A look back at Lincoln Enterprises: Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek store

I was quite fortunate to chat with the great Bjo Trimble last month. Trimble, if you don’t know, worked with her husband John to save Star Trek in 1968. The letter writing campaign they spearheaded convinced NBC and Paramount to produce a third season, thus ensuring the show would be syndicated. And the rest, as they say, is history.

We chatted about many things, but the main thing I was interested in talking about was Lincoln Enterprises. Lincoln Enterprises was the first “semi-official” Star Trek mail-order store. It was semi-official, in that it was owned by Gene Roddenberry himself, who had created the original show. Roddenberry originally called the company “Star Trek Enterprises” but since it was an independent from Paramount, Roddenberry changed the name (probably after getting a call from a lawyer) He was always a fan of Abraham Lincoln, so that is the name he picked. Ironically, the name changed back to Star Trek Enterprises in some ads in the late 80s.

I wanted to ask Bjo about it because she and John ran the mail order company for Roddenberry in the early 70s. Bjo didn’t have much to say about it, but I did ask if she had any of the old catalogs. “No, I’m old, I need to get rid of stuff.” Eventually, Majel Barrett took over the company from the Trimbles (many say Roddenberry did so after he got divorced from his first wife, to prevent his ex from getting half of the company). The Trimbles were, effectively, fired. I didn’t ask about that part, but Bjo had previously discussed how this went in a 2012 interview (referenced from Fanlore.com).

Gene really wanted the business for Majel. And Majel didn’t know bupkis about running a mail order. She came in and took over, and wanted everything her way. And, if you knew Majel, you know that that’s true. She came in and wanted to completely reorganize everything. For instance, tribbles would have been a good idea, but she wanted to add Spock ears to them, and give them long eyelashes and make them chirp. And we said, ‘No, they won’t sell.’ Well, she ordered them anyway and I don’t know what happened to the poor little things, but they didn’t sell.

And she would get things like a Star Trek insignia in brilliant rhinestones. We hadn’t worked there more than a year when we were fired… We were heartbroken. John and I had been looking at this, hopefully, that it would have been our career, for the next couple of decades, anyway. But, obviously, that didn’t happen. And, once we left that office, we weren’t allowed to go back in to pick up any of our personal stuff.

Gene was doing it for Majel, but he was the one that fired us. We didn’t kowtow to him, and that bothered him. He said to me once, ‘You know, Bjo, I’d hire you to be on the Star Trek staff, but producers want yes people, they don’t need no-you-definitely-can’t-do-that people.’ He knew he was going to get that kind of ripple from me.

There’s also numerous rumors online that the film frames from the original series Lincoln Enterprises sold were not Roddenberry’s property, but taken from the editing rooms at Desilu. Whether he “stole” these (and scripts, as well), who knows? I wasn’t there. I do know that they were definitely sold and listed in the catalogs for years… And a friend of mine bought some at the official Trek convention a few years back, paying a lot more than the original price.

I used to order a LOT of Trek stuff from Lincoln Enterprises… posters, pins, and costume patterns – in fact, I still have the Star Trek movie costume my aunt Peggy made for me when I was 18 (and it still fits!). Most of the products in the catalogs were (of course) Trek related, though for a while they were also selling Kung Fu products (for some reason).

As a collector of Star Trek Ephemera, I’ve been buying old copies of these catalogs off of eBay, and recently tweeted some images from some of the early catalogs. Here’s a sample…

Eventually Lincoln Enterprises closed shop, only to be again revived as an online retailer by Gene’s son Rod in the 2000s (Roddenberry.com). That shop, too, closed up at the end of 2018.

Here’s a gallery of images from the original catalogs – hope you enjoy it.

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