FANDOM FRIDAY: Howard Cronson Celebrates His Found Family of Fellow STAR TREK Fans

EDITOR’S NOTE: It somehow seems appropriate that our final article is a “Fandom Friday” one. DSTN has always been for the fans, celebrating the franchise we all love via the news stories that have followed Star Trek’s modern journey. That’s probably why Fandom Friday, a monthly column that celebrated the fans themselves, immediately felt like it fit in with our outlet. Thank you, fans, for sticking with us throughout the years. It has truly been an honor bringing you the Star Trek news you needed to know, wherever you were.

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Hello and happy Fandom Friday! This month I had the pleasure of getting to know Howard Cronson. He has been in the Star Trek Fandom for quite some time and has some amazing stories to share! I hope you enjoy them as much as I did. 

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Daily Star Trek News: Tell us a bit about yourself and your life outside of Star Trek.

Howard Cronson: I have been married to my wonderful wife Alison for 31 years and have two great adult children, Jeremy and Rachel. For work, I have been an accountant for many years and I am currently the Controller of a subsidiary of one of the largest construction companies in the world. Aside from Star Trek, my other great passion is baseball, most notably my beloved Boston Red Sox.

DSTN: How and when did you get into Star Trek? What show was your first?

HC: My interest in baseball actually intersected with Star Trek. In 1975, I was at a friend's house watching Game 1 of the World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. After the game was over, Star Trek was on TV. It was the “Who Mourns for Adonais?" episode of the original series and I was instantly hooked. When you’re 11, a guy shooting lightning bolts out of his fingers at an orbiting starship is super cool!

My second Star Trek "origin story" is when I first became involved with fandom. In early 1982, I saw a classified ad in a local weekly newspaper that said "Attention Star Trek Fans!". The ad briefly described a local fan club and invited interested fans to send a letter to a post office box. I wrote and soon met Dave Ryan, the commanding officer of a local Starfleet chapter. Dave, who has sadly passed away, became one of my closest friends. When I started college that September, I also joined the Boston Star Trek Association and became involved with that club and their annual convention, The BASH.

DSTN: What is it about Star Trek that you love?

HC: So many things, but I think the keys are the optimistic vision of the future, the respect for diversity, the found family bonding among the characters on the various shows and the focus on science. And of course, hundreds of great stories. None of the great messages are going to penetrate if no one is watching!

DSTN: Has Star Trek impacted your life in any way? If so, how?

HC: I can't even begin to imagine what my life would be like without Star Trek. There are two big things that come to mind when talking about how Star Trek impacted my life. First, many of my closest friends are people I met through Star Trek fandom. Many of them are people I met through a Starfleet chapter I co-founded in 1986 called the USS Christa McAuliffe. They are my found family. And I have so many other friends I met over the years through other clubs and at conventions.

The second thing is lessons I learned about leadership. My early experiences helping to run fan clubs and conventions in my late teens and early 20s taught me lessons about leadership that I was able to apply to my career. I have been lucky enough to have a successful professional life. I doubt that would have happened if I hadn't learned some of those early lessons about leadership.

DSTN: You've been in the Star Trek fandom since its conception, how have you seen the fandom grow and change over time? Has it changed for the better or for the worse?

HC: I think the biggest change in Star Trek fandom (and in society at large) is the availability of cheap instant communication. In 1975, the main way to communicate was by postal mail. Long distance telephone calls were very expensive, email didn't exist for most people and video conferencing apps like FaceTime and Zoom were literally something you saw on Star Trek. When I was about 12, I learned about the Star Trek Welcommittee's pen pal service. If you sent a letter (and the requested self-addressed stamped envelope) they would match you up with a pen pal. I got a letter back from the Welcommittee's Shirley Maiewski (who would later become a friend) matching me up with a boy from Denver. We would carry on a correspondence for several years, but it was all analog and exchanging one communication could take a couple of weeks or more, depending on how busy we both were with school or other activities. 

Today, of course, the communication is all instant and comes from a hundred different directions: email, message boards,  podcasts, YouTube videos, social media etc. Like most things, all this communication has its pros and cons. More, easier communication is generally better, I think. But, it also opens up the various forums we participate in to some of the more toxic elements of fandom.

DSTN: If you have one, tell us a story that you have about Star Trek/being in the Star Trek fandom?

HC: I was very active in fandom from the early 1980s to the late 1990s and have LOTS of stories from that period. This one is my favorite, though.

In 1986 I was the Treasurer of a convention sponsored by the Boston Star Trek Association called the Platinum Anniversary Convention (PAC). It was a 20th anniversary celebration of Star Trek and the guest list included Gene Roddenberry, Majel Barrett, George Takei, Robin Curtis, David Gerrold, and Diane Duane. This convention is well known for a couple of things. First, it was the convention where a fan asked Gene if there would ever be a gay character in Star Trek. The question was asked by my friend Frank Hummel, and Gene responded that there would be (although we never saw a gay regular character until Discovery over 30 years later.) The other thing, which is not as obvious, is that it was the source of several black and white pictures of Gene and Majel that have been used extensively in recent Star Trek documentaries like Chaos on the Bridge and The Center Seat. There is one particular photo that pops up often of Gene and Majel with a young woman between them and a group of fans behind them. The young woman was my girlfriend at the time.

Neither of these were my story.

Every year as part of the BASH, we put on a Star Trek play. It was typically a comedy spoof of a recent Star Trek movie or would put the TOS characters into a famous movie situation. The 1986 play took place between Star Trek III and IV (The One with the Whales would not be in theaters for about another month) and was a take on It's a Wonderful Life. Kirk is lamenting (*SPOILER ALERT for a 40-year-old movie) destroying the Enterprise and their exile on Vulcan and wondering if his crew would have been better off if he had never been born.

I was playing Spock, still recovering from the Fal-Tor-Pan ritual at the end of STIII. I had a long, expository monologue at the top of the show, setting up the situation. I walk out on stage to a full house and there, front row center, is Gene along with the rest of the guests. Gene had his arms crossed, looking unsure whether he actually wanted to be there but was willing to play along. My brain suddenly realized the fact that I was playing Spock in front of his creator! Needless to say, I was a bit terrified, but I managed to get through my speech and the play was very well received.

After the show, we had an after party for the cast and crew in the con suite. Most of the guests came by and were very complimentary. However, one of the greatest moments of my life happened when Gene and Majel came by. They were very gracious and chatted with everyone. When I had my chance to talk with them, Gene said that I was the second best Spock he had ever seen! I was stunned, and it's something that I remember fondly almost 40 years later.

DSTN: What is your favorite Star Trek show and why?

HC:I like all the Star Trek shows to varying degrees, but TOS is my favorite and always will be. For my first 12 years as a fan, that crew WAS Star Trek. Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov and the rest were the ones that first fired my imagination.

That said, I LOVE Lower Decks. It's so much fun and I was devastated when it was canceled.

DSTN: Do you have a favorite character? If so, which one and why?

HC: Captain Kirk is my favorite character, much for the same reason TOS is my favorite show. Kirk came into my life at a very impressionable age and he was everything I imagined I would want to be as an adult: a confident, strong leader who had a cool job. I'm still hoping to get there someday.

DSTN: What's something you want the readers of DSTN to know about you?

HC: Two things on my bucket list, weirdly, are in Iowa. The Field of Dreams in Dyersville and Trekfest in Riverside. Hopefully, I will get to them both in the next few years!

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I hope you all enjoyed getting to read Howard’s amazing Star Trek stories as much as I did! It was an honor to get to interview Gene Roddenberry’s 2nd favorite Spock.