Warning: Brutal Honesty & Belligerent Opinions, about 40 words ahead:
In a nutshell, no.
Were there any people in those type periods who enjoyed geek stuff but were athletic and intelligent who ended up becoming military officers?
Of course.
Actually, that's worse now than it was then. I'd add other sorts of pop entertainers, not just athletes. That's actually
much worse. Seriously, do you realize what a large fraction of the Hollywood pseudo-intellectuals that take themselves so seriously are high school drop outs?
As preface, I fully acknowledge, with no apology, that I'm a genre snob. While I don't disdain fantasy, and certainly there is a fuzzy borderland between it & SF somewhere in Meyers' Commonwealth, with all due respect, I must point out that "dragons and swords" is more characteristic of fantasy. Now, I'll get off my high thoat and address the question as regards SF.
Regardless of when Ellison, first made his infamous remark, the era of the "SF ghetto" was earlier than that. It was one front in the older culture war that C.P.Snow wrote about. The noble Greek philosopher types who dealt with the Big, Abstract, Important, Ethereal questions (meaning the ones where nobody could actually
prove you were just a glib bull ejesta artist) vs. the grubby handed slave types who had the vulgarity to deal with the physically real and eventually even cast aspersions on Aristotle's physics by measuring things in the objective real world (How dare they?). Yeah, my bias is showing - if that's a problem, deal with it. I'm strongly partisan in that war - and it still goes on. Reality matters.
Asimov wrote eloquently on this factor in the decline of the "SF is trash" idea in one of his essays in the F&SF series (his finest work, BTW). Specifically about how this began to change with the launch of Sputnik. The changing perception of SF was part of the changing perception of
science.
Jane & Joe Sixpack and the Congress'en that pandered to them began to dimly perceive that those 4-eyed, pointy-headed intellectuals were the ones that could build the ICBMs and maybe they were useful after all. JFK's moon speech was part of this sequence. And then he was killed (a coup IMO, but that's another subject, and borders on the verboten here) & he became a Saint, whose vision Must Not be Questioned. So hey, ho, off to the moon we go.
Of course SF got a boost.
The other big factor in the change is more complex. The career track that lead to teaching English Lit, either at Uni or in HS, attracted a lot more of some types of people than others. Most of them were the type that crave a feeling of intellectual superiority, but couldn't pass algebra. They were uncomfortably aware that SF was superficially similar to their own subject matter so they felt they'd be expected to have an opinion on it. But they were also aware, that by and large, they didn't understand it. So they turned up their noses and dissed it. That didn't stop the engineering or physics students from reading it. Those profs were pretty effective in defining the "proper" view of SF as trash before the 60s.
But dramatic economic growth, followed by Vietnam, the Pill, and an era with no known venereal diseases that weren't trivially curable lead to the youth rebellion of the 60s. Drawing those links would be another long essay, but I'll just leave that stub. Suffice to say, "Question Authority" became the order of day and the supercilious English prof shrilly asserting that SF was trash wasn't blindly assumed to know what the Heck he was talking about.
The flower children already
knew that it was the smart kids in high school that were always reading Analog. So, SF became
cool.
That was good and bad. The market exploded and publishers were desperate to cash in on it. But there wasn't really enough talent to go around. So a lot of powdered skim milk got sold as cream. And the poor, vacuous theater major in her bell bottoms & Birkenstocks, striving to look hip and catch the eye of the bearded boy in beads sat on the bench in the park with her copy of
Dangerous Visions pretending to read Science Fiction. Because The Establishment disapproved. Which made it chic.
