It turns out, he had called not only me but also the folks at Vulcan’s Tourism and Trek Station to lend his support. Staff there were “courteous and professional” but also harboured doubts that the man on the other end of the line was Mr. Spock. They assumed they were being “punked.” In a town that designs its tourism plan around Star Trek, crank calls are frequent.

“I didn’t know if it was real or not,” Dayna Dickens, then the town’s tourism co-ordinator, told me later that day. “We are in a bit of a target position.”

No one really knows why Nimoy took up the cause. As fans know, he had a cameo in Abrams’ reboot and certainly spoke highly of it when I spoke to him that day. Nevertheless, after briefly morphing into Mr. Spock, he said: “My people in Vulcan are very disappointed and something needs to be done about it.”

In the end, no doubt thanks to the massive publicity Nimoy generated, a compromise was reached. Paramount agreed to an exclusive advanced screening in Calgary for 300 Vulcan residents, who were chosen by lottery and bused into the city in early May. Nimoy didn’t speak publicly about it again, but released a joint statement with Paramount suggesting the compromise was “logical”. The evening had a celebratory feel to it but it was nothing compared to the giddy spectacle in Vulcan a year later, when Nimoy made his first appearance in the town at a ceremony to help usher in the small farming community’s new status as the “Official Star Trek Capital of Canada.” The visit coincided with his appearance at the 2010 Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo.

Nimoy, who passed away on Friday at the age of 83, was probably not the most famous person I’ve spoken to. Unlike the star attractions at the Calgary Expo these days, it was easy to get an interview with the actor. In fact, he ended up leaving another message on my voicemail rather than set up an interview time through a publicist (He never seemed to call when I was in).

But my Spock story is the one that my friends still like to hear. When I was growing up, reruns of the original Star Trek aired Saturday at noon on one of the few channels we received in rural Ontario. Spock helped introduce me to space and the stars and science fiction a few years before I saw Star Wars in a movie theatre. So having him appear on my voicemail was surreal.

Judging by the outpouring of affection expressed after he died, it’s clear that Nimoy’s impact went far beyond an actor playing a role. He was Spock. Losing him was losing a piece of our culture. I’ve never kept an audio file from work before or since, at least not for sentimental reasons. But I still have the one I recorded from my voicemail on the day he called the Calgary Herald to go to bat for Vulcan.