three, I'm a registered nurse, and for the last nine years I have worked in the emergency department of a big hospital in Atlanta, mostly nights. I am also a lifelong, unembarrassed, knows-the-episode-from-the-first-ten-seconds Star Trek fan, and when somebody at work asks me why I went into nursing, the honest answer is Dr. Leonard McCoy. I was the kind of kid who came home from school, dropped her book bag in the hall and turned on the TV before she took off her coat. In the late seventies one of our UHF channels ran Star Trek reruns every weekday afternoon, and I watched every one of them, over and over, for years. My little brother wanted to be Captain Kirk. My best friend wanted to be Spock. I wanted to be the one who walked into the room when somebody was hurt. That's not the whole story, of course. There was a school nurse, and a grandmother who was sick for a long time, and a very good nursing instructor named Juanita Nigro who scared me half to death. But the first person who ever made me think taking care of sick people might be the most important job on the ship was a cranky Southern doctor in a blue shirt. I suspect I'm not the only one. Every hospital I've ever worked in has had at least one nurse or doctor who'll admit it, usually around four in the morning. DeForest Kelley died on Friday, June 11, 1999. I heard it on the radio driving home from a night shift. I sat in the parking lot of my apartment building until the news was over, and then I went upstairs and started this page instead of going to bed. It's been growing ever since. HIS CHART Old habits. Everybody gets a chart.
HIS LIFE The Georgia boy. He was born in Georgia in 1920, the son of a Baptist minister, and he grew up a church kid in a small-town South that I recognize from my own grandparents' stories. As a young man he went out to California and stayed. Everything I've ever read about him calls him a Southern gentleman, and I believe it, because you could hear it in McCoy. McCoy yelled at people. He never once yelled at a patient. The war. He served in the Army Air Forces during World War II, like my granddaddy did. That's all I know for sure about those years, so that's all I'll say. The westerns. Before he was anybody's doctor he was the man in the black hat. He played heavies in western after western, in the movies and all over television in the fifties and early sixties, and he was good at it, with those pale eyes. The one everybody remembers is Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), where he played Morgan Earp, one of Wyatt's brothers. So the next time somebody tells you Dr. McCoy was a softie, remind them he once walked down a dusty street in Tombstone with a gun on his hip. The doctor. Star Trek went on the air on NBC in September 1966, and he was Dr. Leonard McCoy, chief medical officer of the Enterprise, for all three seasons, until it was canceled in 1969. Kirk was the head and Spock was the logic, and McCoy, everybody says it, was the heart. He came back to do McCoy's voice on the cartoon series in 1973 and 1974, and then he played him in all six of the movies, from Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 through Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country in 1991. By the last one McCoy was an old man and so was he, and he was still the best thing in every scene he was in. The cameo. In 1987 he turned up in "Encounter at Farpoint," the very first episode of The Next Generation, as an admiral well past a hundred years old, being shown around the new Enterprise by Data. It's only a couple of minutes long. I was twenty-one, in nursing school, watching it on a little TV in my dorm room, and I cried, and my roommate thought I had lost my mind. It was like the old crew handing the ship over, and of course it was McCoy who did it. Carolyn. He married Carolyn Dowling in 1945, and they were married for fifty-four years. In a business where people change spouses like they change agents, that tells you most of what you need to know about him. My heart goes out to her. June. He died on June 11, 1999, at the Motion Picture and Television Country House in Woodland Hills, California, which is a retirement home and hospital for people from the movie business. He had stomach cancer. He was 79. I know a little about the last weeks of a cancer like that, because I've sat with families going through them. I hope he had good nurses. I hope somebody held his hand and told him what was going on in plain words, the way he would have wanted. I bet he was a lovely patient. I bet he was a terrible one, too, the way doctors always are. WHAT BONES TAUGHT ME ABOUT PATIENTS I know he was an actor saying lines somebody wrote for him. I'm not crazy. But he decided how to say them, and how to stand by a biobed with his hand on somebody's shoulder, and that part was his. Here's what I took to work with me:
And no, before anybody writes: I was not named after Nurse Chapel. I was born in March of 1966, six months before Star Trek ever went on the air, and my mother has still never watched a whole episode. But the other nurses do call me Nurse Chapel when I'm being bossy, and Dr. Wenner, one of our residents, calls me Bones when I catch something he missed. I take both as compliments.
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My Five Favorite McCoy Episodes, one line each, and one I left off on
purpose.
Other Trek and TV-hospital people on GeoCities.us I'm glad to know:
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