Leonard Nimoy died yesterday. He was 83.

He was an actor best known for a three-year role as the half-Vulcan/half-human Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame.

His was just one character of a television series that lasted only three seasons, from September 8, 1966, through June 3, 1969, before coming back to life as a movie franchise, as well as a comic-book topic and at least two more TV series.

To those of my generation, however, Nimoy was always the Spock of the first TV series, whose relentlessly “logical” character was both a life coach and a role model for many of us who were young teens, or even pre-teens, during the time of the show.

“That is not logical” was something the Spock character uttered at least once per Star Trek episode, or seemed to, and was meant as a mild rebuke/reminder to those emotional humans that they were acting out before having thought through the consequences of their reactions to some outside stimulus.

I wanted to be Spock and, actually, it wasn’t that big a jump.

I was never a child prone to outbursts. I was the quiet kid in the back who watched what others were doing and, eventually, volunteered answers or information that the majority may not have needed or welcomed.

But that is what Spock did, and he was respected for it — in the television series.

His character, and the TV series, debuted at a moment when generic unhappiness with the cultural status quo, in the U.S., and the Vietnam War was reaching critical mass, and at the back end of a period when American males — or white males, anyway (think Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Dwight Eisenhower) — were often depicted as quiet and laconic. Men of few words who did not act until the logic of that act could be seen.

Thus, Nimoy’s Spock was pretty much the only TV character that ever served as a personal role model for me.

(Part of the power of Gene Roddenberry‘s series: seemingly everyone of the Boomer generation felt particularly comfortable with at least one Star Trek character.)

To be sure, Spock was somewhere I was moving towards before the series began. I already was attempting to connect dots in the most direct manner. But his (fictional) existence encouraged me to take my own observational rationalism (I wasn’t reading John Locke, at age 12) to another level, to investigate — as best a young teenager could — the notion of “rational being” as the preferred personality going forward into this inevitable, intergalactic age.

(Or so it seemed, in 1969. Two Americans landed on the moon one month after the original TV series went off the air, making it seem almost as if real events had overtaken the premise of humans living and working in space.)

It was not as if I wore Vulcan ears or walked around with the split finger Vulcan salute muttering “live long and prosper”. I never went to a Trekkie convention. Never wore the uniform.

It was a more subtle fandom, and also deeper. I tried to embrace the Spock world view in which emotional outbursts and rash reactions were for the silliest humans, and probably often counter-productive or even destructive.

Again, how much was Spock and how much was already me? It probably was about 25/75. But Nimoy’s Spock gave me a widely recognized character who seemed to sum up — in the world view of a fully formed (fictional) adult — what I aspired to.

Nimoy himself apparently was anything but the relentlessly logical character of the original TV series. He wrote poetry. He recorded music. He made some illogical career decisions.

But his Spock was a sort of muse for a 12-year-old boy, one of the two fictional representations (along with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I had read before Star Trek debuted) that served as outsized influences for a watchful, reticent kid trying to figure out where he fit in a changing society.

I imagine Nimoy knew his Spock character encouraged that sort of thinking. And I imagine somewhere, perhaps in one of his two autobiographies, he came down on whether Spock was a good role model, or an illogical one.

For sure, it was a powerful, and Nimoy helped make it so.