By Nancy Miller Chenier
What if William Shatner, a.k.a. Captain James T. Kirk, had known he could have said “Beam me up.” when he was eating at the lunch counter of the newly enlarged Woolworth’s on Rideau Street in the 1950s?
Maybe then he would have avoided developing a violent reaction to fruit salad. In a 1966 Ottawa Journal story, he recalled that “Daily, and sometimes twice a day … I shelled out 27 cents for a plate of fruit salad at a lunch counter in Ottawa. It helped make my budget work but to this day I not only can’t bear the sight of the stuff but I react somewhat violently at its very mention.”
After William Shatner graduated from McGill University in 1952, he joined the Canadian Repertory Theatre located in La Salle Academy on Guigues Street. While acting there, he recalled that he did one play a week, got paid little, and stretched his meagre earnings at 47 Rideau Street, where the Woolworth store claimed to have the longest lunch counter in Canada at 183 feet.
William Shatner’s extensive career in the television series Star Trek is well known,but his years performing in Ottawa theatre less so. He often referred to his Ottawa period, where he spent time before he joined the Stratford Festival in the mid-1950s. Besides his memories of the Woolworth lunch counter, he mentioned another regular experience where a transporter would have helped: “a highway from Ottawa to Montreal on which I nearly got killed every time I travelled back home.”
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