Hermosa Beach businessman Roger Bacon seals final deal
Roger Bacon in 2009, climbing the Vetter Windmill, which he helped restore. Photo by Abigail Miller Roger Bacon was polarizing. “I guess that’s one funeral I won’t be going to,” a former politician from a neighboring city said on learning of the Hermosa Beach businessman’s death last Friday, at age 88, of conditions related to old age. Bacon’s civic contributions to Hermosa Beach equaled those of anyone of his generation, as did the enmity he engendered. “I know I piss people off,” he said with characteristic bluntness in a 1997 Easy Reader interview. He learned the power of showmanship in his teen years at his father’s auto dealership, Les Bacon Ford, where he made a Southern California catchphrase of “Get off your couch and come on down to Les Bacon Ford.” He offered a new Ford as a prize in a pole sitting contest, which he thought no one could win, because it required sitting atop a 60-foot pole for 30 days. When one sitter reached the 29th day, Bacon sent a message up the pole that the sitter’s wife was across the street at the Hermosa Saloon with another man. The already delirious pole sitter scurred down the pole to investigate. Roger Bacon two years ago, at age 86, striking…
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