Today in Star Trek History: John Arndt, TOS actor and basketball coach, is born

John Arndt, basketball coach, as Fields (l) and Sturgeon (r) in Star Trek: The Original Series

93 years ago today, on November 17, 1928, actor John Arndt was born. Star Trek fans know Arndt as two characters, Sturgeon and Fields, on The Original Series, but acting wasn’t his first career.

Arndt, a 1952 graduate of Los Angeles’ Loyola Marymount University, spent time away from his studies by serving in the US Navy Reserve. He played on the University’s Lions basketball team in the 1940-’50 season and after graduating, he pursued a brief career in the National Industrial Basketball League pro-team , the Los Angeles Fibber McGee & Mollys and the Los Altima Flyers.

Arndt returned to his roots in 1960, taking a job as assistant coach for the Loyola Marymount Lions and gaining a promotion the next season to head coach and athletic director for the 1961-’62 season through the ’67-’68 season. Arndt was the team’s second all-time winningest coach, leading the team to 91 victories in just seven short years. His prodigious record garnered him a place in the school’s Hall of Fame in 1986.

Between coaching duties in 1966 and ’67, Arndt picked up several uncredited minor television roles, frequently playing “wild Indians.” He also picked up several appearances on that other popular Desilu program, Mission: Impossible.

Arndt first appeared in Star Trek as the ill-fated Sturgeon, one of the crewmen who beamed down to planet M-113 to investigate crewman Darnell’s death in “The Man Trap.” Arndt may not have been wearing a red shirt, but in the first aired episode of the series, that didn’t protect him, and he was last seen as Sturgeon lying dead, a victim of a creature with an appetite for sodium. You might say the M-113 creature assaulted him and then un-salted him. (I’ll be here all week, folx!) 

You can’t keep a good man down, however, and Arndt set the groundwork for other Trek notables to return as multiple characters when he reappeared as crewman Fields in “Balance of Terror.” Ironically, when Fields returned in “Dagger of the Mind” he did wear a red shirt, yet still survived through that episode and two others, “Miri” and “Space Seed.”

Vincent McEveety, who directed 3 of Arndt’s outings as Fields, must have liked him, because the actor appeared sporadically in a number of McEveety-helmed projects throughout the course of the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, including Gunsmoke, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again, Murder, She Wrote and Diagnosis: Murder. He also appeared in The Deadly Spawn and two episodes of The New Leave It To Beaver.

Please join us here at Daily Star Trek News in wishing John Arndt a very happy birthday.