Lily Rantanen

When Mira Cunning ‘26 made the first edits of Mr. Bacon in Photoshop, she had no idea how far it would go. After sending her image–a graphic of Mr. Bacon in sunglasses with the caption It’s a great day to be a Little Hawk–to a friend, Elizabeth Gugliuzza ‘26, she continued to create more and more Mr. Bacon-themed designs.

Then, everything took off like a rocket ship off a launchpad.

“We were like, ‘Oh my gosh, this could be a business,’” Cunning said. “We made an Instagram account and it got super popular.”

Presently, the Mr. Bacon Day Instagram account sits at a cool 176 followers–not too shabby for something created from a fleeting thought.

Cunning–as well as a few other friends, including Gugliuzza–are the brains behind Mr. Bacon Day, a holiday on April 23rd celebrating the day Mr. Bacon became Principal more than ten years ago. Part tongue-in-cheek, part dead serious, Mr. Bacon Day is everything that it needs to be.

“Mr. Bacon is infamous throughout our school for being kind of a goofball,” Cunning said of her reasoning behind the holiday. “But he’s very passionate about school spirit.”

With Mr. Bacon Day, Cunning decided to lean into this personification of the principal. On the Mr. Bacon Day Instagram account, you can order shirts, pins, and posters with designs like the one that spurred Cunning’s original idea behind the celebration.

Of course, because Mr. Bacon Day is technically a business, there have been some struggles that Cunning and the rest of the Mr. Bacon Day team has had to grapple with. Cunning admitted that when they first started selling T-shirts, they underpriced them, which led to financial problems later on when they had to order the shirts from a printing company.

“Originally, when we were looking at the prices, we didn’t take into account that we had five different designs and all of those designs would cost different amounts based on how much we had to order,” Cunning said. Since the Mr. Bacon Day team priced them at $15 originally and they cost around $20 to print, they actually ended up with a financial loss instead of a profit, which came out of Cunning’s own bank account.

Cunning’s ingenious creation has, in fact, been approved by City High administration. Earlier this year, Mr. Bacon Day team member Grey Linley was posted on the Iowa City High School Instagram account wearing one of the six designs sold, this one featuring a headshot of Mr. Bacon with bacon strips raining down around him.

“We were worried Mr. Bacon would be opposed to the holiday, but overall, he seems fairly positive about it,” Cunning said. “We talked to him and he was pretty ‘go get ‘em.’ He even suggested posing it to the school Senate for funding which we did not end up doing.”

You can find more about the holiday on the Instagram account.

“We’re appreciating Mr. Bacon and all he’s done for the school, but at the same time, we’re just having fun with it,” Cunning said.