Not a very good title, so my apologies.

For some reason, (I wasn't the person who did it, i digress) we have a table structure where the field type for a date is varchar. (odd).

We have some dates, such as:

```
1932-04-01 00:00:00 and 1929-07-04 00:00:00

```

I need to do a query which will convert these date strings into a unix time stamp, however, in mySQL if you convert a date which is before 1970 it will return 0.

Any ideas?

Thanks so much!

EDIT: Wrong date format. ooops.