Providence. Pt. 1. (Or #42 Meets #35)

I was watching one of those short bio’s on the Turner Classic Movie Channel. And this series of photos, film clips and monologue featured one of the movie icons of the 20^th century. Cary Grant. Tony Curtis narrated this particular segment. He spoke of sitting in his boyhood home at the age of 16, and watching the movie, “Destination Tokyo;” released in 1943. In one scene Cary Grant peers through a periscope, as he prepares to launch a torpedo against a Japanese ship. Of course, Tony was fascinated with the movie, and even more fascinated with Archibald Leach; (for this was Grant’s rather unfortunate birth name). 

Little could Tony Curtis have imagined where fate would take him, and to whom it would introduce him. For you see, a scant decade and a half later Tony Curtis was provided the inestimable privilege of co-starring alongside (you guessed it)… Cary Grant in another war movie, “Operation Petticoat,” and in which the famous actor recreated that earlier scene of which Tony was so familiar.

Of course, over the course of time there have been any number of such scenarios involving historical figures. I’m reminded of a ‘chance meeting’ between the best known and most revered president of the last century, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and an adolescent boy who would, ultimately, assume the presidency at the end of the same century, and serve into the emerging one. Bill Clinton. 

A black & white video exists of the meeting, in which Bill Clinton, as a member of a group of American Legion boys, referred to as “Boys Nation,” shakes hands with Kennedy at the White House. #42 meets #35. The group president has said that immediately after Clinton shook hands with his hero, he turned to his compatriots and said, “One day I’m going to have that man’s job!” (Well, the rest is, as they say, history). Interestingly enough, after President Clinton assumed office he invited that same bunch of boys, now aging men, to the White House to pose for a group photo; similar to one they posed for a full three decades before.

(to be continued)



   By William McDonald, PhD. From (Mc)Donald's Daily Diary. Vol. 43. Copyright pending

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