WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE WITH YOUR BACON?

July 8th in history:

We can’t prove it, but it’s possible that every item listed in “Triviazoids” is within six degrees of Kevin Bacon. The star of “Footloose” and dozens of other movies was born on July 8th, 1958.

Bacon had a role in the movie “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.” And on July 8th, 1965, Ronald Biggs escaped from a British prison where he was serving time for his role in the “Great Train Robbery” of 1963. He stayed out of prison for more than 30 years before turning himself in.

Bacon played Jack Swigert, one of the three endangered astronauts in the film “Apollo 13.”   The Apollo 13 flight of 1970 was supposed to be the third mission to land men on the moon.  Pete Conrad of Apollo 12, the third man to walk on the moon, was another real-life astronaut portrayed in the movie.   Conrad died on this date in 1999, at age 69.

In the movie “Frost/Nixon,” Kevin Bacon portrayed a Marine colonel.  On July 8th, 1776, a colonel named John Nixon publicly read the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia for the first time since it was adopted.

Two governors who ran for president against Richard Nixon in 1968 were born on July 8th, one year apart.  Michigan’s George Romney (born 1907) later served in Nixon’s cabinet, and was the father of future governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  And Nelson Rockefeller of New York (1908) was chosen to succeed Gerald Ford as vice president in 1974, four months after Nixon resigned from the presidency. 

PRESIDENTS ON TV AND IN THE MOVIES

April 7th in history:

The first publicly-seen television broadcast between two U.S. cities happened on April 7th, 1927. The link between New York and Washington featured President Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of Commerce, who would be president himself just two years later: Herbert Hoover.

President Richard Nixon announced on April 7th, 1969, that he would increase the U.S. troop withdrawals from Vietnam.

That announcement came on the 30th birthday of two famous men whose careers would be tied to Vietnam and Nixon. Director Francis Ford Coppola set the novel “Heart of Darkness” in Vietnam for his war epic “Apocalypse Now.” And TV personality David Frost conducted a famous series of 1977 interviews with former President Nixon, which were dramatized in the play and movie “Frost/Nixon.”

Also born on April 7th: Daniel Ellsberg (1931), famous for releasing the Pentagon Papers revealing government decisions about the Vietnam War, and another movie director, Alan J. Pakula (1928), who made “All the President’s Men,” about the Washington Post reporters who uncovered many details about the Watergate scandal in the Nixon White House.