It is not simply that both were Republican politicians (Grandy served four terms in the House of Representatives between 19). This brings me to a post at the site this week, which asked the question: what connection does Fred Grandy, the actor familiar to multitudes as Gopher on the TV series The Love Boat, have with Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh President? Nonetheless, six degrees is the formulation still used with his name. With all the club dates he’s done by now, probably every last American, and most Canadians, knows someone, or at least knows someone who knows someone, who has met him. The students had come across the six-degrees concept in their textbooks, and applying it to the toothsome star, began to explore the ways in which he could be connected to just about any celebrity, or maybe even non-celebrity, in the known universe.Īnd this was long before Kevin Bacon began crisscrossing the country, performing in a musical duo with his brother. It was subsequently adapted into a film starring Will Smith, which brought the “six degrees” idea more prominence.īut even before then, late one evening at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, some students, after watching a videotape of Footloose starring Kevin Bacon, began to ponder the various movies Bacon had appeared in, and those with whom he had shared the screen. In 1990, John Guare wrote a play inspired by the misdeeds of professional impostor David Hampton, and titled his work Six Degrees Of Separation. This helped made the idea a topic of dinner-table conversation around the country. In a magazine article in the 1970s, psychologist Stanley Milgram cited data that tended to establish the truth of Kartinthy’s thesis. His story, “Chain Links,” pondered the idea that it was possible to pick any two people at random from the billion and a half then living on this planet, and find somebody who knew the first person, who knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone who knew the second person. But in a short story he wrote in 1929, he introduced a concept that he derived from studying the mathematics of probability, and which, for over a quarter-century, has been a staple of discussion wherever pop-culture junkies and bored college students assemble. Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938) is a name little known now except to students of Hungarian literature.
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