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Bruce Hyde, Kevin Riley actor, passes away at age 74

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Bruce Hyde — Dallas native, professor and beloved ‘Star Trek’ actor — has died at 74

 

From the Dallas Morning News by Robert Wilonsky, Published: October 17, 2015 5:49 pm

 

Bruce Hyde is a footnote in sci-fi pop-culture history, a man who appeared in two of the original Star Trek episodes: “The Naked Time,” which originally aired on Sept. 29, 1966; and “The Conscience of the King,” first broadcast on Dec. 8, 1966. As Lt. Kevin Riley, a navigator aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, he was memorable in both — “The Naked Time,” especially, the episode in which he sang “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” while declaring himself captain and cutting off the engines while under the influence of … well, sure, maybe you should just watch the whole thing.

 

Regardless, he’s beloved by Trek fans, who now mourn his death earlier this week from throat cancer at the age of 74. His death was first reported Friday by the St. Cloud Times in Minnesota, where he was professor emeritus of communication studies at St. Cloud State University. He taught there for the past 25 years.

 

According to the family’s official obituary, Hyde was born in Dallas on September 14, 1941. His mother Edna taught in Mesquite. His father Rufus was the head football coach at North Dallas High School, from which Bruce graduated in 1959 after attending Robert E. Lee Elementary in Lower Greenville.

 

After high school, Hyde enrolled at Northwestern University, from which he got his Bachelor of Arts in 1963. Then, for a while, he became an actor. He got some small roles on stage and TV. Then came Trek and the small part he made big. And he didn’t talk about it much. Just last year, in fact, he said he didn’t think anyone would care. Besides, he was busy being a professor, a writer.

 

“Then somebody once told me, ‘You know, you should be willing to talk about this with people. It’s interesting, it’s something you did that most people didn’t do,’” Hyde said. “And so I decided to lighten up about it.”

 

So he made the rounds — doing the conventions, talking about working with Shatner, deciphering the reasons behind the show’s lasting influence. He found the experience … odd, to say the least, especially when fans knew every detail about every scene into which he’d put just a few weeks’ work. But Riley remained a popular character — beloved enough to resurface as a major character in the 1991 novel A Flag Full of Stars, set shortly after the end of the Enterprise‘s five-year mission.

 

“I don’t do very many [conventions] now, but I still enjoy them, still feel so privileged to have them in my life,” he told StarTrek.com last year. “And it’s remarkable how different being a convention guest is from being a communications professor.”

 

Turns out, he wasn’t much interested in acting. After Trek, he got a part in Hair in San Francisco … then decided to drop out.

 

“I played a hippie — and I decided I wanted to be a hippie instead of playing one,” he told the Trek fanzine. “I was going to get a Volkswagen bus and a big bag of brown rice and go find God. And that’s what I did.” He also spent time in Nashville, where he wrote music.

 

He then came home for a little while in the early 1980s, earning his master’s degree in Communication Studies from North Texas State University in 1984. He never acted again.

 

“Mr. Hyde was coauthor of a book that will be published posthumously,” says his obituary. “Speaking Being emerged from Mr. Hyde’s decades long commitment to the method of inquiry developed by Werner Erhard, first in EST and later in the Landmark Forum, and from his Ph.D. dissertation and several scholarly papers that examined Erhard’s ‘ontological’ communication, which was marked by an effort to move beyond conceptual knowledge to an authentic inquiry into human being. Mr. Hyde incorporated his ideas about dialogue and ontological communication into his classes. He was an award winning teacher and a respected colleague.”

 

Rest in peace, Bruce Hyde!

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He was only in a few episodes but he made a huge impact. Fare thee well, Bruce Hyde. I hope that Kathleen took you home again...

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I don't know ths star trek crew,best regards to him and his family members

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