A Superb Warrior has died--Salute her with me!

Friends, I speak of Admiral K'Zhen, Gennie Summers, leader of the Klingon Strike Force for many years. She has just died. Oh, but I will miss her! And all of Trek fandom has cause to raise a shout to be heard in the Black Fleet.

Here is a piece I wrote about her several years ago, for KAG's newsletter, the Mindscanner. It was my attempt at the time to fill in some background on her and express my admiration. I'm not going to go through it and change the present tenses to past:-)

Gennie Summers-K'Zhen-where to start?T

She lives in her own little house in Cassville, MO. She's older than me and Kerla, younger thanGod.

For some years now, she has been Admiral K'Zhen, guiding spirit of the Klingon Strike Force (started by Kris, carried on by Keel, saved by K'Zhen from foundering when Keel retired from leadership.).

Gennie is an expert gamer-by-mail who keeps the KSF's round-robins lively with invention. Going
much further back, to the early seventies, though, she has been a mainstay of
Star Trek fandom in general, ever ready to contribute her art to the dozens of amateur publications that sprang up in tribute to the show. (She is one of the rare fannish artists who will draw you a whole page full of figures complete with hands and feet (!), capable of expressing most any action or emotion you need to complement a story. She is a zine-editor's dream come to life.)

My first through-the-mail encounter with Gennie came in 1989, after I visited Linda
Slusher in Ohio. Linda showed me several of her own Klingon stories illustrated
by Gennie in zines like the Rondeaus' Clipper Trade Ship and Roberta Rogow's
GRIP, and gave me her address when I admitted that I was eager to get involved
with Klingon zining myself.Times-Roman"">

Starting with the first issue of Agonizer, Gennie decorated every one of my Klingon projects with
fierce warriors, and imaginatively garbed (and some exquisitely
"un-garbed") females. She crafted portraits of fannish Klingons on
request. She collaborated with both writers and other artists when invited,
always there to support another's fannish fun.

Gennie's sense of humor, energy, kindness, creativity (and the fact that she was a self-described hermit
who was not likely to come to any of our out-of-Missouri conventions) made it a
long-term goal of mine to travel to meet her face-to-face. I finally did manage
it in 1998, almost ten years after our first communications. Dave Kraklow
(Kadak) was living in Springfield, near Cassville. He had befriended Gennie and
was trying to fit her out with e-mail, so had been visiting her on a monthly
basis trying to get things going on her limited budget. He warned me that she
was shy of visitors. She has lived alone since her aged parents died and was
worried that a visitor would find her house too messy. I wrote to her ahead of
time, hoping that if I described the house I grew up in which featured cats
falling through the attic drop-ceiling onto my head ("drop" is
right:-) as I sat on the potty would reassure her. To my delight, she chuckled
and said I could come along.

So days before we were to head off to the Klingon Year Games in the summer of '98, Kadak and I drove the hour to
Cassville and had a day with Gennie that fulfilled all my hopes and brought
surprises too. Gennie is short, zoftig, with curly gray hair and the smile
you'd expect. She showed me her collections of drawings, a lifetime's fannish
industry. She let me browse through her zine collection of close to a dozen
cartons full of the amateur books, most of them the paper cover, 11X 8 " format which
fans make to celebrate their loves. Gennie's were all "comps", the
free copies fannish publishers send to their contributors by way of thanks.
They ranged in date from the seventies to the present. Most were Star
Trek-related, but there were plenty of Star Wars and "multi-media"
projects as well. I settled in to survey the collection while Kadak and the
Admiral went to fiddle with the computer.

The zines by themselves were a treasure trove, a monument to Gennie's not-for-money-but-for love
productiveness. But I soon got distracted by the collection of artifacts
arranged on shelves in the little zine closet. There was a box full of metal
insignia, a military looking cap, a pile of the colored images of handsome
space captains, intimidating alien opponents and an assortment of rocketships,
and planets, all conceived and hand-crafted by Gennie. I was intrigued by a
couple of scrap pages crammed with notes about what sounded like the components
of a rocket command console-to be built of transistors, bulbs, bells, and
wires. A "little red handbook", mimeoed in purple, with rules for
conduct within the SPACEFLEET Club looked to date from the 'fifties, long
before Star Trek ever appeared.

When I asked Gennie about these things, she explained that she had indeed started SPACEFLEET almost
40 years ago when she lived with parents in Omaha. She must always have been
pretty and friendly, but she says she never wanted to marry. She was happy to
stay with her parents, her Dad, who ran a gas station, and her Mom who kept
house. She loved the space operas on radio and TV. When she had time away from
her mundane jobs--she'd worked as a secretary and dog groomer--she turned her
energy to converting a small outbuilding on her family's property into a
wrap-around spaceship console. She developed the idea of SPACEFLEET and invited
the neighborhood kids to get involved.

At one time, she had close to two dozen young cadets enrolled (They look six to fifteen-ish in the photos with the deckled edges. All were welcome.). She found her Dad's old Merchant Marine training manual and adapted the rifle drill for her junior recruits. She has pictures of herself, a female cousin and a cadre of children in full dress SPACEFLEET garb, all her own handiwork, practicing with wooden guns; photos also of the winking, blinking buzzing console which covered the walls of the shack's interior-a wonderland effect she and her cohorts never stopped tweaking, a mosaic built of magpie glitter, buttons, hub caps, handles,

even the gleaming fender of an old Ford. It includes a viewscreen into which
her portraits, landscapes and prop drawings (the very ones I had found in the
zine closet) could be slid, made to coordinate with the unfolding of adventure
scripts she prepared for special meetings of the club.

The club was a neighborhood glory for over a decade. One set of parents came to visit to make
sure Gennie wasn't some kind of pedophile weirdo. She's not a pedophile (I
needed to say that, didn't I?????). Weird, she admits to, but she's wise and
knows that kids are definitely the best company for the kind of play she has
always enjoyed most--fantasy role playing. Another time, a building inspector
from town came to satisfy himself that "headquarters" wouldn't fall
in around their heads. He officiously instructed Gennie to keep people from
climbing around on the roof. When his own kid became a loyal member of
SPACEFLEET (and he himself was impressed with the strong Christian values which
Gennie judiciously expressed as an epilogue in the handbook), he became a
supporter too. (Gennie's Jewish cadet didn't mind the Jesus-y window dressing.)

When Gennie's folks became ill, she moved with them to the small house in Cassville, Missouri, now
well known as KSF Headquarters. The SPACEFLEET console was dismantled to make
the move with her. Twenty years later, one of her grown cadets came to visit
her. Gennie was tickled when he took most of the components home to recreate
the fun for his own kids. My prize souvenir of my visit to her is one of the
diamond-shaped tin pins she made for her recruits. It's done up in yellow
paint, edged in red, with a cigar-shaped rocket of blue and red soaring
starwards.

Dave did get Gennie to VisionCon in Springfield a couple of times. She greeted friends like Kragtowl (Bill Reed) and K'Lay (Margie McDonnell, a KSF stalwart),
and at least some of the more local fans had a chance to meet her.