FP Series #225 - DeForest Kelley Traditional Cache

Years before being cast as Dr. McCoy, Kelley appeared in the 1962 Bonanza episode entitled "The Decision," as a doctor sentenced to hang for the murder of a judge's wife. The judge in this episode was portrayed by John Hoyt, who played Dr. Phillip John Boyce, one of Leonard McCoy's predecessors, on the Star Trek pilot "The Cage".


Kelley played Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy from 1966 to 1969 in Roddenberry's Star Trek (TOS) and the first six Star Trek motion pictures (1979 to 1991). He also had a cameo in "Encounter at Farpoint", the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as by-that-time Admiral Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Fleet Surgeon General Emeritus.

One of his best-known lines as Dr. McCoy was of the form "I'm a doctor, not a [insert other trade or profession here]!" As a nod to the original series, this phrase was also often used by the Holographic Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager, and once by Dr. Bashir in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" which merged the DS9 cast with the original series episode "Trouble With Tribbles".


He was good friends with Star Trek castmates William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy from 1964, when he met each of them for the first time. He was very proud of the fact he was the only one of the three who stayed married to the same wife, Carolyn, for almost his entire life. His stock comment to them was, "I'm alive and well and living in the valley with the very same wife!"

After Star Trek, Kelley found himself a victim of the very typecasting he had so feared. He did a few television appearances and a couple of movies, but essentially went into de facto retirement. In a TLC interview done in the late 1990s, he said one of his biggest fears was that the words etched on his gravestone would be "He's dead, Jim,"

Here in the Woodland Memorial Park Cemetery, you will find a small, green bison tube hidden away in Deep Space Nine.