Sunday, August 30, 2026

Jack Swigert is born in Denver, then gets a last-minute seat on Apollo 13

1931 · Denver (Park Hill / East High); CU Boulder

John Leonard "Jack" Swigert Jr. was born in Denver on Aug. 30, 1931. Thirty-nine years later he was the last-minute command-module pilot on Apollo 13, the Moon mission that blew an oxygen tank and still brought everyone home.

He learned to fly before he learned to vote.

Swigert grew up in Park Hill, took a private-pilot license at 16, finished East High in 1949, and played football at the University of Colorado while collecting a mechanical-engineering degree. Air Force fighter time in Japan and Korea, test-pilot work, two more graduate degrees, then NASA on the third try. He was backup. He was supposed to watch.

Seventy-two hours before launch in April 1970, prime command-module pilot Ken Mattingly was scratched for a measles exposure he never actually caught. Swigert walked in. Fifty-five hours later an oxygen tank in the service module ruptured. The line from the spacecraft — Swigert first, then Jim Lovell — was the dryer original: "Houston, we've had a problem." The lunar module Aquarius became a lifeboat. The crew looped the far side of the Moon farther from Earth than anyone had gone, jury-rigged a carbon-dioxide "mailbox" so they would not asphyxiate on their own breath, and splashed down on April 17. The landing was canceled. The three men were not.

Colorado sent him to Congress next. Voters in the new 6th District elected him in November 1982. He died of cancer on December 27, a week before he could be sworn in. The state later put him in Statuary Hall — the only astronaut in the U.S. Capitol — in a bronze by Loveland sculptors George and Mark Lundeen. A twin stands over the B-gates train at DIA. Another watches Lowry at Wings Over the Rockies, a few miles from the neighborhood that produced him.

He would have turned 95 today. The statue at the airport does not blink. That is the point.

Sources: NASA astronaut biography — John L. Swigert Jr. · Encyclopaedia Britannica — Jack Swigert · Architect of the Capitol — Colorado statue · Wikipedia — Jack Swigert

Grasshoppers darken the Denver sun

1875 · Denver and the Front Range plains

On Aug. 30, 1875, after nearly two weeks of swarms, National Weather Service notes say the grasshoppers over Denver were so numerous they almost darkened the sun. Streets were covered. City gardens were gone. Ripe grain in the countryside went with them.

The insects had been commuting since the 19th.

NWS Denver weather history is unusually literary about it. Grasshoppers appeared in great numbers at 10 a.m. on August 19. Thousands landed. The streets were literally covered. Swarms showed up every day after that. On the 30th the sky itself started to lose the argument.

What Denver was watching was the Rocky Mountain locust — Melanoplus spretus — a plains grasshopper that could flip into a flying carpet when the conditions lined up. The 1870s were its last big tour. One 1875 swarm measured later as Albert's Swarm was estimated in the trillions and entered the record books as the greatest concentration of animals anyone has tried to count. Farmers from Colorado to Nebraska watched fields vanish to the stems. The Army ended up hauling food west that winter so homesteaders would not starve. It is often cited as an early federal disaster response, minus the press conference.

Then the species did something even stranger than blot out the sun. It vanished. The last confirmed collections came in the early 1900s — a handful of specimens in Colorado in 1904 — and Melanoplus spretus is now extinct. The leading theory is unglamorous: settlers plowed the river-valley breeding grounds where the locusts went quiet between irruptions, and dug up the eggs with the potatoes.

If a grasshopper lands on your windshield tonight, it is a cousin, not a sequel. The original company folded. Denver kept the weather note.

Sources: NWS Denver — August weather history notes · Denver Post — 1875 locust plague · Wikipedia — Rocky Mountain locust

Julie Bishop is born in Denver, works 80 pictures, and dies on the same date

1914 · Denver

Actress Julie Bishop — born Jacqueline Brown in Denver on Aug. 30, 1914 — appeared in more than 80 films, including work with Laurel and Hardy and John Wayne. She died in Mendocino, California, on her 87th birthday in 2001.

She left town young and took the names with her.

Jacqueline Brown started as a child extra in 1923, billed later as Jacqueline Wells and, for one stretch, Diane Duval. Warner Bros. offered a contract in 1941 on the condition that Jacqueline Wells sounded too much like a B-picture. She picked Julie Bishop because it matched the monograms already stamped on her luggage from a brief earlier marriage. Hollywood logic: keep the suitcases, change the person.

The filmography is a tour of the studio system at working speed — Laurel and Hardy shorts, Lady Gangster, Action in the North Atlantic, Northern Pursuit, Rhapsody in Blue, Sands of Iwo Jima opposite Wayne, The High and the Mighty. More than 80 credits between the silent era and 1957, then she stopped. She had married a test pilot who flew for Howard Hughes. Their daughter, Pamela Susan Shoop, became an actress too.

She died of pneumonia in Mendocino on August 30, 2001, the same calendar square she had entered in Denver 87 years earlier. Not a tragedy with a moral. Just a clean loop: a Colorado birthday, a lot of pictures, and an exit on schedule.

Sources: Wikipedia — Julie Bishop · On This Day — Julie Bishop born in Denver