thousands of Star Trek fans, also known as Trekkies.

They don't even feel like they're on Make their way to the small Iowa community.

They come to celebrate the birth of a fictional captain from a sci fi TV show.

That won't happen for another 200 years.

And it's all the brainchild of this man.

I'm Steve Miller, and I came up with the idea of Riverside being the future birthplace of Captain Kirk.

In the mid 1960s, Gene Roddenberry created the science fiction TV show Star Trek.

He assembled a diverse cast of characters where humanity set aside their differences to work toward scientific discovery.

The show captured imaginations of countless people across the world and sparked enthusiasm to create over a dozen movies, several spinoffs, fan clubs, conventions and even a small town festival.

Steve: came out in 1966, and I was a senior in high school.

Usually when you're a senior in high school on Friday night at 8:00, you're not home watching television with your family.

But I like the show.

It was a show that captured a lot of people of my generation of my age at that time.

Star Trek was there and pervasive Enterprise.

Log: Captain James Kirk, commanding.

I read the book The Making of Star Trek by Stephen Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry.

And Roddenberry, of course, created Star Trek.

There was a biography of Captain Kirk, and it says he appears to be about 34 years old and was born in a small town in the state of Iowa.

Well, being born in a small town, the state of Iowa, that, of course, was something I latched on to.

And so the evolution of that came when I was on the city council.

And the mayor, Robert Schneider, asked us to come to the next meeting and discuss how we would promote our community.

And so I had this low hanging fruit out there.

So I brought it up at the council meeting.

The rest of the council, there was only three other members there.

Then one guy said, you know, there's not much going on here now, this might help.

So he seconded the motion and one motion passed.

And the next day I called a friend, Tom Walsh, who was a writer for the C Rapids Gazette, and told him, This is what we've done at the council meeting the night before.

He ran a front page story on the Cedar Rapids Gazette the next day, and then it took off.

This final frontier starts in Riverside, Iowa.

There it is, a monument honoring the future birth of Captain James T Kirk.

Every television station in Iowa came.

Radio stations were calling.

I don't want to say it was a slow news time, but it was kind of a fun thing.

Claiming to be the future birthplace of Captain Kirk was the easy part.

Convincing the community and Hollywood lawyers proved to be a different challenge.

We hadn't really prepped the community for what was going on, and so the first response was a little out there.

I've said the most difficult thing I had to do when I first came up with this was go down to our senior citizens dining, our congregate meal program and explain to people in their seventies and eighties a fictional character in a television show they'd never paid any attention to is going to be born here in another 238 years.

Hard concept to get out there.

In the meantime, Paramount Studios is offering to sue me into poverty and the community because they think we're stealing something.

And so we exchanged certified letters and things back and forth.

I had told the city council that I'd take responsibility for any legal action, not realizing that there would be any.

So this then became incumbent on me to figure out.

Steve was facing an uphill battle and Riverside's claim was in a tenuous position.

But with the continued media attention, Steve's idea eventually reached the ears of Mr. Gene Roddenberry.

But once it started getting into the bigger newspapers, Gannett News called him and got a hold of him, and he thought it was a his quote was, It's a very enterprising idea.

And as far as I'm concerned, the first volunteer has it.

But I've been in discussion with their attorney.

And I said, you know, we're not ever going to do anything to harm Paramount or the Star Trek franchise.

We're giving you millions of dollars in free publicity.

And she goes, you know, you're right.

And so that was the end of it.

that summer of 1985 was the first trek fest, it's a small town celebration with the Star Trek theme and the only one like it on the planet.

This is an event, like I would say, no other convention that takes place, Star Trek wise, throughout the whole entire year.

The locals, this is for them, the Trekkies.

This is also for them.

If you're not a Trekkie, don't worry about it.

This is home for everybody.

We're just here to have a good time and celebrate.

Like I said, the future birthplace of Captain James Kirk.

For me, IDIC it infinite diversity and infinite combination that everybody just accepting of everybody.

And the fellowship over the years, you build with everybody.

I mean, we've known most of these guys for decades.

I mean, just the vastness of the story that you can tell because it's like it's all the space.

Yeah.

So there's infinite stories and possibilities to capture.

Also, like Captain Kirk being just the space cowboy that he is, makes it that much more fun.

For three decades, Riverside has embraced itself as the birthplace of this iconic fictional character.

But why?

Why, of all places, Iowa?

Steve has a theory.

I was trying to get a hold of Gene Roddenberry forever to ask him why he said Captain Kirk was born in Iowa, and after he was dead, I did get a hold of Marjelle.

Barrett is his wife, but she kind of alluded to the fact that when you said you were from Iowa in the sixties and the fifties in California, that meant something.

It meant that you had a good education and B, you knew how to work.

And that's part of what of what I think was in Gene's mind to us being Iowans.

Like I said, it's it's such a rare occasion for us to feel like we're somebody this this, this really, really helps.

Don't tell me you're from outer space.

No, I'm from Iowa.

I only work in outer space.