Atlanta's Bill Pacer is all about the Benjamin

• Courtesy of Bill Pacer

Veteran Atlanta actor Bill Pacer wants to expand people's perception of Benjamin Franklin as simply "the man who tamed electricity." "I'm helping to educate about a person everyone knows," says Pacer, who finds Franklin an inexhaustible subject. "What gives me great pleasure when I do Franklin is the number of times I say to myself, 'I didn't know that!'"

Pacer, who goes by the nickname "Barefoot Bill," first donned the 18th century spectacles and puffy shirt eight years ago. "I was hired for the Georgia Independence Day Festival to be Franklin as a walkabout character," says Pacer, who found that he enjoyed mingling with visitors in the guise of the writer, inventor, diplomat, and signer of the Declaration of Independence. "Friends told me, 'Why not do a Ben Franklin show? You look just like him.' I thought it would take just six months to do the research for it, and years later, I'm still researching. Any information I find out about him on the Internet, I double and quadruple check."