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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