Well, that one is a puzzler. I will offer up a wild guess since you haven't heard back from anyone for a while on this. Could it be that the spark plug in the #1 cylinder is badly fouled or otherwise damaged, so badly that spark can't jump across the gap?? I was thinking that maybe when you pull the wire off the distrib, spark can jump across the gap between your clean distrib and plug wire terminals, but maybe for some reason it can't jump across the plug gap? Just a wild guess...