Perhaps my most exciting "escape" occurred not long afterwards in a Long Island department store... where I was promoting an album I'd recorded on Dot Records entitled "Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock's Music from Outer Space."
I was signing autographs at a counter, closed in on either side by portable gates. At some point, the crowd started pushing so hard that the gates started to collapse. Unfortunately, the crowd was noisy, and out of control; I tried standing on a counter and talking to them to quiet them down, but there were just too many people. Finally, the manager grabbed my arm and said, “Let’s get out of here!”
We pushed our way through the throng and started running. Fortunately, we made it up to the manager’s office and locked the door behind us, thinking we were safe at last. But then we realized we had a new problem: we were now trapped in the office! There was no way out of the building except down and through the crowd.
But the manager was a resourceful man, and said, “Wait a minute. We can’t go down because of all the people. But we can go up. There’s a back stairway that leads to the roof…” He placed a call to the fire department, who sent a hook-and-ladder truck… I went up to the roof, climbed down the provided fire ladder, and made good my escape!
Source: Nimoy, I Am Spock, 80-82.
