Our RV Adventures

My Bacon Number post got a lot of responses, including readers with connections to Patsy Cline, John Wayne, and Willie Nelson, among others. But we have one BIG winner.

Now I thought I was doing pretty good with my list:

Eleanor Roosevelt
Margaret Mead
(Met them at lectures at Peabody College in Nashville with my mother when I was 10-11)

Werner Von Braun
(Met with my father when he worked at Boeing in Huntsville during the late 60’s on the Apollo project.)

Deke Slayton
(Was my late best friend’s brother-in-law)

Deng Chao Peng (Chinese Chairman)
Barbie Benton
Richard Feynman
Jim Oberg
(Met while they were visiting NASA-JSC when I worked there from 1978-1987.)

John Glenn
John Young
Bob Crippen
Walt Cunningham
Neil Armstrong
Ed Aldrin
Scott Carpenter
Gordo Cooper
Sally Ride
Anna Fisher
Bill Fisher
Story Musgrave
(Met at NASA-JSC when I worked there from 1978-1987.)

*** Challenger 7 ***
Dick Scobee
Mike Smith
Judy Resnik
Ellison Onizuka
Ron McNair
Greg Jarvis
Christa McAuliffe
(Met at NASA-JSC when I worked there from 1978-1987.)

Col. Sanders
(Met while working at a new KFC while in college in 1967. This was when he still visited every new store.)

Willie Mays
Jesse Owens
(Met while working as a Broadcast Engineer at a black radio station in Birmingham.)

Fanny Flagg
(She was my baby sitter when I was a kid. Her real name is Patricia Neal. Her family and mine were close friends.)

Sean Connery
Katherine Ross
John Saxon
Leslie Nielson
Robert Conrad
(Met them while I was at White Sands for the STS-3 Shuttle landing. We were all staying at the same hotel in Alamogordo while they were filming “Wrong is Right”.)

The Mamas and Papas
Gene Watson
Chet Atkins
Floyd Cramer
Boots Randolph
Al Hirt
(Met while playing in bands in Nashville in the mid 60’s)

Kenny ‘Snake’ Stabler  – Super Bowl-Winning Quarterback
(Played High School football with him at Foley High School, Foley, AL and my mother was his tutor in some subjects after school.)

Jimmy Buffet
Almost certainly met him as a kid when he used to surf at Gulf Shores, AL while I grew up there. In his books he talks about surfing at Alabama Point. My friends and I surfed there too, and talked to the kids from Mobile. He’s about two years older than me.

But I think friend and blog reader Boots Gibson has me beat. Here’s hers.

I met and/or cared for quite a few well-known people in my 50 years in the medical field.  A few are: 

Gabby Hayes,
Barbara Stanwyck,
Red Foxx,
Ralph Bellamy,
Elizabeth Taylor’s mother,
David and Ricky Nelson’s parents (Ozzie and Harriet) and grandmother,
David Soul,
Ryan O’Neal,
Baryshnikov,
Evel Knievel,
Richard Burton,
Gary Busey,
Peggy Lee,
Jimmy Durante,
Casey Kasem,
Euell Gibbons,

and she just missed Elvis!

Elvis visited someone in the afternoon when I wasn’t working yet but when I got in for the evening shift the place was still all a buzz.  Those are a few I remember off the top of my head, but there were many others. 

Celebs get sick just like us mere mortals!

Someone asked why, the other day, I mentioned picking up our prescriptions from both Sam’s Club and WalMart. Why two different places?

My answer – Because it’s cheaper. Of course.

WalMart has their $4 – $10 list, so we start with that. Whenever our doctor wants to prescribe something new, we check the list and coordinate with her on it, trying to pick the cheapest one.

But our fallback is Sam’s Extra Value List, their own version of the $4 – $10 list, but with different, in some cases, more expensive drugs. Now, of course you have to be a Sam’s Club member, which runs about $70 per year. But to be able to buy under the Extra Value List, you have to upgrade to a Plus membership for an additional $30 per year. But we usually save the $30 upgrade fee on one month’s prescriptions.

Right now, all of our prescriptions are on one or the other lists, saving us a lot of money every month.

Nice.

As Sheldon says, “Everything’s better with Bluetooth!† And the Jacuzzi people apparently took that to heart.

So let me get this straight. You have to plug in and recharge your shower?

Thought for the Day: 

In 1969, we built the C-5A, a transport plane whose cargo bay was large enough to accommodate the entire first flight of the Wright brothers only 66 years before.

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Again, a day without a lot going on.

We had a great lunch at our favorite King Food, and our favorite Garlic Chicken with Jalapenos. One thing nice was that when we walked in the door, the owner saw us and, knowing we always order the Jalapeno dish and knowing he was out, told us he’d be right back and rushed out to buy some.

Then it was a stop at Lowe’s and Home Depot, still looking at stuff for the house. Then after stopping off at the house and taking some more measurements, we headed back by Sam’s and WalMart before heading home for the night.

I did the washer repaired and reinstalled tonight, and it’s running a test load right now. So we’ll see.

Yesterday I was reading an article about “Degrees of Separation†and the math used to calculate the possibilities, and it made me remember a blog I did about 18 months ago, so here we go again.

So what is your Bacon number?

A couple of days ago I was reading an article about the “Six Degrees of Separation†concept. First put forward in the late 1920’s, it says that any two people on earth can be connected by only five other people in between.

And computer simulations done in the 1970’s seem to show that you only need three degrees of separation to connect any two people in the US.

Just to clarify, a ‘degree of separation’ is one person to another. So if I know one person, that’s one degree. And if they know another person, I’m two degrees from that second person. And so on.

There’s even been a couple of games invented that use this idea, the most famous being “Six Degrees of Kevin Baconâ€. Which is where your Bacon Number comes from.

The idea is to connect the actor Kevin Bacon to any other actor in as few degrees as possible, but only by using movies they were in.

For example, Kevin Bacon to Elvis Presley. This is an easy one.

Elvis Presley was in Change of Habit with Edward Asner.

Edward Asner was in JFK with Kevin Bacon.

So with Kevin Bacon always having a Bacon Number of 0, that means that Edward Asner has a BN of 1 and Elvis has a BN of 2.

And strangely enough if you want to add in plays (the movies of their day), you can give John Wilkes Booth (yes that one!) a Bacon Number of 5, or even a 4

JWB was in an 1863 production of Macbeth with Louisa Lane Drew.

Louisa Lane Drew was in a 1896 production of “The Rivals†with her grandson Lionel Barrymore.

Lionel Barrymore was in “It’s A Wonderful Life†with Jimmy Stuart.

Jimmy Stuart was in “Airport ‘77†with Jack Lemmon.

Jack Lemmon was in “JFK†with Kevin Bacon.

But someone else brought JWB’s Bacon Number down to a 4 with this shortcut.

Lionel Barrymore was in “Right Cross†with Kenneth Tobey.

Kenneth Tobey was in “Hero At Large†with Kevin Bacon.

But another game takes this to a more personal note, with someone picking a famous person from history, and then the rest try to link themselves to that person with the smallest Bacon Number, still using that concept.

For example, Jan and our son Chris, (not sure about our daughter Brandi) met Michael Jackson in Montgomery, AL when he came to the TV station where I worked in the mid 70’s. He was appearing in town and came by the station to do a promo.

So Jan has a BN of 1 to Michael Jackson, and oddly enough, a BN of 3 to Elvis Presley through Lisa Marie Presley.

For me, I was thinking more historical, and was surprised to find that I have a BN of 3 to Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin.

When I was 9 or 10 I met, shook hands with, and talked to Eleanor Roosevelt when she was on a book tour in Nashville, TN in the late 50’s. So that gives me this.

From me to Eleanor Roosevelt to FDR to Churchill and Stalin at the Yalta Conference in 1945. So a BN of 3.

Unfortunately Eleanor did not go to Yalta, otherwise it would have been BN of 2.

But I was astounded to find that I had a BN of 2 to Adolf Hitler from two different directions.

In the mid-60’s my father was working for Boeing on the Apollo project in Huntsville, AL. Boeing had a big party for the employees and my father took me along. When I found out that Werner Von Braun was there, I went and introduced myself in the stumbling German that I was taking at the time. (Hey, at least I didn’t call him a jelly donut like JFK called Berlin)

And since von Braun knew Hitler, that gives this.

Me to Werner von Braun to Adolf Hitler. So a BN of 2.

As for the other path, I mentioned a few days ago that I worked as a Broadcast Engineer at a black radio station (oh the stories I could tell) in Birmingham, AL in the early 70’s, and so got to meet Jesse Owens, the famous Olympic athlete who embarrassed the German athletes at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Contrary to popular ‘knowledge’, Hitler did shake Owen’s hand, because the Olympic Committee demanded it, but Hitler did refuse to ‘congratulate’ him.

Me to Jesse Owens to Adolf Hitler. So a BN of 2 there also.

Now that you’ve heard my Bacon Number stories, let’s throw it out to our blog readers.

What’s your shortest BN to a famous person?

Or even, what famous people have you met?

Thought for the Day: 

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.†– Oscar Wilde

dfgh