To boldly go …

At the end of a gravel driveway near Coarsegold in a tidy room utilized as an office, a celebrity lives among us.

Sure, Kellie Flanagan is a “celebrity” in Eastern Madera County, where she serves as a reporter for this newspaper, and has for six years. That means she’s deeply involved in the community and is known by many people in that region.

But beyond EMC and that tidy office, Flanagan is a celebrity whose legacy lives on from her days as a child actor.

This year, especially, is meaningful because Star Trek is celebrating 60 years and Flanagan has a direct tie to the famed franchise.

“It was a much smaller industry then,” said Flanagan.

Certainly, but it was big enough that Flanagan became a part of it at a young age — before abruptly leaving roles in front of the camera.

Flanagan was in the Star Trek episode, “Miri,” which is one of the most iconic episodes of what is known as TOS, or The Original Series. That series launched a franchise that thrives to this day but it also made an impact on society that, in many ways, reflects the human experience as it has evolved.

And to think, Flanagan portrayed an “alien” in that episode, though its Earth-like references are unavoidable. In fact, it was a planet nearly identical to Earth the crew reached hundreds of light years away on their journey to “boldly go where no man has gone before.”

She was just six years old when the episode was filmed in 1966. It was her first acting gig on a series, though she had vast experience doing television commercials since the age of three.

“It is a compelling storyline,” said Flanagan of the “Miri” episode.

Indeed.

In the episode, the USS Enterprise discovers a duplicate Earth populated by childlike “Onlies” and deadly terminal disease. The premise is once the children hit puberty, their fates are sealed because the disease will lead to death. It is why the crew discovers only children are on the planet.

As in most Star Trek episodes, the race is on to save everyone, including the crew, with the exception of Mr. Spock, who was immune to the disease. Captain James T. Kirk befriended one of the teens, named Miri, and it was Dr. Leonard “Bones” Mc- Coy who, in the nick of time, developed a cure and saved the day — and the children.

But for a girl just six years old, none of that really mattered. It was a job and, as she noted, a lot of fun because there were so many kids involved in the episode. They were able to play and Flanagan even recalls shooting some of the outdoor scenes on the Culver City lot.

“There were a lot of kids, so it was fun,” she said.

She was known as the “Blonde Girl” in the episode, though she had a streak of green, quite the getup back in the late 1960s.

The start

For Flanagan, it was her mother who got her into the business.

Though there is nothing to back it up, Flanagan said “as the story goes,” her mother was working at a store in Santa Monica, their hometown. She had Kellie late in life, at nearly 50, so there was a special spotlight on the child.

She entered her daughter in a fashion show, the story continues, and “by the end of the show,” someone used a pay phone from the location to call an agent. They said Flanagan was the “next Shirley Temple, but with short hair.”

That agent, Dorothy Day Otis, took the young girl, only three years old, under her wings and remained her agent for the rest of her brief acting career.

Flanagan said it’s hard to say if she has memories from some of that time because “I have seen imagery and it can get conflated.”

She does remember filming a commercial for Hostess Ding Dongs and having to be on a tire swing for a long time.

“I got sick,” she said.

To this day, she refuses to eat a Ding Dong.

She filmed many other commercials, including her first with June Lockhart for Crest toothpaste.

She also played characters on a number of television shows, including Family Affair, The Andy Griffith Show and Mannix. She starred alongside Burl Ives in a television special about a little girl trying to find her way.

But it was Star Trek that earned Flanagan her Screen Actors Guild card.

In the episode, she had one line: “Call the police.”

Because of that line, she became eligible for the card. It would lead to a two-year role as the character Candy Muir on the series “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,” a role that would eventually lead Flanagan back to the spotlight, along with Star Trek.

A short career

But Flanagan’s career was cut short by tragedy. Just before she turned 11, her mother died. Just three years later, her father died.

Because she had sisters who were so much older, they raised her after those tragic deaths.

For Flanagan, she turned away from the spotlight.

“I didn’t want to be recognized,” she said. “I wanted to be normal.”

Now she admits “normal” is something that may never be achieved but at the time, it seemed being out of the spotlight was the path to normalcy.

Though she would eventually go to UCLA, she didn’t finish college. She did start working at a video store and the video bug just couldn’t leave her. She started a side hustle of filming weddings, birthday parties and many other events.

One event just happened to be the wedding of the daughter of Gene Roddenberry, the man who created Star Trek.

She had no clue, and wouldn’t for years, who he was even though he was the one, indirectly, who led her to that SAG card.

In another instance, Flanagan tells a story about attending an awards show centered around celebrity pets. She was filming the event and was down on her knees when an elderly Milton Berle arrived. When he spoke, he made a crude joke about Flanagan.

She never did like Berle and that sealed the deal.

A realization

It wasn’t until 2017, decades after being an actor, that Flanagan began to get a sense about the impact she made in Hollywood.

She said there is a small group of people who are super fans of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. There was an event called The Hollywood Show and they asked if she would attend. It was for her part in the show that ran for two years.

Richard Dreyfuss was the “star” they recruited for the show and Flanagan loved that part because “Jaws is one of my favorite movies of all time.”

Then, a year later in 2018, she was invited to attend Creation, a massive Star Trek convention in Las Vegas.

“They took care of me,” she recalls.

That included the flight, the room and a table on the convention floor where there were photos she could sign and more. She recalls Nichelle Nichols being there but said she was elderly and not in good condition. Nichols played Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek series and broke barriers as being a lead actress who was African American.

At the convention, one aspect of attending for Flanagan was she had to speak to fans. Since she had just one role (and one line) in one episode, she wasn’t quite sure how it would unfold.

“It was a humbling experience,” she said.

It turned out it wasn’t her speaking that was the focus, rather the die hard fans who wanted to tell their stories.

In one instance, a man who was in a wheelchair approached her. He had no legs. As a child, he said he had contracted a disease and had to have both of his legs amputated.

It turned out his father knew someone associated with Star Trek and the recovering young boy was able to visit the set during filming.

That’s a Star Trek story.

“It was just a great group of people,” she said. “I am super proud of it now.”

Lasting impacts

As someone who grew up around the spotlight of Hollywood, Flanagan points to the “pop culture” aspect of her role in the big scheme of things.

And now, decades later, she thinks back on people like William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, George Takei and many others who she worked with and who, at the time, nobody realized would become household names.

She also recalls enjoying the set during filming of Star Trek. She liked the uniforms and the set design and now has come to appreciate it even more.

Another aspect of Star Trek that Flanagan is extremely proud of is how it broke barriers at a time in the late 1960s when chaos and turmoil reined around the nation and world.

Star Trek had the first interracial kiss, it featured a Russian on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, there was Nimoy cast as a Vulcan, meaning another race of people interacting with humans.

The list is almost endless and Flanagan said she is quite proud of being a small part of something that literally changed minds and the culture. The Star Trek universe continues strong to this day, with its roots going back to that series that ran only three years.

In fact, it wasn’t until five years after it had been canceled that it ran in syndication and the rest, as they say, is history.

A career turn

Flanagan’s career turned to video production when she was in her 30s and she landed a job with Alan Funt, a renowned figure in Hollywood.

Funt was larger-than-life in the industry, famed for being the creator of Candid Camera.

Flanagan laughs when she talks about “getting fired probably a dozen times” by Funt, who then would beg her to come back. She said many in Hollywood called it a “rite of passage” to be fired by Funt, a cantankerous but brilliant producer.

That eventually led Flanagan to being a writer/producer, focusing on documentaries.

“That was the early days of cable,” she said.

She leaned toward television documentaries, doing a variety of topics including the Civil War, sharks and police chases.

To this day, there isn’t a good police chase she won’t drop everything to watch.

By 1995, she was married and then in 1998, her daughter was born.

“I wanted to get out of Los Angeles,” she said.

Her brother had lived in the Oakhurst area since the 1970s and they visited frequently. They wondered why they would come there and then go back to the rat race.

“I am very happy I left Los Angeles,” she said.

She spent several years just being a mom and raising her daughter, but deep inside, she knew writing was in her blood.

“I had always written,” she said, noting she had diaries as a child.

In 2012, she knew someone who was involved with a new website called Sierra News Online. Flanagan said she liked what she saw and decided to go into that aspect of writing.

By 2019, she became a freelance writer for this newspaper and a year later became the reporter for Eastern Madera County, a new venture by the Gazette following the closure of the newspaper in Oakhurst.

Since then, the EMC news is now in its own section and Flanagan is enjoying what she does writing news stories, features and more.

“Yes,” she said when asked if she felt she had taken the right path in life. “Success is a number of things. I like the path of my life.”

Flanagan said she is “fortunate to have a job where I have relevance in the community. Yes, I’m happy with it.”

But she’ll always know the impacts of her life, from starring for two years in a television series to forever being known as one of the “Women of Star Trek,” although at the time she was a girl with a streak of green in her hair.

In fact, she chuckles at the fact that every year, like clockwork, she gets a residual check from Star Trek. A whopping $20.

“I cash it,” she laughed, “and buy a bottle of wine.”

She probably sips it in the neat office, thinking about her past and focusing on the future.

Hopefully, she will live long and prosper.