It’s a rare thing to meet someone who has it all figured out—a person whose ambitions never outreach their means and who can find nirvana within a reasonable drive from their home. But for nearly 40 years, Milwaukeeans could find such a person with perhaps more ease than the residents of any other city in the nation. From the 1960s through the 1990s, one needed only to visit Bradford Beach during the morning hours, be it the peak of the summer swelter or the depths of the winter chill, to find a man at an enviable peace. This was the domain of Dick Bacon, a Milwaukee brewery worker with no hopes or dreams much beyond playing volleyball, lounging on the beach (in any weather) and building his tan.
Bacon died 15 years ago this summer, depriving Milwaukee of one of its most colorful (usually somewhere between a light mahogany and a glimmering bronze) characters. But Bacon himself was hardly cheated in life. Despite his modest means, he lived nearly every day on his own terms—save for the occasional arrest for nude sunbathing—and bred a legacy that still survives long after his last morning spent on the beach.
If anyone was born to gain fame as a nude male sunbather, it was Richard “Dick” Bacon. While the numerous newspaper articles on Bacon neglect to give details about his upbringing, he was a known figure at Milwaukee’s Bradford Beach by the early 1960s, when he began a streak of daily tanning sessions at the crest of Lake Michigan that would last until his death in August 2000. “I’ve only had one ambition in life: To enjoy it to the fullest and never have to work any more than I have to support myself,” Bacon told the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1978. “From the time I was a kid, the only thing I planned for was retirement.”
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When he worked, he labored at the Pabst Brewery, sticking to the second and third shifts, so he could reserve his mornings for the beach. He liked to recount an incident from his youth—when he fell asleep on a West Coast beach and awoke to a seal sleeping beside him—that cinched his love for sand. Sometime in the 1960s, he met a girl at Bradford whom he would eventually marry. When she asked him his name, he replied, “Bacon. Wanna strip?” They stayed together for about nine years before she realized his deepest love would always be for the beach.
By the late 1970s, Bacon had established himself as a local celebrity. He won a string of nude male modeling contests—Mr. Nude America 1973, Mr. Nude Apollo 1976 and Mr. Nude Galaxy 1977. His white van—emblazoned with his nickname, “The Nude Dude,” on its side—became nearly as recognizable as his dusky and chiseled 6-foot-2-inch frame.
He pasted an ad for his forthcoming autobiography, The Naked Truth, on the vehicle, but readily admitted he hadn’t written anything past the title. He was featured, au natural, in the pages of the skin magazine Oui in December 1974 and was a model for the cover of several Doc Savage pulp novel reprints. He appeared on several local stages: in figure drawing classes as an artists model, gyrating as a stripper at the Pussycat-A-Go-Go club on West Burleigh and—dressed in a pair of tiny gold briefs—as the doctor’s “creation” during the early run of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Oriental Theatre.
While most embraced Bacon’s laidback attitude and free-spirited style, his ways managed to rub an uptight few in the city the wrong way. “I get hate mail and obscene phone calls from people who are resentful,” he said in 1978. “Because I don’t worry about anything but playing volleyball at the beach, keeping up my suntan and paying rent, which is $100 a month.” But Bacon let such talk get to him no more than he did the freezing winds of Lake Michigan when he lay out in the winter months. “I’ve always had a need to feel completely free,” he said, “to be responsible to no one, to do only those things that make me feel free and happy.”
In the mid-’80s, Bacon led an ill-fated effort to establish a nudist beach just north of the water intake facility on Bradford Beach. He managed to draw a number of followers, but the vice squad usually busted up the gatherings. Bacon himself received a number of fines for nude sunbathing over the years, but usually just paid his fine and went right back to his typical routine.
His methods for wintertime sunbathing earned some nationwide attention in the early ’80s, as a number of newspapers ran photos of him in his custom-built foil-lined cardboard cubicle, which he claimed could reflect the sun’s rays to create a cozy 80-degree pocket on even the coldest Milwaukee days. He made an appearance on “The Jerry Springer Show” in 1995, where he stripped down to a G-string before the hooting audience—he was about 62 years old.
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In August 2000, at the peak of the summer tanning season, Bacon died of a heart attack. Write-ups on his death made sure to note that his autopsy showed no indication of skin cancer. Jim Stingl, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist and friend of Bacon’s, eulogized him under a headline of “There Goes The Sun,” stating, “Dick Bacon would have loved his memorial service, except for the fact that it was indoors and everyone was clothed.”
Check out Matthew J. Prigge’s weekly blog, What Made Milwaukee Famous, at shepherdexpress.com.
