Steven Thompson e-mails:
While my family also enjoys our annual 1776 showing this weekend, I’m reminded that the very first time I saw it was on a field trip from school! With just a few days notice, my entire Kentucky junior high school was taken in buses (I was in 7th grade) to Cincinnati’s Carousel theater, the largest curved Cinemascope screen in Ohio! We all came out singing and saying “I want to be Ben Franklin!” and snickering about Jefferson’s “burning”. I always found it ironic that to generations, Howard da Silva became the embodiment of American Patriotism after the vicious blacklisting he received as a communist in the fifties. Even more ironically, in the mid-seventies he portrayed a startling Kruschev in the TV movie MISSLES OF OCTOBER!