In outer space, there was no blacklist.
Writer Oliver Crawford was among the Hollywood hundreds who found themselves unemployable during the Red Scare-marked 1940s and 1950s.
Fortunately for Crawford, the blacklist was not a career death sentence.
Upon returning from his Industry-imposed hiatus of about four years, Crawford went on to write for dozens of hit TV shows from the 1950s to the '70s: The Fugitive, The Outer Limits, even Gilligan's Island.
In 1967, Crawford stranded Mr. Spock and others in a shuttlecraft in "The Galileo Seven," a first-season episode of the original Star Trek.
Crawford went on to write two more Trek episodes, "The Cloud Minders" and "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," a script about half-black, half-white space aliens that brought TV's Riddler, Frank Gorshin, one of his most memorable post-Batman roles.
It was reported this week that Crawford died Sept. 24 in Los Angeles. He was 91. And had outlived the blacklist by about 50 years.
Other passings of note:
- Nick Reynolds, 75, was one of the original members of the Kingston Trio, a popular guitar- and banjo-picking group that, starting in the mid-1950s, helped make the music charts safe for the generation of Bob Dylans that followed.
- The doo-wop era, much less a Sha Na Na show, would not have been the same without "Rama Lama Ding Dong," the essential 1961 sing-along hit penned by George "Wydell" Jones, 71, for his group, the Edsels.
- Actor House Peters Jr., 92, was a staple of TV Westerns and cowboy movies who really cleaned up, shaved head and all, as the original Mr. Clean in classic TV-era commercials for the cleaning product.
- Dave Powers, 74, won Emmys for directing The Carol Burnett Show, and won ratings for directing most of the episodes of Three's Company.
- Director David Jones, 74, helmed the 1989 Robert De Niro movie Jackknife.