PRE-ASSAULT: Bob Hope’s TV special about D-day...

PRE-ASSAULT: Bob Hope’s TV special about D-day next Monday night on NBC will be special to Richard T. Headrick, 77, of Irvine. When Hope learned that Headrick had been an adviser to Dwight D. Eisenhower on bombing strategies at Normandy, he asked him to his home in Toluca Lake to be interviewed for the show. . . . “Unfortunately, I ended up on the cutting room floor,” Headrick says with a chuckle. “But my visit with Bob was delightful.”

HISTORIC MEAL? Residents at the Palm Terrace Retirement Home in Laguna Hills are recalling life on the home front during the D-day era with a World War II recipe book. It’s selling throughout South County for $3, and includes wholesome meals like Marge Mackessy’s pork chop and potato casserole. Says Mackessy: “When my three sons came home from the war, I made each of them what they wanted--but they all liked this!”

HAPPY DAY: The Orange County Bar Assn. wanted a prominent jurist for the July 15 groundbreaking of the Ronald Reagan U.S. Courthouse at Santa Ana’s Civic Center. It got one. . . . Sandra Day O’Connor, a Reagan appointee and the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, will join a celebration at Le Meridien hotel in Newport Beach. “It’s the first time that a Supreme Court justice has ever been here for a bar event,” says Arthur Nakazato, a bar official. “And Justice O’Connor wanted to attend this event for a very special reason.”

ORANGE SLICKER I: A support group for the county Probation Department has finagled a special Orange County premiere for “City Slickers II.” It’s a red-carpet, $100 per ticket fund-raiser Thursday night to help juvenile delinquents. . . . There’s a buffet at Roxbury South at Santa Ana’s Hutton Centre, followed by the movie next door at the Edwards Cinema. Will Billy Crystal be there? “He’s iffy,” says a spokesman. “But we did get Bo Derek and Lorenzo Lamas.”