February 6, 2007

• It's the birthday of the 40th president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, born in Tampico, Illinois (1911). His father suffered from alcoholism,
  and Reagan was only 11 years old when he first came upon his father
  drunk and passed out on the front porch. Reagan wrote about the
  incident in his 1965 memoir, Where's the Rest of
  Me. He
  said, "That was my first moment of taking responsibility. ... I bent
  over him, smelling the sharp odor of whiskey from the speakeasy. I got
  a fistful of his overcoat. Opening the door, I managed to drag him
  inside and get him to bed. In a few days, he was the bluff, hearty man
  I knew
  and loved and will always remember."

  Reagan went into broadcasting and then got a job as an actor in B
  movies. He loved acting because, he said, "So much of our profession is
  taken up with pretending, with the interpretation of never-never roles,
  that an actor must spend at least half his waking hours in fantasy."
  But by the mid-1950s, Reagan's career as an actor had stalled. He spent
  eight years as the host of a TV show called "General Electric Theater."
  But he was slowly growing more interested in politics. He became a
  Republican in 1962, and in 1964 the Republican Party asked him to give
  a half-hour
  address at the convention to nominate Barry Goldwater. The speech was
  so good that a group of Republicans got together and persuaded Reagan
  to run for governor of California, and that was the beginning of his
  political career.  (From "The Writer's Almanac.")

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