Scotty ate lead on D-Day
Thursday, August 11, 2005 at 4:01AM ■"Doohan Was Fan Favorite," obituary, Variety, 25-31 July 2005, p. 55.
Jimmy Doohan, famous for playing "Scotty" on Star Trek, left a tumultuous and violent home life as a young man of 19 by joining the Canadian army in 1939. He rose to the rank of lieutenant in the artillery, and landed on Juno Beach in Normandy France on D-Day. The landing went well, because the mines under the sand were set for heavy tanks, so Doohan and his fellow soldiers didn't trigger them.
But before the day ended, Doohan was machine-gunned head-on, taking six bullets. One took off his right middle finger (catch that, in all those years of watching him on Star Trek?), four others went into a leg, and the sixth he took in the chest (he lived because a silver cigarette case blunted its impact).
He and his wife of many years had seven kids.
I own all 79 episodes of the original series on VHS (a whim my spouse and I fulfilled when I worked as a superintendent at an apartment complex in Boston while getting my PhD-all that unspent rent money had to go somewhere), so I'm a fairly strong fan. Never went to conventions, read plenty of books though, and I must say, I never heard of Doohan's wartime record.
You have to respect that.
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