Spock is a graduate of Starfleet Academy, but before Leonard Nimoy landed his iconic role on “Star Trek,” he appeared in a 1950s TV show about the United States Military Academy that was actually filmed at West Point.
“The West Point Story” was a syndicated anthology series that ran for two seasons from 1956 to 1957. Nimoy was a natural fit, having served in the army himself from 1953 to 1955 as part of the Army Special Services, the military’s entertainment branch. In one of Nimoy’s two appearances, he played Cadet Tom Kennedy, an accomplished boxer who came to West Point and faced pressure from his brother to abandon the military to return to the ring.
In his second episode, Nimoy played a cadet who takes an unauthorized leave when he walks across the frozen Hudson River to visit his girlfriend and must rush back before an icebreaker strands him on the wrong side. While most of Nimoy’s other roles at the time were shot in Los Angeles, “West Point” was made on location. “To be put on a plane and flown far away to a far location like that, actually at West Point, New York, was a big deal,” he told the Television Academy. This meant that Nimoy, like his cadet, had to deal with the Hudson River in the winter. “It was cold,” he recalled. “It was so cool, the cameras were freezing up.”
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry wrote several episodes of West Point
Leonard Nimoy was not the only “Star Trek” alum with credits on “The West Point Story.” The show was one of “Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry’s earliest writing gigs. He sold his first script after he harangued the show’s producer on a cross-country flight. At this point, Roddenberry still had his day job as an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department and used personal days to take a week and half off to visit the Military Academy. Roddenberry quit the LAPD in 1956 and became the head writer for “West Point,” where he penned more than a quarter of the show’s 40 episodes.
One of the episodes Roddenberry wrote featured cadets who had an illicit television set in their dorms; he later learned that some real-life cadets had watched that very episode on a TV that they were not supposed to have. Roddenberry is not credited on either of the two episodes that his future “Star Trek” star appeared in, however. Nimoy and Roddenberry first met on the 1960s crime drama “The Lieutenant.”