#NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS HAD I IMAGINED DRAWING ABRAHAM LINCOLN
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Just so you know, if you ever write a one-shot about Chloe and Lucifer as president and first gentleman, I would read the shit out if it. I didn't even know I need it but now I think that would be the most hilarious thing
pure crack based on my tags from this post, Lucifer’s feelings about Trump, and the fact that I think we could all really use this.
“Wow,” says Chloe Decker, President-elect of the UnitedStates of America, as she stares at her new office. A windowless cornercubicle, it is not. She laughs a little unsteadily, as the gravity of itfinally, finally seems to be hitting. “So, uh, that’s it, I guess. Not bad. Andbefore you ask, no. We absolutely may not have sex on the desk.”
Her devoted spouse pouts. “Bloody hell, you already stoppedme from jumping on the bed in the Lincoln Bedroom and now this. It’s like you’redetermined not to let me have any fun at all. Besides, I can’t do anything anymore degrading to it than he did.”
Despite herself, Chloe snorts. “Answer’s still no.”
“Oh, come on, Senator. Just once?”
“No, I said. And you’re going to have to get used to callingme Madam President, remember?” Chloe turns to grin up at her husband. Inexactly six days, America’s First Gentleman is going to be one Lucifer Morningstar,and America is going to have absolutely no idea what hit it. The WestboroBaptist Church has already announced plans to picket the inauguration,delighting Lucifer inordinately, and the right wing nut job online hysteriafactory has been double-overtime blowing gaskets on theories about how theseare the biblical End Times and Satan has taken over America (“oh bless them,look how hard they’re working to prove I’m the Devil, it’s adorable”), but therest of the country is too relieved at getting rid of Chloe’s predecessor tocare. There is still a distinct whiff of orangeabout the whole place, and of course he’s been a massive sore loser and hasmade the transition as purposefully unhelpful as possible. But Chloe is armedand ready to go. She wasn’t intending on running for president so early in hercareer, though she did have it in mind after quitting acting and following herdad, a greatly respected U.S. Senator from California who was shot at are-election event in 2000, into politics. Like him, she’s one of the criticallyendangered species who thinks she can really make a positive difference inpeople’s lives, and after a stint in the state legislature, two terms in theHouse, getting elected to the Senate and her dad’s old seat soon after sheturned thirty, and being tipped as a rising star in the Democratic Party totake down FührerCheeto Voldemort in 2020, here she is. It’s a surreal and emotional moment, tosay the least. But they made it.
“Well,” Lucifer says, as they continue to stare at the OvalOffice and Chloe tries to imagine herself sitting there, reading briefings,making decisions, fielding calls from foreign leaders. The work part, at least,is not going to be a problem for her. “As the presidential spouse, do I atleast get to plan the entertainment? Play piano at state dinners, order thestrippers?”
“Lucifer, we have gone over this. Absolutely no strippers atstate dinners.”
“Right, right. We are running a classy White House again.” He snaps his fingers. “And I suppose themedia will have a fit if I spend a lot of money decorating the place to make itlook less like your dead grandmother’s sitting room. All that china and stripedwallpaper, really. It’s already bad enough that we have to have those SecretService gits in sunglasses following us everywhere. Do they think I can’tprotect you?”
“Considering what happens to you when I’m around, and thatwe have a lot of crazy people with guns very angry at us, I’m perfectly finewith them.” Of all of this, Chloe has worried most about the effecton Trixie, transplanting a thirteen-year-old girl across the country from LosAngeles to Washington D.C., transformed overnight from an ordinary tween worryingabout starting high school and boys and pimples to the single most scrutinizedchild in the world, who will never have an entirely normal life again. Maliaand Sasha are going to be by later for a chat, and Chloe has invited Barack andMichelle as her special guests to the inauguration, after all the campaigningthey did for her – along with her ex-husband, former California AttorneyGeneral Dan Espinoza, and U.S. Representative Ella Lopez, from Detroit. Her newvice president, Dr. Linda Martin, has already been dubbed “America’s Mom,” andthe internet loves her. (They also love Chloe and Lucifer.) Amenadiel hadkittens about an angel interfering in human politics and didn’t do any events,while Maze, to prove a point, did about twenty a day. They, however, had tostrictly forbid her from starting them off by running on stage dressed in blackleather, cracking a whip, and yelling, “VOTE FOR CHLOE AND LINDA, PUNY MORTALS!”
As for Lucifer himself, it turns out that if you give himone of his favorite subjects (Chloe) and clear instructions (talk about howawesome she is), he is an absolute lethal weapon, stone-cold closer, on thecampaign trail. Easily drew the biggest crowds, and was, of course, more thanhappy to take a million selfies with everyone afterward. What’s noticeable ishow that feeling seems to have finally permeated the air around here again, howrelieved and hopeful everyone is. They’re expecting a record crowd, and HillaryClinton sent a personal note of thanks and congratulations. Yes,He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did a lot of shit in four years. A lot. But Chloe is going to fix it, atleast as much as she can. And for all his requests to jump on Abraham Lincoln’sbed and have sex on a desk built with wood from the U.S.S. Constitution, she wouldn’t have anyone else as her partner onthis.
“Anyway,” she says, as they step back and start to walk.There are a thousand events to finalize, a draft of her inaugural address tolook over, a few interviews to do, a press conference where she is very muchlooking forward to answering questions about how much the Cheeto is hatinghaving a woman kick him out in total humiliating one-term disgrace (the ElectoralCollege split was close to 400-138 and the popular vote was 55%-33%-12% – yes, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein are stillrunning, and even more bewilderingly, yes, people are still voting for them) as officially America’s least popular president ever. Chloe’s first meetings in the White House are allslotted for women’s groups and minorities and everyone else who needs theirseat at the table back. “I have something else I want you to do.”
“Oh?” Lucifer looks intrigued. “And what is that?”
“Anyone I’m appointing to any post anywhere, I want you tomeet them. They’re all going through the usual vetting process, of course, butyou’re a lot faster than any bureaucracy – and frankly, a lot more efficient. Whateverthey tell you about whatever they want or what they’re planning to do, I canuse it to decide if they’re right for the job. Sussing out the scandaloussecrets of the American government sounds like exactly the sort of thing you’d be good at. After all, you’vealready said plenty that this place is basically exactly like hell.”
“Ooh, Madam President.”Lucifer stops, stares at her, and grins wickedly. “You are playing a little dirty after all, aren’t you?”
“If Satan is takingover America, I intend to put him to work.” Chloe links her arm through his. “Which reminds me, on that note – ”
“Yes, I was just getting to that, thank you. Did you knowthat the presidential spouse usually holds the Bible on which the president istaking the oath of office? It’s terrible, I won’t do it.”
“Really?” Chloe’s eyebrows nearly arch off her head. “Really? After all this, holding theBible on Capitol Hill for literally one minute is where you’re going to drawthe line?”
“But my dear – ”
“Fine, you giant whining baby. I’ll ask Trixie to do it. Ithink that says something more important, anyway.”
Chloe is just trying to remember what she was actually aboutto say before he hijacked her train of thought, when an aide hurries up. “MadamPresident-elect? We need to go over a few things, if you could possibly –”
“Yes, yes, I’m coming.” She does have to get used to beingat everyone’s permanent beck and call, so Chloe stands on her tiptoes to kiss Lucifer onthe cheek, sternly admonishes him not to get into any trouble, and follows theaide. There are a few wrinkles to iron out with the order of events, she isscheduled to host Justin Trudeau in three weeks and Canada has sent a polite welcomedossier (being Canada) that she needs to read before their talks, and PenelopeDecker has called about five times to make sure the dress she’s picked out forthe inauguration ball is the right one. By the time Chloe is let go, it’salmost the end of the afternoon, and Lucifer has gone walkabout. Oh dear.
She is just about to ask the Secret Service if he’s takenhis Corvette out for one final spin (no more tooling around in two-seater openconvertibles for the president’s husband, it’ll be armored limos from thispoint on) when she hears a funny noise from behind one of the doors. She frowns, tiltsher head, and then it comes again – which she then recognizes, breaks into arun down the expensive carpet to the door in question, and yanks it open.
Inside, Lucifer Morningstar has Donald J. Trump around theneck and hoisted into the air with one hand. Trump is wheezing and kicking,while Chloe stops dead, stares, and then bellows, “LUCIFER!”
Lucifer glances at her in innocent surprise, looks betweenhis wife and the man whose job she is taking, shrugs, and finally drops Trumpwith a thump. His hairpiece falls off and slides over one eye, as he isgibbering even more incoherently than usual – seems Lucifer might have givenhim a taste of the full Devil Face. While she of course absolutely does notendorse this extremely illegal treatment of a sitting (alas) U.S. President, Chloe to bite her cheek hard. “Lucifer,” sheorders. “Do not ever do that again.”
Lucifer looks at Trump meaningfully.
Trump whimpers.
Lucifer shrugs again, steps over him, and offers his arm to Chloe.“Come on, Madam President,” he says. “Time to go run this bloody country.”
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How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-reagans-childhood-home-gave-up-on-reaganism-14/
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
Photograph by M. Scott Mahaskey
DIXON, Illinois—In the gift shop of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home is a T-shirt bearing one of the 40th president’s best-known sayings: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Since opening to the public in 1984, the home, run by a nonprofit foundation, has lived by that principle, rejecting public money and staying proudly independent. Its website declares, “The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home does not receive State or Federal Funding.”
Nearly 130 years old, the three-bedroom, one-bathroom white house onSouth Hennepin Avenue in Dixon is a testament to Reagan’s modest, all-American childhood.Many of its counterparts around the country, includingBill Clinton’s boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts; andthe estate in New York where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, are run by the National Park Service.
Not Reagan’s house.In 2002, Dixon’s congressman, Dennis Hastert, then the Republican speaker of the House, passed a bill authorizing the National Park Service to buy the property and manage the house, as it does so many other presidential properties. The members of the Reagan home’s board of directors were aging and approached Hastert because they thought the Park Service might be a good candidate to carry on their work. They changed their minds, however, and spurned the help,in part because Congress wouldn’t match the millions of dollars private donors had invested in the property, and in part because that’s not how Reagan would have wanted it.
“He didn’t think government needed to be involved in our daily lives,” Connie Lange, the executive director at the time, said of the 40th president. “And people really took that to heart here.”
The Reagan boyhood home’s independence made it a rallying point for conservatives. Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the Reagan Legacy Project, told theWashington Times, “I’m not in favor of the government owning property, never mind Reagan’s house.” In a 2013 report about the “congressional shortsightedness and bureaucratic mismanagement” around U.S. national parks, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma used the Reagan house as evidence that historic sites could be just fine in private hands, writing that the home had recently reported an annual net income of $172,000 and “can manage its affairs just as well as many of the nonprofits administering the nation’s celebrated presidential sites.”
Now, though, it turns out the mantle of Reaganism might be too much for Reagan’s boyhood home and his small hometown to carry.The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation, beset by shrinking attendance, a shortage of volunteer docents, an aging house and—crucially—the death of its most generous benefactor,is finally asking the government for a bailout. And this time, it’s basically inviting Congress to name its price.
A year ago, Patrick Gorman, who became the foundation’s executive director in 2016, wrote a letter to the National Park Service, offering, at long last, to sell the home to the federal government. He understood, and sympathized with, the former president’s philosophy. But it had reached the point that clinging to Reagan’s anti-government principles might mean the demise of the most important tourist attraction in Dixon. He and the foundation were not willing to leave the home to the whims of the free market.
“It’s not gonna close, if I have to stay here and run it myself,” says Gorman, who grew up nearby in another home the Reagan family inhabited. “It would be a loss to this community, the status, the tourism. Those 5,000 people that come to see us [every year], they eat in restaurants, spend money here.”
The boyhood home would not be the first presidential property to pass from a private foundation to the Park Service. James Garfield’s Lawnfield in Mentor, Ohio; William Taft’s house in Cincinnati; Herbert Hoover’s home in West Branch, Iowa; and Clinton’s home in Hope, have all gone through the process. But none did so after such a concerted resistance, in the name of a president’s legacy. Now, a monument to private-sector gumption is becoming, instead, a testament to its limits.
***
Ronald Reagan moved intothe house at 816 South Hennepin Avenue in December 1920, when his father, an itinerant shoe salesman, finally settled down as co-owner of a store called the Fashion Boot Shop. The Reagans—including Ronald’s mother and older brother—occupied the house until 1924, first paying $12 per month in rent, then $15. Reagan would spend the remainder of his youth in Dixon, leaving at 18 to attend Eureka College downstate.
In his autobiography,An American Life, Reagan wrote that life in Dixon “was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain inThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “Dutch” Reagan, as he was known in his hometown, skated on the frozen Rock River (“the Hudson of the West”), played right guard on the Dixon High School football team and launched his acting career in student theatricals. During the summers, he worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, where he claimed to have saved 77 swimmers, though locals will tell you a lot of those would-be drowning victims were girls who wanted to be saved by the handsome young man in the tank suit.
As even Reagan admitted, though, life in Dixon was not always sweet. Reagan’s father was an alcoholic, and the house on South Hennepin Avenue was the scene of Reagan’s darkest childhood memory. One night, when he was 11 years old, Dutch came home from the YMCA to find Jack Reagan sprawled out on the snowy lawn, dead drunk after a binge at a speakeasy. Reagan dragged him inside by the overcoat, “then put him to bed and never mentioned the incident to my mother,” he wrote in the autobiography.
The house was later chopped up into two apartments, and it stood vacant by the time Reagan ran for president in 1980. Thatyear,a mailman alerted local business leaders to its history. They pooled their money to buy the house, starting the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation.
The Queen Anne-style home, built in 1891, would probably have been demolished long ago if Reagan hadn’t lived there. It is furnished with period beds, old-fashioned china, a Detroit Jewel stove and an icebox. The furniture, which was purchased at second-hand shops around Illinois, didn’t belong to the Reagans—though there is a chair Dutch sat in when he visited a neighbor to listen to the radio. The only feature connecting the house to its long-ago occupants is a loose tile in front of the fireplace, under which Reagan and his brother hid pennies. (A photo in the upstairs hallway shows Reagan and his brother during a 1984 visit, sitting on a replica of the bed they shared.)
Even so, in the 1990s, the home was drawing 20,000 visitors a year—only a 10th the number of visitors Lincoln’s home in Springfield draws, but enough to make it a viable tourist attraction in Dixon, a town of 16,000 people a two-hour drive from Chicago.
Author Bob Spitz says the home also was a valuable research tool, giving him a sense of Reagan’s humble background that informed Spitz’s biography,Reagan: An American Journey. “His bedroom was no bigger than a closet; it is where he often shared a single bed with his brother,” Spitz says. “The tiny porch is where he occasionally found his father passed out from a binge and had to drag him not only inside, but up a steep flight of stairs. The ‘garden’ where his mother raised vegetables so the family could eat when meat was unaffordable was no more than a patch out the back door, by the garage shed.”
The National Park Service manages 16 presidential homes, including Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Illinois, and FDR’s in Hyde Park, New York—each of which has six-figure annual attendance and could probably get by without government help. (Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo in California is owned by the Young America’s Foundation, which uses it as a center to promote conservative ideals. The Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, which receives 400,000 visitors a year, is jointly run by the National Archives and the Reagan Foundation.) There are at least 20other presidential homes besides Reagan’s that are run by private foundations, including George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Buchanan’s Wheatland and Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage. Most survive on a mixture of tourist dollars and local investment.
But among presidential attractions, childhood homes like Reagan’s are not in the same league as Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The best known—JFK’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts—is a Park Service property that receives about 25,000 visitors a year, less than a 10th of the traffic at Kennedy’s presidential library in Boston.
It doesn’t help the Reagan home that Illinois is not the state most Americans associate with the 40th president, and Dixon is not a major population center. The town also doesn’t have much to offer visitors other than Reagan. (It does have a lot of Reagan, though: a History and Learning Center; Reagan statues; a Reagan museum; his original lifeguard chair. There’s also a Ronald Reagan Middle School.)
“It has less to do with presidencies and more to do with the tourist business,” says Hugh Howard, author ofHomes of the Presidents. “If you go to Charlottesville, which is a fun place, you can’t not go to Monticello.”
***
One of the main reasons the boyhood homefoundation could maintain the Reaganite principle of independence from government for so longwas Norm Wymbs, a Florida grocery store magnate who knew Reagan personally and was the home’s biggest benefactor—a “sugar daddy,” in the words of staffers and board members. Wymbs idolized Reagan—he even wrote a book about the president’s years in Dixon—and spent $5 million to restore the house to its 1920s look and build a visitor center. Shortly before his death, he deeded a home he owned in Dixon to the foundation, which sold it in 2013 to a private buyer for $270,000 (the source of the $172,000 profit cited in Coburn’s 2013 report, according to a foundation board member).
That money was used to purchase four small houses near the boyhood home as part of a since-abandoned expansion plan. Wymbs—who called Hastert’s 2002 allocation of $420,000 to buy the home “insulting,” because it didn’t approach his investment over the years—died in 2016, leaving the Reagan home to support itself.
As Reagan has receded into history, attendance has fallen to 5,000 visitors per year. In 2016, finding the home in a state of decrepitude, Gorman took out a $100,000 line of credit. A retired nuclear power plant mechanic, Gorman went a year without taking a salary, but the home was still losing $20,000 to $25,000 annually. Although a pair of $25,000 donations from a local charity will help pay off the line of credit, no one has stepped forward to replace the home’s sugar daddy. Last year, Reagan’s post-presidential secretary, Peggy Grande, came to Dixon for a fundraiser; it netted only $7,500.
When Gorman told the board of directors that he was seeking a Park Service takeover, this time, there was no pushback. Everyone realized the home could no longer raise enough money to remain open.
“It’s the only move,” says Joe Rudolphi, the board’s treasurer. “I don’t think we have much choice, unless we can find someone in Chicago to support us. We need to put a new roof on the house. That’s going to cost thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars. You look at an old house, an old property—it’s a money pit.”
Hastert’s act of Congress establishing a Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home National Historic Site is still in effect, but the appropriation to buy the house has expired. The Park Service is aware of the foundation’s desire to sell, and is working to arrange for an appraisal, says Brent Everitt, a spokesperson for the National Park Service: “Once the due diligence process is completed, the NPS would likely begin the process of developing a land acquisition budget request through Congress.”
Dixon’s current congressman, Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, “supports the National Park Service purchasing the site,” he said through a spokesperson. This time, the money to honor Reagan will have to come from a Democratic Congress. One factor in the home’s favor, however: The Park Service can name its own price.
“Whatever we can get, I would recommend that we take,” Rudolphi says. “If we can get out of there, just get. We can use the money to help kids through college, give them a Reagan scholarship, help the people in the community.”
In the meantime, the Reagan boyhood home soldiers on, with dwindling resources and visitors. Gorman says he has “mixed emotions” about selling the anti-big government president’s house to the government. (Although maybe he shouldn’t: Despite Reagan’s rhetoric, the Park Service acquired plenty of land when he was president, including an $8 million purchase in the Santa Monica Mountains.) But Gorman believes it’s the best way to honor Reagan. As it stands, Gorman is the home’s only full-time employee. He has trouble attracting volunteer docents. He doesn’t have time to raise funds or promote the home on social media.
“I think even Ronald Reagan would admit that times have changed,” Gorman says. “I have the utmost respect for Ronald Reagan the man, the president. I don’t want to say we’re doing him a disservice here, but we could be doing a lot better.”
Howard, theHouses of the Presidentsauthor, says he hopes the Park Service takes over the house but adds, “My suspicion is … they will stabilize it and put it on their website, but their visitation is not going to quadruple.”
A lot of Dixonites have mixed feelings about the potential sale, too. “I don’t have a problem with it, because it’s struggling, and the Park Service can help,” says Marlin Misner, a former foundation board member who wrote a history of the boyhood home. “Whether they will or not, we’ll see. If you want to ruin a project, get the federal government involved.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better himself.
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Evangelism: The Art Of Selling Your Dream
You may have tried your hand selling something trivial, but challenging. It might have been Girl Scout Cookies, Time-Life Subscriptions or Sierra Club Donations. You were only half-sold on the product, service, cause or idea, but you gave it your best.
Chances are you fell into one of two traps: One: You tried cramming the product down the prospect’s throat, usually over increasingly vociferous objections. Two: You tried to win the prospect by being a nice guy or gal, but forgot to show how the product can actually serve the person.
In either case, you failed to make the sale. What if there was a better way? What if the best way to “sell” someone is to not sell him at all, but make him want to buy, and then convince him it was all his idea.
Master salespeople are like samurai warriors, blending with the background, yet ready to spring into action at any moment.
What Is Evangelism?
Evangelism means “Good News” in Greek. It was initially used by the early Christians, starting with Jesus Christ, Himself. When Jesus first met Saint Peter, he was a mere fisherman. Jesus invited Peter to follow Him, and Christ would make him “a fisher of men.” A recent Gospel movie modified His invitation to, “Come with me and change the world.” For Christ, it was all about preaching a new humanity driven by the power of divine Love.
Evangelism can be personal or mass, done by individuals to other individuals, or to whole groups of people. At the day of Pentecost, Saint Peter spoke, divinely inspired, to a huge group of Jewish people gathered in Jerusalem, and 3,000 were converted that very day. Yet even with mass evangelism, it is always “won by one.” There is always a one-to-one element in a total life transformation.
Evangelism has recently expanded beyond religion to include any Idea, Cause, Product or Service. It can be direct or indirect. The greatest evangelist after the Apostle Paul was Billy Graham, who pioneered global evangelism using contemporary media, such as radio, TV, Film and Direct Mail. A later generation had a more commercial focus, and could draw on social networks and mobile media.
Evangelism technically lies between sales and marketing, while including elements of both. It is an art, and it always entails sharing a dream that enchants and captures the audience. The audience buys into the dream, and in turn, shares the story with others. A viral community can emerge, going beyond town or city to wrap around the world in seconds, minutes or days.
What It Takes to Go Global
The great secret to going global is to have a big enough dream, a dream worthy of both life and death. The men and women who changed the world for not a decade or two, but for hundreds and thousands of years, were all transformed. Buddha birthed the possibility of enlightenment for all humanity, not just for a privileged few. Jesus gave humanity a vision of divine love with both His life and His death that defied all human standards. Muhammad gave humanity a vision of absolute unity and the abiding peace that comes from surrendering to the perfect will of our Creator.
Chances are you already have a dream that you have been cherishing, a book that has never been written or a message to be shared at the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards or the United Nations.
That dream must be nursed and cultivated until it takes on a life of its own and begins to direct and guide your every thought, word and action. Coming up with a truly compelling dream that others can make their own is half the battle.
1. Your Dream Must Be Insanely Great
When Steve Jobs created the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iMac, the iPhone and the iPad, his self-imposed criterion was always, “Is this product insanely great?” Not just OK, good, cool or even excellent. It must be so great that it blows away everything before it. You must up the competition 10x.
We might think of Thomas Edison, who after literally 10,000 attempts, perfected the incandescent light bulb. Imagine what that meant to humanity, which could do precious little after dark, depending upon candles and kerosene lanterns. This held true for thousands of years. Suddenly, everything changed.
Today, we need look only at Elon Musk, who perfected a gorgeous, powerful car--luxury, sport or utility--far sexier than any gas-guzzling car with zero carbon emission. Furthermore, Elon is preparing to lead humanity into successfully colonizing Mars by building a rocket reusable on a daily basis.
2. Your Dream Must Change the World
If you look at the pioneers, visionaries and inventors that fundamentally changed life, you can see Johannes Gutenberg with his printing press, Martin Luther with his freedom of consciousness, the Freemasons with their freedom of thought and Thomas Jefferson with his freedom to choose your own government.
The trend continued with people like Alexander Graham Bell, who created the telephone, Orville and Wilber Wright, who took us into the sky, Guglielmo Marconi, who introduced radio and Henry Ford, who succeeded in belting the earth with dependable automobiles.
On the humane side of life, we can think of Mahatma Gandhi bringing down the British Empire, the Dalai Lama, who nursed Tibetan civilization back to life, becoming the leading spokesman for humanity, and Mother Theresa of Calcutta, who showed what could be done to rehabilitate the utterly destitute.
3. Your Dream Must Speak to Everybody
We can go from Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” to John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. The most sacred literature is often supremely simple. Think of David’s Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd,” or Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
Most religious and political movements start with a book. The three Abrahamic Faiths started with the Hebrew Bible. Classical China started with The Analects of Confucius and the Tao Te Ching. Modern Hinduism started with The Bhagavad Gita. The American Revolution started with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Need we forget Mao’s Little Red Book, of dubious merit, but which had a huge impact on China?
Perhaps the dream is most effective when expressed in a song, play or movie. Think of John Lennon’s “Imagine” or George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.” Think of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” or “Hamlet.” Think of Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, or Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth.
4. Your Dream Must Create Community
Barack Obama did not become the first Black American President by accident. His slogan “Yes, we can!” resonated with millions of people no longer willing to judge a Presidential candidate by the color of his skin. All dreams require a community where people can share and pass on the dream.
Buddha started with his Sangha, Jesus Christ with His inner circle and apostles, Muhammad with his Ummah. These eventually grew into temples, cathedrals and mosques. The heart of community, however, is always with people. As Jesus put it, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
If we go into modern times, we can think of Mahatma Gandhi with his ashram, the abolitionists and feminists in their Congregational Churches, and Martin Luther King with his Freedom Riders. Never underestimate the gathering power of a high school auditorium, a Unitarian Church or a Masonic Hall. It is sobering to realize that once upon a time, all the Communists in the world could fit into a high school gymnasium with room to spare!
5. Your Dream Must Survive the Test of Time
Great ideas never die. Just think of three core ideas: Faith, education and revolution.
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The great religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam show no signs of going away. Yes, they are being reinvented, and in some sense they are merging with each other. Women are moving into leadership positions, and increasingly, all races, nations and classes are welcome, even among contemporary Jews, such as The Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles.
Writing and education are here to stay. Writing began on stone, clay and metal. It then moved on to papyrus and silk until it found its way to paper and the printing press. Now writing is digital, and you can compose anytime, anywhere on your smart phone or table. The university started with Plato’s Academy, was developed in India at Nalanda, a Buddhist institution, was picked up in Cairo as a Muslim institution, was appropriated by the Christians in Oxford, Notre Dame and Chartres and eventually morphed into the grand secular university, thanks to the Germans.
Political freedom is never really going away. It was pioneered in the direct democracy of Athens, developed in the Roman Republic, picked up in Venice and Geneva and introduced in America as the United States. Eventually, the ideal of democracy found its way into every single form of government, even fascism and Communism, perverted as they may have become. Today, it continues on with such phenomena as Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement.
Five Ultimate Evangelists Who Changed the World Forever
If we think of very positive people who changed life on a global scale, we can get helpful insights into how we might either continue their work, or discover a whole new possibility. We could point to hundreds and thousands of people, some whose influence has survived millennia.
1. Jesus Christ: The Prince of Peace and Lord of Love began His early life under the most unfavorable circumstances, being born among cattle and chased by a crazed, despotic king. Whether or not Jesus ever went to India, He chose to start His ministry with simple village workers of high integrity. He healed the sick and raised the dead wherever they happened to be. Jesus spoke in the open as much as in synagogues and the Temple. When Christ died, He was utterly abandoned by His terrified confidants. That they would then rally together with invincible faith just two months later is the greatest testament to the reality of His resurrection.
2. Werner Erhard: Werner abandoned his first wife and kids and left town with another woman, whom he later married. He sold cars and books until he got into self-improvement. Werner never had the chance to go to college. So he reinvented himself. Under the influence of the great Anglo-American Zen evangelist, Alan Watts, Werner had an enlightenment experience that utterly transformed him. He then realized that enlightenment was an incomparable experience that can be transmitted within a modern institution. Enlightenment should be our birthright. He directly or indirectly trained several million people, the majority of whom “got it.” Werner also cleaned up his early life with his first wife, and gradually transformed into a shining inspiration. Werner made “transformation” a household word.
3. President Ronald Reagan: Reagan was an aging actor who became governor of California. He developed conservative, hawkish views while maintaining a high personal integrity. Reagan had a charming personality, as he was never mad at anyone, and even his enemies couldn’t help but like him. Reagan launched the “Star Wars” campaign to scare the Soviets out of their wits. He felt the Cold War was stupid and useless, and that America could establish lasting peace through strength, not weakness. Reagan met his match in General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, and learned the power of relationship, and a deep friendship beyond ideological barriers. Together, they forged a new world order, ending the stubborn 40-year Cold War.
4. Steve Jobs: Steve was an orphan who only met his birth parents in adult life. His adoptive parents were good-hearted with modest means who loved technology. Steve was a perfectionistic who had a tough time adapting to high school. Then he met Steve Wozniac, dropped acid with a high school sweetheart, and then went to India after a brief stint at Reed College in Oregon. When Steve came back, he had a vision of an electronic apple, and of building a computer that even his mother would love. Before he died, Steve had made “Apple” the most beloved brand in the world and totally transformed no less than six industries.
5. Pope Francis I: Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina was an extremely popular priest who sided with the poor, conspicuously riding buses when he could have been escorted in limousines. He was about to retire when Pope Benedict unexpectedly decided to quit his office, feeling temperamentally unsuited to the position. The Church was embroiled in charges of financial misappropriation and pedophilia claims going back decades. Rarely had it been in a weaker position. The cardinals decided Jorge Bergoglio was their man. When elected, he decided not to become another “Peter,” “Paul” or “John.” Rather, the new pope chose to be called by Saint Francis of Assisi, the Church’s greatest saint who most embodied Christ. The Pope then insisted he be called only “the Bishop of Rome.” He kissed poor people’s feet, refused to reside in the papal palace, and began to give away the Church’s misappropriated money. He refused to judge Lesbians and Gays. Pope Francis brought to life the original ideal: Love, Joy and Peace. Recently, Pope Francis addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress, as well as the United Nations. While he has no illusions about the implications of global warming, he maintains an abiding faith in humanity. It has been a long time since the Church has confronted a true saint in its highest office.
How “Little Old You” Can Save the Planet
A hero is nothing but a common man or woman in uncommon circumstances. If you consider yourself “common,” you have a real chance of becoming a hero. It begins with a truly worthy dream or vision 10 times greater than anything before it. If we look at the overwhelming crises humanity faces, the greatest is a spiritual emptiness. The fastest growing religion in America is “None.” “Spiritual but not religious” characterizes many of our best youth. Why couldn’t we create a noninstitutional, all-inclusive “religion” via the Internet or mobile devices?
If Gandhi was here today, chances are that he would use very different tactics. He would no longer depend upon rallies, marches and sit-ins. He would look to the tools of today. What can hackers do? What can viral “memes” do? How can social media and networks be mobilized? Gandhi would definitely hold to loving his enemies, while staying true to his core principles, which he called “Satyagraha.”
Once you come up with the insanely great idea, cause, vision or dream, you can then scale it in a fashion never before dreamed. It no longer takes months or years. It can take seconds, minutes or hours. The potential of many-to-many communication has barely been tapped. It is awaiting a few people who love the world and want to enlighten humanity in time. That person just might be you.
Master the Craft from the Evangelist’s Evangelist
Guy Kawasaki apprenticed with the late Steve Jobs, making Macintosh the most popular computer in the world. He was hired as Apple’s second evangelist to promote a daring new platform to PC developers with hardly any software to show. Guy was a Hawaiian boy with an “Aloha” personality selling jewelry before Apple recruited him. Guy did his job so well that when numerous corporate upsets threatened the very life of the company, the fan base he created refused to let the Mac die.
Guy has gone on to evangelize all kinds of products, services, causes and ideas, but the dearest one to him is evangelism itself. Guy would like to see all humanity become evangelists. He is witty, passionate, refreshing and totally fun. He has the art of evangelism down to the point where he can impart his principles to even think-headed people like me. I have been personally acquainted with Guy for a couple of decades, and I can truthfully say that Guy is one of the very brightest, shining stars that keep Silicon Valley vibrant, no matter what happens in the larger world.
You couldn’t ask for a better teacher at a more affordable price. In fact, it was Guy who made “evangelism” a household word. Without Guy, an article like this would have never even occurred to me. Why don’t you join our community? You may be a far greater evangelist than you ever imagined!
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Evangelism: The Art Of Selling Your Dream appeared first on http://consciousowl.com.
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How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-reagans-childhood-home-gave-up-on-reaganism-13/
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
Photograph by M. Scott Mahaskey
DIXON, Illinois—In the gift shop of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home is a T-shirt bearing one of the 40th president’s best-known sayings: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Since opening to the public in 1984, the home, run by a nonprofit foundation, has lived by that principle, rejecting public money and staying proudly independent. Its website declares, “The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home does not receive State or Federal Funding.”
Nearly 130 years old, the three-bedroom, one-bathroom white house onSouth Hennepin Avenue in Dixon is a testament to Reagan’s modest, all-American childhood.Many of its counterparts around the country, includingBill Clinton’s boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts; andthe estate in New York where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, are run by the National Park Service.
Not Reagan’s house.In 2002, Dixon’s congressman, Dennis Hastert, then the Republican speaker of the House, passed a bill authorizing the National Park Service to buy the property and manage the house, as it does so many other presidential properties. The members of the Reagan home’s board of directors were aging and approached Hastert because they thought the Park Service might be a good candidate to carry on their work. They changed their minds, however, and spurned the help,in part because Congress wouldn’t match the millions of dollars private donors had invested in the property, and in part because that’s not how Reagan would have wanted it.
“He didn’t think government needed to be involved in our daily lives,” Connie Lange, the executive director at the time, said of the 40th president. “And people really took that to heart here.”
The Reagan boyhood home’s independence made it a rallying point for conservatives. Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the Reagan Legacy Project, told theWashington Times, “I’m not in favor of the government owning property, never mind Reagan’s house.” In a 2013 report about the “congressional shortsightedness and bureaucratic mismanagement” around U.S. national parks, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma used the Reagan house as evidence that historic sites could be just fine in private hands, writing that the home had recently reported an annual net income of $172,000 and “can manage its affairs just as well as many of the nonprofits administering the nation’s celebrated presidential sites.”
Now, though, it turns out the mantle of Reaganism might be too much for Reagan’s boyhood home and his small hometown to carry.The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation, beset by shrinking attendance, a shortage of volunteer docents, an aging house and—crucially—the death of its most generous benefactor,is finally asking the government for a bailout. And this time, it’s basically inviting Congress to name its price.
A year ago, Patrick Gorman, who became the foundation’s executive director in 2016, wrote a letter to the National Park Service, offering, at long last, to sell the home to the federal government. He understood, and sympathized with, the former president’s philosophy. But it had reached the point that clinging to Reagan’s anti-government principles might mean the demise of the most important tourist attraction in Dixon. He and the foundation were not willing to leave the home to the whims of the free market.
“It’s not gonna close, if I have to stay here and run it myself,” says Gorman, who grew up nearby in another home the Reagan family inhabited. “It would be a loss to this community, the status, the tourism. Those 5,000 people that come to see us [every year], they eat in restaurants, spend money here.”
The boyhood home would not be the first presidential property to pass from a private foundation to the Park Service. James Garfield’s Lawnfield in Mentor, Ohio; William Taft’s house in Cincinnati; Herbert Hoover’s home in West Branch, Iowa; and Clinton’s home in Hope, have all gone through the process. But none did so after such a concerted resistance, in the name of a president’s legacy. Now, a monument to private-sector gumption is becoming, instead, a testament to its limits.
***
Ronald Reagan moved intothe house at 816 South Hennepin Avenue in December 1920, when his father, an itinerant shoe salesman, finally settled down as co-owner of a store called the Fashion Boot Shop. The Reagans—including Ronald’s mother and older brother—occupied the house until 1924, first paying $12 per month in rent, then $15. Reagan would spend the remainder of his youth in Dixon, leaving at 18 to attend Eureka College downstate.
In his autobiography,An American Life, Reagan wrote that life in Dixon “was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain inThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “Dutch” Reagan, as he was known in his hometown, skated on the frozen Rock River (“the Hudson of the West”), played right guard on the Dixon High School football team and launched his acting career in student theatricals. During the summers, he worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, where he claimed to have saved 77 swimmers, though locals will tell you a lot of those would-be drowning victims were girls who wanted to be saved by the handsome young man in the tank suit.
As even Reagan admitted, though, life in Dixon was not always sweet. Reagan’s father was an alcoholic, and the house on South Hennepin Avenue was the scene of Reagan’s darkest childhood memory. One night, when he was 11 years old, Dutch came home from the YMCA to find Jack Reagan sprawled out on the snowy lawn, dead drunk after a binge at a speakeasy. Reagan dragged him inside by the overcoat, “then put him to bed and never mentioned the incident to my mother,” he wrote in the autobiography.
The house was later chopped up into two apartments, and it stood vacant by the time Reagan ran for president in 1980. Thatyear,a mailman alerted local business leaders to its history. They pooled their money to buy the house, starting the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation.
The Queen Anne-style home, built in 1891, would probably have been demolished long ago if Reagan hadn’t lived there. It is furnished with period beds, old-fashioned china, a Detroit Jewel stove and an icebox. The furniture, which was purchased at second-hand shops around Illinois, didn’t belong to the Reagans—though there is a chair Dutch sat in when he visited a neighbor to listen to the radio. The only feature connecting the house to its long-ago occupants is a loose tile in front of the fireplace, under which Reagan and his brother hid pennies. (A photo in the upstairs hallway shows Reagan and his brother during a 1984 visit, sitting on a replica of the bed they shared.)
Even so, in the 1990s, the home was drawing 20,000 visitors a year—only a 10th the number of visitors Lincoln’s home in Springfield draws, but enough to make it a viable tourist attraction in Dixon, a town of 16,000 people a two-hour drive from Chicago.
Author Bob Spitz says the home also was a valuable research tool, giving him a sense of Reagan’s humble background that informed Spitz’s biography,Reagan: An American Journey. “His bedroom was no bigger than a closet; it is where he often shared a single bed with his brother,” Spitz says. “The tiny porch is where he occasionally found his father passed out from a binge and had to drag him not only inside, but up a steep flight of stairs. The ‘garden’ where his mother raised vegetables so the family could eat when meat was unaffordable was no more than a patch out the back door, by the garage shed.”
The National Park Service manages 16 presidential homes, including Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Illinois, and FDR’s in Hyde Park, New York—each of which has six-figure annual attendance and could probably get by without government help. (Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo in California is owned by the Young America’s Foundation, which uses it as a center to promote conservative ideals. The Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, which receives 400,000 visitors a year, is jointly run by the National Archives and the Reagan Foundation.) There are at least 20other presidential homes besides Reagan’s that are run by private foundations, including George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Buchanan’s Wheatland and Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage. Most survive on a mixture of tourist dollars and local investment.
But among presidential attractions, childhood homes like Reagan’s are not in the same league as Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The best known—JFK’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts—is a Park Service property that receives about 25,000 visitors a year, less than a 10th of the traffic at Kennedy’s presidential library in Boston.
It doesn’t help the Reagan home that Illinois is not the state most Americans associate with the 40th president, and Dixon is not a major population center. The town also doesn’t have much to offer visitors other than Reagan. (It does have a lot of Reagan, though: a History and Learning Center; Reagan statues; a Reagan museum; his original lifeguard chair. There’s also a Ronald Reagan Middle School.)
“It has less to do with presidencies and more to do with the tourist business,” says Hugh Howard, author ofHomes of the Presidents. “If you go to Charlottesville, which is a fun place, you can’t not go to Monticello.”
***
One of the main reasons the boyhood homefoundation could maintain the Reaganite principle of independence from government for so longwas Norm Wymbs, a Florida grocery store magnate who knew Reagan personally and was the home’s biggest benefactor—a “sugar daddy,” in the words of staffers and board members. Wymbs idolized Reagan—he even wrote a book about the president’s years in Dixon—and spent $5 million to restore the house to its 1920s look and build a visitor center. Shortly before his death, he deeded a home he owned in Dixon to the foundation, which sold it in 2013 to a private buyer for $270,000 (the source of the $172,000 profit cited in Coburn’s 2013 report, according to a foundation board member).
That money was used to purchase four small houses near the boyhood home as part of a since-abandoned expansion plan. Wymbs—who called Hastert’s 2002 allocation of $420,000 to buy the home “insulting,” because it didn’t approach his investment over the years—died in 2016, leaving the Reagan home to support itself.
As Reagan has receded into history, attendance has fallen to 5,000 visitors per year. In 2016, finding the home in a state of decrepitude, Gorman took out a $100,000 line of credit. A retired nuclear power plant mechanic, Gorman went a year without taking a salary, but the home was still losing $20,000 to $25,000 annually. Although a pair of $25,000 donations from a local charity will help pay off the line of credit, no one has stepped forward to replace the home’s sugar daddy. Last year, Reagan’s post-presidential secretary, Peggy Grande, came to Dixon for a fundraiser; it netted only $7,500.
When Gorman told the board of directors that he was seeking a Park Service takeover, this time, there was no pushback. Everyone realized the home could no longer raise enough money to remain open.
“It’s the only move,” says Joe Rudolphi, the board’s treasurer. “I don’t think we have much choice, unless we can find someone in Chicago to support us. We need to put a new roof on the house. That’s going to cost thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars. You look at an old house, an old property—it’s a money pit.”
Hastert’s act of Congress establishing a Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home National Historic Site is still in effect, but the appropriation to buy the house has expired. The Park Service is aware of the foundation’s desire to sell, and is working to arrange for an appraisal, says Brent Everitt, a spokesperson for the National Park Service: “Once the due diligence process is completed, the NPS would likely begin the process of developing a land acquisition budget request through Congress.”
Dixon’s current congressman, Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, “supports the National Park Service purchasing the site,” he said through a spokesperson. This time, the money to honor Reagan will have to come from a Democratic Congress. One factor in the home’s favor, however: The Park Service can name its own price.
“Whatever we can get, I would recommend that we take,” Rudolphi says. “If we can get out of there, just get. We can use the money to help kids through college, give them a Reagan scholarship, help the people in the community.”
In the meantime, the Reagan boyhood home soldiers on, with dwindling resources and visitors. Gorman says he has “mixed emotions” about selling the anti-big government president’s house to the government. (Although maybe he shouldn’t: Despite Reagan’s rhetoric, the Park Service acquired plenty of land when he was president, including an $8 million purchase in the Santa Monica Mountains.) But Gorman believes it’s the best way to honor Reagan. As it stands, Gorman is the home’s only full-time employee. He has trouble attracting volunteer docents. He doesn’t have time to raise funds or promote the home on social media.
“I think even Ronald Reagan would admit that times have changed,” Gorman says. “I have the utmost respect for Ronald Reagan the man, the president. I don’t want to say we’re doing him a disservice here, but we could be doing a lot better.”
Howard, theHouses of the Presidentsauthor, says he hopes the Park Service takes over the house but adds, “My suspicion is … they will stabilize it and put it on their website, but their visitation is not going to quadruple.”
A lot of Dixonites have mixed feelings about the potential sale, too. “I don’t have a problem with it, because it’s struggling, and the Park Service can help,” says Marlin Misner, a former foundation board member who wrote a history of the boyhood home. “Whether they will or not, we’ll see. If you want to ruin a project, get the federal government involved.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better himself.
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How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-reagans-childhood-home-gave-up-on-reaganism-12/
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
Photograph by M. Scott Mahaskey
DIXON, Illinois—In the gift shop of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home is a T-shirt bearing one of the 40th president’s best-known sayings: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Since opening to the public in 1984, the home, run by a nonprofit foundation, has lived by that principle, rejecting public money and staying proudly independent. Its website declares, “The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home does not receive State or Federal Funding.”
Nearly 130 years old, the three-bedroom, one-bathroom white house onSouth Hennepin Avenue in Dixon is a testament to Reagan’s modest, all-American childhood.Many of its counterparts around the country, includingBill Clinton’s boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts; andthe estate in New York where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, are run by the National Park Service.
Not Reagan’s house.In 2002, Dixon’s congressman, Dennis Hastert, then the Republican speaker of the House, passed a bill authorizing the National Park Service to buy the property and manage the house, as it does so many other presidential properties. The members of the Reagan home’s board of directors were aging and approached Hastert because they thought the Park Service might be a good candidate to carry on their work. They changed their minds, however, and spurned the help,in part because Congress wouldn’t match the millions of dollars private donors had invested in the property, and in part because that’s not how Reagan would have wanted it.
“He didn’t think government needed to be involved in our daily lives,” Connie Lange, the executive director at the time, said of the 40th president. “And people really took that to heart here.”
The Reagan boyhood home’s independence made it a rallying point for conservatives. Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the Reagan Legacy Project, told theWashington Times, “I’m not in favor of the government owning property, never mind Reagan’s house.” In a 2013 report about the “congressional shortsightedness and bureaucratic mismanagement” around U.S. national parks, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma used the Reagan house as evidence that historic sites could be just fine in private hands, writing that the home had recently reported an annual net income of $172,000 and “can manage its affairs just as well as many of the nonprofits administering the nation’s celebrated presidential sites.”
Now, though, it turns out the mantle of Reaganism might be too much for Reagan’s boyhood home and his small hometown to carry.The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation, beset by shrinking attendance, a shortage of volunteer docents, an aging house and—crucially—the death of its most generous benefactor,is finally asking the government for a bailout. And this time, it’s basically inviting Congress to name its price.
A year ago, Patrick Gorman, who became the foundation’s executive director in 2016, wrote a letter to the National Park Service, offering, at long last, to sell the home to the federal government. He understood, and sympathized with, the former president’s philosophy. But it had reached the point that clinging to Reagan’s anti-government principles might mean the demise of the most important tourist attraction in Dixon. He and the foundation were not willing to leave the home to the whims of the free market.
“It’s not gonna close, if I have to stay here and run it myself,” says Gorman, who grew up nearby in another home the Reagan family inhabited. “It would be a loss to this community, the status, the tourism. Those 5,000 people that come to see us [every year], they eat in restaurants, spend money here.”
The boyhood home would not be the first presidential property to pass from a private foundation to the Park Service. James Garfield’s Lawnfield in Mentor, Ohio; William Taft’s house in Cincinnati; Herbert Hoover’s home in West Branch, Iowa; and Clinton’s home in Hope, have all gone through the process. But none did so after such a concerted resistance, in the name of a president’s legacy. Now, a monument to private-sector gumption is becoming, instead, a testament to its limits.
***
Ronald Reagan moved intothe house at 816 South Hennepin Avenue in December 1920, when his father, an itinerant shoe salesman, finally settled down as co-owner of a store called the Fashion Boot Shop. The Reagans—including Ronald’s mother and older brother—occupied the house until 1924, first paying $12 per month in rent, then $15. Reagan would spend the remainder of his youth in Dixon, leaving at 18 to attend Eureka College downstate.
In his autobiography,An American Life, Reagan wrote that life in Dixon “was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain inThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “Dutch” Reagan, as he was known in his hometown, skated on the frozen Rock River (“the Hudson of the West”), played right guard on the Dixon High School football team and launched his acting career in student theatricals. During the summers, he worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, where he claimed to have saved 77 swimmers, though locals will tell you a lot of those would-be drowning victims were girls who wanted to be saved by the handsome young man in the tank suit.
As even Reagan admitted, though, life in Dixon was not always sweet. Reagan’s father was an alcoholic, and the house on South Hennepin Avenue was the scene of Reagan’s darkest childhood memory. One night, when he was 11 years old, Dutch came home from the YMCA to find Jack Reagan sprawled out on the snowy lawn, dead drunk after a binge at a speakeasy. Reagan dragged him inside by the overcoat, “then put him to bed and never mentioned the incident to my mother,” he wrote in the autobiography.
The house was later chopped up into two apartments, and it stood vacant by the time Reagan ran for president in 1980. Thatyear,a mailman alerted local business leaders to its history. They pooled their money to buy the house, starting the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation.
The Queen Anne-style home, built in 1891, would probably have been demolished long ago if Reagan hadn’t lived there. It is furnished with period beds, old-fashioned china, a Detroit Jewel stove and an icebox. The furniture, which was purchased at second-hand shops around Illinois, didn’t belong to the Reagans—though there is a chair Dutch sat in when he visited a neighbor to listen to the radio. The only feature connecting the house to its long-ago occupants is a loose tile in front of the fireplace, under which Reagan and his brother hid pennies. (A photo in the upstairs hallway shows Reagan and his brother during a 1984 visit, sitting on a replica of the bed they shared.)
Even so, in the 1990s, the home was drawing 20,000 visitors a year—only a 10th the number of visitors Lincoln’s home in Springfield draws, but enough to make it a viable tourist attraction in Dixon, a town of 16,000 people a two-hour drive from Chicago.
Author Bob Spitz says the home also was a valuable research tool, giving him a sense of Reagan’s humble background that informed Spitz’s biography,Reagan: An American Journey. “His bedroom was no bigger than a closet; it is where he often shared a single bed with his brother,” Spitz says. “The tiny porch is where he occasionally found his father passed out from a binge and had to drag him not only inside, but up a steep flight of stairs. The ‘garden’ where his mother raised vegetables so the family could eat when meat was unaffordable was no more than a patch out the back door, by the garage shed.”
The National Park Service manages 16 presidential homes, including Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Illinois, and FDR’s in Hyde Park, New York—each of which has six-figure annual attendance and could probably get by without government help. (Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo in California is owned by the Young America’s Foundation, which uses it as a center to promote conservative ideals. The Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, which receives 400,000 visitors a year, is jointly run by the National Archives and the Reagan Foundation.) There are at least 20other presidential homes besides Reagan’s that are run by private foundations, including George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Buchanan’s Wheatland and Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage. Most survive on a mixture of tourist dollars and local investment.
But among presidential attractions, childhood homes like Reagan’s are not in the same league as Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The best known—JFK’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts—is a Park Service property that receives about 25,000 visitors a year, less than a 10th of the traffic at Kennedy’s presidential library in Boston.
It doesn’t help the Reagan home that Illinois is not the state most Americans associate with the 40th president, and Dixon is not a major population center. The town also doesn’t have much to offer visitors other than Reagan. (It does have a lot of Reagan, though: a History and Learning Center; Reagan statues; a Reagan museum; his original lifeguard chair. There’s also a Ronald Reagan Middle School.)
“It has less to do with presidencies and more to do with the tourist business,” says Hugh Howard, author ofHomes of the Presidents. “If you go to Charlottesville, which is a fun place, you can’t not go to Monticello.”
***
One of the main reasons the boyhood homefoundation could maintain the Reaganite principle of independence from government for so longwas Norm Wymbs, a Florida grocery store magnate who knew Reagan personally and was the home’s biggest benefactor—a “sugar daddy,” in the words of staffers and board members. Wymbs idolized Reagan—he even wrote a book about the president’s years in Dixon—and spent $5 million to restore the house to its 1920s look and build a visitor center. Shortly before his death, he deeded a home he owned in Dixon to the foundation, which sold it in 2013 to a private buyer for $270,000 (the source of the $172,000 profit cited in Coburn’s 2013 report, according to a foundation board member).
That money was used to purchase four small houses near the boyhood home as part of a since-abandoned expansion plan. Wymbs—who called Hastert’s 2002 allocation of $420,000 to buy the home “insulting,” because it didn’t approach his investment over the years—died in 2016, leaving the Reagan home to support itself.
As Reagan has receded into history, attendance has fallen to 5,000 visitors per year. In 2016, finding the home in a state of decrepitude, Gorman took out a $100,000 line of credit. A retired nuclear power plant mechanic, Gorman went a year without taking a salary, but the home was still losing $20,000 to $25,000 annually. Although a pair of $25,000 donations from a local charity will help pay off the line of credit, no one has stepped forward to replace the home’s sugar daddy. Last year, Reagan’s post-presidential secretary, Peggy Grande, came to Dixon for a fundraiser; it netted only $7,500.
When Gorman told the board of directors that he was seeking a Park Service takeover, this time, there was no pushback. Everyone realized the home could no longer raise enough money to remain open.
“It’s the only move,” says Joe Rudolphi, the board’s treasurer. “I don’t think we have much choice, unless we can find someone in Chicago to support us. We need to put a new roof on the house. That’s going to cost thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars. You look at an old house, an old property—it’s a money pit.”
Hastert’s act of Congress establishing a Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home National Historic Site is still in effect, but the appropriation to buy the house has expired. The Park Service is aware of the foundation’s desire to sell, and is working to arrange for an appraisal, says Brent Everitt, a spokesperson for the National Park Service: “Once the due diligence process is completed, the NPS would likely begin the process of developing a land acquisition budget request through Congress.”
Dixon’s current congressman, Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, “supports the National Park Service purchasing the site,” he said through a spokesperson. This time, the money to honor Reagan will have to come from a Democratic Congress. One factor in the home’s favor, however: The Park Service can name its own price.
“Whatever we can get, I would recommend that we take,” Rudolphi says. “If we can get out of there, just get. We can use the money to help kids through college, give them a Reagan scholarship, help the people in the community.”
In the meantime, the Reagan boyhood home soldiers on, with dwindling resources and visitors. Gorman says he has “mixed emotions” about selling the anti-big government president’s house to the government. (Although maybe he shouldn’t: Despite Reagan’s rhetoric, the Park Service acquired plenty of land when he was president, including an $8 million purchase in the Santa Monica Mountains.) But Gorman believes it’s the best way to honor Reagan. As it stands, Gorman is the home’s only full-time employee. He has trouble attracting volunteer docents. He doesn’t have time to raise funds or promote the home on social media.
“I think even Ronald Reagan would admit that times have changed,” Gorman says. “I have the utmost respect for Ronald Reagan the man, the president. I don’t want to say we’re doing him a disservice here, but we could be doing a lot better.”
Howard, theHouses of the Presidentsauthor, says he hopes the Park Service takes over the house but adds, “My suspicion is … they will stabilize it and put it on their website, but their visitation is not going to quadruple.”
A lot of Dixonites have mixed feelings about the potential sale, too. “I don’t have a problem with it, because it’s struggling, and the Park Service can help,” says Marlin Misner, a former foundation board member who wrote a history of the boyhood home. “Whether they will or not, we’ll see. If you want to ruin a project, get the federal government involved.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better himself.
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How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-reagans-childhood-home-gave-up-on-reaganism-11/
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
Photograph by M. Scott Mahaskey
DIXON, Illinois—In the gift shop of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home is a T-shirt bearing one of the 40th president’s best-known sayings: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Since opening to the public in 1984, the home, run by a nonprofit foundation, has lived by that principle, rejecting public money and staying proudly independent. Its website declares, “The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home does not receive State or Federal Funding.”
Nearly 130 years old, the three-bedroom, one-bathroom white house onSouth Hennepin Avenue in Dixon is a testament to Reagan’s modest, all-American childhood.Many of its counterparts around the country, includingBill Clinton’s boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts; andthe estate in New York where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, are run by the National Park Service.
Not Reagan’s house.In 2002, Dixon’s congressman, Dennis Hastert, then the Republican speaker of the House, passed a bill authorizing the National Park Service to buy the property and manage the house, as it does so many other presidential properties. The members of the Reagan home’s board of directors were aging and approached Hastert because they thought the Park Service might be a good candidate to carry on their work. They changed their minds, however, and spurned the help,in part because Congress wouldn’t match the millions of dollars private donors had invested in the property, and in part because that’s not how Reagan would have wanted it.
“He didn’t think government needed to be involved in our daily lives,” Connie Lange, the executive director at the time, said of the 40th president. “And people really took that to heart here.”
The Reagan boyhood home’s independence made it a rallying point for conservatives. Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the Reagan Legacy Project, told theWashington Times, “I’m not in favor of the government owning property, never mind Reagan’s house.” In a 2013 report about the “congressional shortsightedness and bureaucratic mismanagement” around U.S. national parks, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma used the Reagan house as evidence that historic sites could be just fine in private hands, writing that the home had recently reported an annual net income of $172,000 and “can manage its affairs just as well as many of the nonprofits administering the nation’s celebrated presidential sites.”
Now, though, it turns out the mantle of Reaganism might be too much for Reagan’s boyhood home and his small hometown to carry.The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation, beset by shrinking attendance, a shortage of volunteer docents, an aging house and—crucially—the death of its most generous benefactor,is finally asking the government for a bailout. And this time, it’s basically inviting Congress to name its price.
A year ago, Patrick Gorman, who became the foundation’s executive director in 2016, wrote a letter to the National Park Service, offering, at long last, to sell the home to the federal government. He understood, and sympathized with, the former president’s philosophy. But it had reached the point that clinging to Reagan’s anti-government principles might mean the demise of the most important tourist attraction in Dixon. He and the foundation were not willing to leave the home to the whims of the free market.
“It’s not gonna close, if I have to stay here and run it myself,” says Gorman, who grew up nearby in another home the Reagan family inhabited. “It would be a loss to this community, the status, the tourism. Those 5,000 people that come to see us [every year], they eat in restaurants, spend money here.”
The boyhood home would not be the first presidential property to pass from a private foundation to the Park Service. James Garfield’s Lawnfield in Mentor, Ohio; William Taft’s house in Cincinnati; Herbert Hoover’s home in West Branch, Iowa; and Clinton’s home in Hope, have all gone through the process. But none did so after such a concerted resistance, in the name of a president’s legacy. Now, a monument to private-sector gumption is becoming, instead, a testament to its limits.
***
Ronald Reagan moved intothe house at 816 South Hennepin Avenue in December 1920, when his father, an itinerant shoe salesman, finally settled down as co-owner of a store called the Fashion Boot Shop. The Reagans—including Ronald’s mother and older brother—occupied the house until 1924, first paying $12 per month in rent, then $15. Reagan would spend the remainder of his youth in Dixon, leaving at 18 to attend Eureka College downstate.
In his autobiography,An American Life, Reagan wrote that life in Dixon “was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain inThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “Dutch” Reagan, as he was known in his hometown, skated on the frozen Rock River (“the Hudson of the West”), played right guard on the Dixon High School football team and launched his acting career in student theatricals. During the summers, he worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, where he claimed to have saved 77 swimmers, though locals will tell you a lot of those would-be drowning victims were girls who wanted to be saved by the handsome young man in the tank suit.
As even Reagan admitted, though, life in Dixon was not always sweet. Reagan’s father was an alcoholic, and the house on South Hennepin Avenue was the scene of Reagan’s darkest childhood memory. One night, when he was 11 years old, Dutch came home from the YMCA to find Jack Reagan sprawled out on the snowy lawn, dead drunk after a binge at a speakeasy. Reagan dragged him inside by the overcoat, “then put him to bed and never mentioned the incident to my mother,” he wrote in the autobiography.
The house was later chopped up into two apartments, and it stood vacant by the time Reagan ran for president in 1980. Thatyear,a mailman alerted local business leaders to its history. They pooled their money to buy the house, starting the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation.
The Queen Anne-style home, built in 1891, would probably have been demolished long ago if Reagan hadn’t lived there. It is furnished with period beds, old-fashioned china, a Detroit Jewel stove and an icebox. The furniture, which was purchased at second-hand shops around Illinois, didn’t belong to the Reagans—though there is a chair Dutch sat in when he visited a neighbor to listen to the radio. The only feature connecting the house to its long-ago occupants is a loose tile in front of the fireplace, under which Reagan and his brother hid pennies. (A photo in the upstairs hallway shows Reagan and his brother during a 1984 visit, sitting on a replica of the bed they shared.)
Even so, in the 1990s, the home was drawing 20,000 visitors a year—only a 10th the number of visitors Lincoln’s home in Springfield draws, but enough to make it a viable tourist attraction in Dixon, a town of 16,000 people a two-hour drive from Chicago.
Author Bob Spitz says the home also was a valuable research tool, giving him a sense of Reagan’s humble background that informed Spitz’s biography,Reagan: An American Journey. “His bedroom was no bigger than a closet; it is where he often shared a single bed with his brother,” Spitz says. “The tiny porch is where he occasionally found his father passed out from a binge and had to drag him not only inside, but up a steep flight of stairs. The ‘garden’ where his mother raised vegetables so the family could eat when meat was unaffordable was no more than a patch out the back door, by the garage shed.”
The National Park Service manages 16 presidential homes, including Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Illinois, and FDR’s in Hyde Park, New York—each of which has six-figure annual attendance and could probably get by without government help. (Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo in California is owned by the Young America’s Foundation, which uses it as a center to promote conservative ideals. The Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, which receives 400,000 visitors a year, is jointly run by the National Archives and the Reagan Foundation.) There are at least 20other presidential homes besides Reagan’s that are run by private foundations, including George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Buchanan’s Wheatland and Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage. Most survive on a mixture of tourist dollars and local investment.
But among presidential attractions, childhood homes like Reagan’s are not in the same league as Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The best known—JFK’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts—is a Park Service property that receives about 25,000 visitors a year, less than a 10th of the traffic at Kennedy’s presidential library in Boston.
It doesn’t help the Reagan home that Illinois is not the state most Americans associate with the 40th president, and Dixon is not a major population center. The town also doesn’t have much to offer visitors other than Reagan. (It does have a lot of Reagan, though: a History and Learning Center; Reagan statues; a Reagan museum; his original lifeguard chair. There’s also a Ronald Reagan Middle School.)
“It has less to do with presidencies and more to do with the tourist business,” says Hugh Howard, author ofHomes of the Presidents. “If you go to Charlottesville, which is a fun place, you can’t not go to Monticello.”
***
One of the main reasons the boyhood homefoundation could maintain the Reaganite principle of independence from government for so longwas Norm Wymbs, a Florida grocery store magnate who knew Reagan personally and was the home’s biggest benefactor—a “sugar daddy,” in the words of staffers and board members. Wymbs idolized Reagan—he even wrote a book about the president’s years in Dixon—and spent $5 million to restore the house to its 1920s look and build a visitor center. Shortly before his death, he deeded a home he owned in Dixon to the foundation, which sold it in 2013 to a private buyer for $270,000 (the source of the $172,000 profit cited in Coburn’s 2013 report, according to a foundation board member).
That money was used to purchase four small houses near the boyhood home as part of a since-abandoned expansion plan. Wymbs—who called Hastert’s 2002 allocation of $420,000 to buy the home “insulting,” because it didn’t approach his investment over the years—died in 2016, leaving the Reagan home to support itself.
As Reagan has receded into history, attendance has fallen to 5,000 visitors per year. In 2016, finding the home in a state of decrepitude, Gorman took out a $100,000 line of credit. A retired nuclear power plant mechanic, Gorman went a year without taking a salary, but the home was still losing $20,000 to $25,000 annually. Although a pair of $25,000 donations from a local charity will help pay off the line of credit, no one has stepped forward to replace the home’s sugar daddy. Last year, Reagan’s post-presidential secretary, Peggy Grande, came to Dixon for a fundraiser; it netted only $7,500.
When Gorman told the board of directors that he was seeking a Park Service takeover, this time, there was no pushback. Everyone realized the home could no longer raise enough money to remain open.
“It’s the only move,” says Joe Rudolphi, the board’s treasurer. “I don’t think we have much choice, unless we can find someone in Chicago to support us. We need to put a new roof on the house. That’s going to cost thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars. You look at an old house, an old property—it’s a money pit.”
Hastert’s act of Congress establishing a Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home National Historic Site is still in effect, but the appropriation to buy the house has expired. The Park Service is aware of the foundation’s desire to sell, and is working to arrange for an appraisal, says Brent Everitt, a spokesperson for the National Park Service: “Once the due diligence process is completed, the NPS would likely begin the process of developing a land acquisition budget request through Congress.”
Dixon’s current congressman, Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, “supports the National Park Service purchasing the site,” he said through a spokesperson. This time, the money to honor Reagan will have to come from a Democratic Congress. One factor in the home’s favor, however: The Park Service can name its own price.
“Whatever we can get, I would recommend that we take,” Rudolphi says. “If we can get out of there, just get. We can use the money to help kids through college, give them a Reagan scholarship, help the people in the community.”
In the meantime, the Reagan boyhood home soldiers on, with dwindling resources and visitors. Gorman says he has “mixed emotions” about selling the anti-big government president’s house to the government. (Although maybe he shouldn’t: Despite Reagan’s rhetoric, the Park Service acquired plenty of land when he was president, including an $8 million purchase in the Santa Monica Mountains.) But Gorman believes it’s the best way to honor Reagan. As it stands, Gorman is the home’s only full-time employee. He has trouble attracting volunteer docents. He doesn’t have time to raise funds or promote the home on social media.
“I think even Ronald Reagan would admit that times have changed,” Gorman says. “I have the utmost respect for Ronald Reagan the man, the president. I don’t want to say we’re doing him a disservice here, but we could be doing a lot better.”
Howard, theHouses of the Presidentsauthor, says he hopes the Park Service takes over the house but adds, “My suspicion is … they will stabilize it and put it on their website, but their visitation is not going to quadruple.”
A lot of Dixonites have mixed feelings about the potential sale, too. “I don’t have a problem with it, because it’s struggling, and the Park Service can help,” says Marlin Misner, a former foundation board member who wrote a history of the boyhood home. “Whether they will or not, we’ll see. If you want to ruin a project, get the federal government involved.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better himself.
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How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-reagans-childhood-home-gave-up-on-reaganism-10/
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
Photograph by M. Scott Mahaskey
DIXON, Illinois—In the gift shop of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home is a T-shirt bearing one of the 40th president’s best-known sayings: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Since opening to the public in 1984, the home, run by a nonprofit foundation, has lived by that principle, rejecting public money and staying proudly independent. Its website declares, “The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home does not receive State or Federal Funding.”
Nearly 130 years old, the three-bedroom, one-bathroom white house onSouth Hennepin Avenue in Dixon is a testament to Reagan’s modest, all-American childhood.Many of its counterparts around the country, includingBill Clinton’s boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts; andthe estate in New York where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, are run by the National Park Service.
Not Reagan’s house.In 2002, Dixon’s congressman, Dennis Hastert, then the Republican speaker of the House, passed a bill authorizing the National Park Service to buy the property and manage the house, as it does so many other presidential properties. The members of the Reagan home’s board of directors were aging and approached Hastert because they thought the Park Service might be a good candidate to carry on their work. They changed their minds, however, and spurned the help,in part because Congress wouldn’t match the millions of dollars private donors had invested in the property, and in part because that’s not how Reagan would have wanted it.
“He didn’t think government needed to be involved in our daily lives,” Connie Lange, the executive director at the time, said of the 40th president. “And people really took that to heart here.”
The Reagan boyhood home’s independence made it a rallying point for conservatives. Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the Reagan Legacy Project, told theWashington Times, “I’m not in favor of the government owning property, never mind Reagan’s house.” In a 2013 report about the “congressional shortsightedness and bureaucratic mismanagement” around U.S. national parks, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma used the Reagan house as evidence that historic sites could be just fine in private hands, writing that the home had recently reported an annual net income of $172,000 and “can manage its affairs just as well as many of the nonprofits administering the nation’s celebrated presidential sites.”
Now, though, it turns out the mantle of Reaganism might be too much for Reagan’s boyhood home and his small hometown to carry.The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation, beset by shrinking attendance, a shortage of volunteer docents, an aging house and—crucially—the death of its most generous benefactor,is finally asking the government for a bailout. And this time, it’s basically inviting Congress to name its price.
A year ago, Patrick Gorman, who became the foundation’s executive director in 2016, wrote a letter to the National Park Service, offering, at long last, to sell the home to the federal government. He understood, and sympathized with, the former president’s philosophy. But it had reached the point that clinging to Reagan’s anti-government principles might mean the demise of the most important tourist attraction in Dixon. He and the foundation were not willing to leave the home to the whims of the free market.
“It’s not gonna close, if I have to stay here and run it myself,” says Gorman, who grew up nearby in another home the Reagan family inhabited. “It would be a loss to this community, the status, the tourism. Those 5,000 people that come to see us [every year], they eat in restaurants, spend money here.”
The boyhood home would not be the first presidential property to pass from a private foundation to the Park Service. James Garfield’s Lawnfield in Mentor, Ohio; William Taft’s house in Cincinnati; Herbert Hoover’s home in West Branch, Iowa; and Clinton’s home in Hope, have all gone through the process. But none did so after such a concerted resistance, in the name of a president’s legacy. Now, a monument to private-sector gumption is becoming, instead, a testament to its limits.
***
Ronald Reagan moved intothe house at 816 South Hennepin Avenue in December 1920, when his father, an itinerant shoe salesman, finally settled down as co-owner of a store called the Fashion Boot Shop. The Reagans—including Ronald’s mother and older brother—occupied the house until 1924, first paying $12 per month in rent, then $15. Reagan would spend the remainder of his youth in Dixon, leaving at 18 to attend Eureka College downstate.
In his autobiography,An American Life, Reagan wrote that life in Dixon “was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain inThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “Dutch” Reagan, as he was known in his hometown, skated on the frozen Rock River (“the Hudson of the West”), played right guard on the Dixon High School football team and launched his acting career in student theatricals. During the summers, he worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, where he claimed to have saved 77 swimmers, though locals will tell you a lot of those would-be drowning victims were girls who wanted to be saved by the handsome young man in the tank suit.
As even Reagan admitted, though, life in Dixon was not always sweet. Reagan’s father was an alcoholic, and the house on South Hennepin Avenue was the scene of Reagan’s darkest childhood memory. One night, when he was 11 years old, Dutch came home from the YMCA to find Jack Reagan sprawled out on the snowy lawn, dead drunk after a binge at a speakeasy. Reagan dragged him inside by the overcoat, “then put him to bed and never mentioned the incident to my mother,” he wrote in the autobiography.
The house was later chopped up into two apartments, and it stood vacant by the time Reagan ran for president in 1980. Thatyear,a mailman alerted local business leaders to its history. They pooled their money to buy the house, starting the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation.
The Queen Anne-style home, built in 1891, would probably have been demolished long ago if Reagan hadn’t lived there. It is furnished with period beds, old-fashioned china, a Detroit Jewel stove and an icebox. The furniture, which was purchased at second-hand shops around Illinois, didn’t belong to the Reagans—though there is a chair Dutch sat in when he visited a neighbor to listen to the radio. The only feature connecting the house to its long-ago occupants is a loose tile in front of the fireplace, under which Reagan and his brother hid pennies. (A photo in the upstairs hallway shows Reagan and his brother during a 1984 visit, sitting on a replica of the bed they shared.)
Even so, in the 1990s, the home was drawing 20,000 visitors a year—only a 10th the number of visitors Lincoln’s home in Springfield draws, but enough to make it a viable tourist attraction in Dixon, a town of 16,000 people a two-hour drive from Chicago.
Author Bob Spitz says the home also was a valuable research tool, giving him a sense of Reagan’s humble background that informed Spitz’s biography,Reagan: An American Journey. “His bedroom was no bigger than a closet; it is where he often shared a single bed with his brother,” Spitz says. “The tiny porch is where he occasionally found his father passed out from a binge and had to drag him not only inside, but up a steep flight of stairs. The ‘garden’ where his mother raised vegetables so the family could eat when meat was unaffordable was no more than a patch out the back door, by the garage shed.”
The National Park Service manages 16 presidential homes, including Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Illinois, and FDR’s in Hyde Park, New York—each of which has six-figure annual attendance and could probably get by without government help. (Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo in California is owned by the Young America’s Foundation, which uses it as a center to promote conservative ideals. The Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, which receives 400,000 visitors a year, is jointly run by the National Archives and the Reagan Foundation.) There are at least 20other presidential homes besides Reagan’s that are run by private foundations, including George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Buchanan’s Wheatland and Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage. Most survive on a mixture of tourist dollars and local investment.
But among presidential attractions, childhood homes like Reagan’s are not in the same league as Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The best known—JFK’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts—is a Park Service property that receives about 25,000 visitors a year, less than a 10th of the traffic at Kennedy’s presidential library in Boston.
It doesn’t help the Reagan home that Illinois is not the state most Americans associate with the 40th president, and Dixon is not a major population center. The town also doesn’t have much to offer visitors other than Reagan. (It does have a lot of Reagan, though: a History and Learning Center; Reagan statues; a Reagan museum; his original lifeguard chair. There’s also a Ronald Reagan Middle School.)
“It has less to do with presidencies and more to do with the tourist business,” says Hugh Howard, author ofHomes of the Presidents. “If you go to Charlottesville, which is a fun place, you can’t not go to Monticello.”
***
One of the main reasons the boyhood homefoundation could maintain the Reaganite principle of independence from government for so longwas Norm Wymbs, a Florida grocery store magnate who knew Reagan personally and was the home’s biggest benefactor—a “sugar daddy,” in the words of staffers and board members. Wymbs idolized Reagan—he even wrote a book about the president’s years in Dixon—and spent $5 million to restore the house to its 1920s look and build a visitor center. Shortly before his death, he deeded a home he owned in Dixon to the foundation, which sold it in 2013 to a private buyer for $270,000 (the source of the $172,000 profit cited in Coburn’s 2013 report, according to a foundation board member).
That money was used to purchase four small houses near the boyhood home as part of a since-abandoned expansion plan. Wymbs—who called Hastert’s 2002 allocation of $420,000 to buy the home “insulting,” because it didn’t approach his investment over the years—died in 2016, leaving the Reagan home to support itself.
As Reagan has receded into history, attendance has fallen to 5,000 visitors per year. In 2016, finding the home in a state of decrepitude, Gorman took out a $100,000 line of credit. A retired nuclear power plant mechanic, Gorman went a year without taking a salary, but the home was still losing $20,000 to $25,000 annually. Although a pair of $25,000 donations from a local charity will help pay off the line of credit, no one has stepped forward to replace the home’s sugar daddy. Last year, Reagan’s post-presidential secretary, Peggy Grande, came to Dixon for a fundraiser; it netted only $7,500.
When Gorman told the board of directors that he was seeking a Park Service takeover, this time, there was no pushback. Everyone realized the home could no longer raise enough money to remain open.
“It’s the only move,” says Joe Rudolphi, the board’s treasurer. “I don’t think we have much choice, unless we can find someone in Chicago to support us. We need to put a new roof on the house. That’s going to cost thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars. You look at an old house, an old property—it’s a money pit.”
Hastert’s act of Congress establishing a Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home National Historic Site is still in effect, but the appropriation to buy the house has expired. The Park Service is aware of the foundation’s desire to sell, and is working to arrange for an appraisal, says Brent Everitt, a spokesperson for the National Park Service: “Once the due diligence process is completed, the NPS would likely begin the process of developing a land acquisition budget request through Congress.”
Dixon’s current congressman, Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, “supports the National Park Service purchasing the site,” he said through a spokesperson. This time, the money to honor Reagan will have to come from a Democratic Congress. One factor in the home’s favor, however: The Park Service can name its own price.
“Whatever we can get, I would recommend that we take,” Rudolphi says. “If we can get out of there, just get. We can use the money to help kids through college, give them a Reagan scholarship, help the people in the community.”
In the meantime, the Reagan boyhood home soldiers on, with dwindling resources and visitors. Gorman says he has “mixed emotions” about selling the anti-big government president’s house to the government. (Although maybe he shouldn’t: Despite Reagan’s rhetoric, the Park Service acquired plenty of land when he was president, including an $8 million purchase in the Santa Monica Mountains.) But Gorman believes it’s the best way to honor Reagan. As it stands, Gorman is the home’s only full-time employee. He has trouble attracting volunteer docents. He doesn’t have time to raise funds or promote the home on social media.
“I think even Ronald Reagan would admit that times have changed,” Gorman says. “I have the utmost respect for Ronald Reagan the man, the president. I don’t want to say we’re doing him a disservice here, but we could be doing a lot better.”
Howard, theHouses of the Presidentsauthor, says he hopes the Park Service takes over the house but adds, “My suspicion is … they will stabilize it and put it on their website, but their visitation is not going to quadruple.”
A lot of Dixonites have mixed feelings about the potential sale, too. “I don’t have a problem with it, because it’s struggling, and the Park Service can help,” says Marlin Misner, a former foundation board member who wrote a history of the boyhood home. “Whether they will or not, we’ll see. If you want to ruin a project, get the federal government involved.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better himself.
Read More
0 notes
Text
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-reagans-childhood-home-gave-up-on-reaganism-9/
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
Photograph by M. Scott Mahaskey
DIXON, Illinois—In the gift shop of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home is a T-shirt bearing one of the 40th president’s best-known sayings: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Since opening to the public in 1984, the home, run by a nonprofit foundation, has lived by that principle, rejecting public money and staying proudly independent. Its website declares, “The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home does not receive State or Federal Funding.”
Nearly 130 years old, the three-bedroom, one-bathroom white house onSouth Hennepin Avenue in Dixon is a testament to Reagan’s modest, all-American childhood.Many of its counterparts around the country, includingBill Clinton’s boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts; andthe estate in New York where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, are run by the National Park Service.
Not Reagan’s house.In 2002, Dixon’s congressman, Dennis Hastert, then the Republican speaker of the House, passed a bill authorizing the National Park Service to buy the property and manage the house, as it does so many other presidential properties. The members of the Reagan home’s board of directors were aging and approached Hastert because they thought the Park Service might be a good candidate to carry on their work. They changed their minds, however, and spurned the help,in part because Congress wouldn’t match the millions of dollars private donors had invested in the property, and in part because that’s not how Reagan would have wanted it.
“He didn’t think government needed to be involved in our daily lives,” Connie Lange, the executive director at the time, said of the 40th president. “And people really took that to heart here.”
The Reagan boyhood home’s independence made it a rallying point for conservatives. Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the Reagan Legacy Project, told theWashington Times, “I’m not in favor of the government owning property, never mind Reagan’s house.” In a 2013 report about the “congressional shortsightedness and bureaucratic mismanagement” around U.S. national parks, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma used the Reagan house as evidence that historic sites could be just fine in private hands, writing that the home had recently reported an annual net income of $172,000 and “can manage its affairs just as well as many of the nonprofits administering the nation’s celebrated presidential sites.”
Now, though, it turns out the mantle of Reaganism might be too much for Reagan’s boyhood home and his small hometown to carry.The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation, beset by shrinking attendance, a shortage of volunteer docents, an aging house and—crucially—the death of its most generous benefactor,is finally asking the government for a bailout. And this time, it’s basically inviting Congress to name its price.
A year ago, Patrick Gorman, who became the foundation’s executive director in 2016, wrote a letter to the National Park Service, offering, at long last, to sell the home to the federal government. He understood, and sympathized with, the former president’s philosophy. But it had reached the point that clinging to Reagan’s anti-government principles might mean the demise of the most important tourist attraction in Dixon. He and the foundation were not willing to leave the home to the whims of the free market.
“It’s not gonna close, if I have to stay here and run it myself,” says Gorman, who grew up nearby in another home the Reagan family inhabited. “It would be a loss to this community, the status, the tourism. Those 5,000 people that come to see us [every year], they eat in restaurants, spend money here.”
The boyhood home would not be the first presidential property to pass from a private foundation to the Park Service. James Garfield’s Lawnfield in Mentor, Ohio; William Taft’s house in Cincinnati; Herbert Hoover’s home in West Branch, Iowa; and Clinton’s home in Hope, have all gone through the process. But none did so after such a concerted resistance, in the name of a president’s legacy. Now, a monument to private-sector gumption is becoming, instead, a testament to its limits.
***
Ronald Reagan moved intothe house at 816 South Hennepin Avenue in December 1920, when his father, an itinerant shoe salesman, finally settled down as co-owner of a store called the Fashion Boot Shop. The Reagans—including Ronald’s mother and older brother—occupied the house until 1924, first paying $12 per month in rent, then $15. Reagan would spend the remainder of his youth in Dixon, leaving at 18 to attend Eureka College downstate.
In his autobiography,An American Life, Reagan wrote that life in Dixon “was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain inThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “Dutch” Reagan, as he was known in his hometown, skated on the frozen Rock River (“the Hudson of the West”), played right guard on the Dixon High School football team and launched his acting career in student theatricals. During the summers, he worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, where he claimed to have saved 77 swimmers, though locals will tell you a lot of those would-be drowning victims were girls who wanted to be saved by the handsome young man in the tank suit.
As even Reagan admitted, though, life in Dixon was not always sweet. Reagan’s father was an alcoholic, and the house on South Hennepin Avenue was the scene of Reagan’s darkest childhood memory. One night, when he was 11 years old, Dutch came home from the YMCA to find Jack Reagan sprawled out on the snowy lawn, dead drunk after a binge at a speakeasy. Reagan dragged him inside by the overcoat, “then put him to bed and never mentioned the incident to my mother,” he wrote in the autobiography.
The house was later chopped up into two apartments, and it stood vacant by the time Reagan ran for president in 1980. Thatyear,a mailman alerted local business leaders to its history. They pooled their money to buy the house, starting the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation.
The Queen Anne-style home, built in 1891, would probably have been demolished long ago if Reagan hadn’t lived there. It is furnished with period beds, old-fashioned china, a Detroit Jewel stove and an icebox. The furniture, which was purchased at second-hand shops around Illinois, didn’t belong to the Reagans—though there is a chair Dutch sat in when he visited a neighbor to listen to the radio. The only feature connecting the house to its long-ago occupants is a loose tile in front of the fireplace, under which Reagan and his brother hid pennies. (A photo in the upstairs hallway shows Reagan and his brother during a 1984 visit, sitting on a replica of the bed they shared.)
Even so, in the 1990s, the home was drawing 20,000 visitors a year—only a 10th the number of visitors Lincoln’s home in Springfield draws, but enough to make it a viable tourist attraction in Dixon, a town of 16,000 people a two-hour drive from Chicago.
Author Bob Spitz says the home also was a valuable research tool, giving him a sense of Reagan’s humble background that informed Spitz’s biography,Reagan: An American Journey. “His bedroom was no bigger than a closet; it is where he often shared a single bed with his brother,” Spitz says. “The tiny porch is where he occasionally found his father passed out from a binge and had to drag him not only inside, but up a steep flight of stairs. The ‘garden’ where his mother raised vegetables so the family could eat when meat was unaffordable was no more than a patch out the back door, by the garage shed.”
The National Park Service manages 16 presidential homes, including Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Illinois, and FDR’s in Hyde Park, New York—each of which has six-figure annual attendance and could probably get by without government help. (Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo in California is owned by the Young America’s Foundation, which uses it as a center to promote conservative ideals. The Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, which receives 400,000 visitors a year, is jointly run by the National Archives and the Reagan Foundation.) There are at least 20other presidential homes besides Reagan’s that are run by private foundations, including George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Buchanan’s Wheatland and Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage. Most survive on a mixture of tourist dollars and local investment.
But among presidential attractions, childhood homes like Reagan’s are not in the same league as Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The best known—JFK’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts—is a Park Service property that receives about 25,000 visitors a year, less than a 10th of the traffic at Kennedy’s presidential library in Boston.
It doesn’t help the Reagan home that Illinois is not the state most Americans associate with the 40th president, and Dixon is not a major population center. The town also doesn’t have much to offer visitors other than Reagan. (It does have a lot of Reagan, though: a History and Learning Center; Reagan statues; a Reagan museum; his original lifeguard chair. There’s also a Ronald Reagan Middle School.)
“It has less to do with presidencies and more to do with the tourist business,” says Hugh Howard, author ofHomes of the Presidents. “If you go to Charlottesville, which is a fun place, you can’t not go to Monticello.”
***
One of the main reasons the boyhood homefoundation could maintain the Reaganite principle of independence from government for so longwas Norm Wymbs, a Florida grocery store magnate who knew Reagan personally and was the home’s biggest benefactor—a “sugar daddy,” in the words of staffers and board members. Wymbs idolized Reagan—he even wrote a book about the president’s years in Dixon—and spent $5 million to restore the house to its 1920s look and build a visitor center. Shortly before his death, he deeded a home he owned in Dixon to the foundation, which sold it in 2013 to a private buyer for $270,000 (the source of the $172,000 profit cited in Coburn’s 2013 report, according to a foundation board member).
That money was used to purchase four small houses near the boyhood home as part of a since-abandoned expansion plan. Wymbs—who called Hastert’s 2002 allocation of $420,000 to buy the home “insulting,” because it didn’t approach his investment over the years—died in 2016, leaving the Reagan home to support itself.
As Reagan has receded into history, attendance has fallen to 5,000 visitors per year. In 2016, finding the home in a state of decrepitude, Gorman took out a $100,000 line of credit. A retired nuclear power plant mechanic, Gorman went a year without taking a salary, but the home was still losing $20,000 to $25,000 annually. Although a pair of $25,000 donations from a local charity will help pay off the line of credit, no one has stepped forward to replace the home’s sugar daddy. Last year, Reagan’s post-presidential secretary, Peggy Grande, came to Dixon for a fundraiser; it netted only $7,500.
When Gorman told the board of directors that he was seeking a Park Service takeover, this time, there was no pushback. Everyone realized the home could no longer raise enough money to remain open.
“It’s the only move,” says Joe Rudolphi, the board’s treasurer. “I don’t think we have much choice, unless we can find someone in Chicago to support us. We need to put a new roof on the house. That’s going to cost thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars. You look at an old house, an old property—it’s a money pit.”
Hastert’s act of Congress establishing a Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home National Historic Site is still in effect, but the appropriation to buy the house has expired. The Park Service is aware of the foundation’s desire to sell, and is working to arrange for an appraisal, says Brent Everitt, a spokesperson for the National Park Service: “Once the due diligence process is completed, the NPS would likely begin the process of developing a land acquisition budget request through Congress.”
Dixon’s current congressman, Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, “supports the National Park Service purchasing the site,” he said through a spokesperson. This time, the money to honor Reagan will have to come from a Democratic Congress. One factor in the home’s favor, however: The Park Service can name its own price.
“Whatever we can get, I would recommend that we take,” Rudolphi says. “If we can get out of there, just get. We can use the money to help kids through college, give them a Reagan scholarship, help the people in the community.”
In the meantime, the Reagan boyhood home soldiers on, with dwindling resources and visitors. Gorman says he has “mixed emotions” about selling the anti-big government president’s house to the government. (Although maybe he shouldn’t: Despite Reagan’s rhetoric, the Park Service acquired plenty of land when he was president, including an $8 million purchase in the Santa Monica Mountains.) But Gorman believes it’s the best way to honor Reagan. As it stands, Gorman is the home’s only full-time employee. He has trouble attracting volunteer docents. He doesn’t have time to raise funds or promote the home on social media.
“I think even Ronald Reagan would admit that times have changed,” Gorman says. “I have the utmost respect for Ronald Reagan the man, the president. I don’t want to say we’re doing him a disservice here, but we could be doing a lot better.”
Howard, theHouses of the Presidentsauthor, says he hopes the Park Service takes over the house but adds, “My suspicion is … they will stabilize it and put it on their website, but their visitation is not going to quadruple.”
A lot of Dixonites have mixed feelings about the potential sale, too. “I don’t have a problem with it, because it’s struggling, and the Park Service can help,” says Marlin Misner, a former foundation board member who wrote a history of the boyhood home. “Whether they will or not, we’ll see. If you want to ruin a project, get the federal government involved.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better himself.
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How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-reagans-childhood-home-gave-up-on-reaganism-8/
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
Photograph by M. Scott Mahaskey
DIXON, Illinois—In the gift shop of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home is a T-shirt bearing one of the 40th president’s best-known sayings: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Since opening to the public in 1984, the home, run by a nonprofit foundation, has lived by that principle, rejecting public money and staying proudly independent. Its website declares, “The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home does not receive State or Federal Funding.”
Nearly 130 years old, the three-bedroom, one-bathroom white house onSouth Hennepin Avenue in Dixon is a testament to Reagan’s modest, all-American childhood.Many of its counterparts around the country, includingBill Clinton’s boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts; andthe estate in New York where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, are run by the National Park Service.
Not Reagan’s house.In 2002, Dixon’s congressman, Dennis Hastert, then the Republican speaker of the House, passed a bill authorizing the National Park Service to buy the property and manage the house, as it does so many other presidential properties. The members of the Reagan home’s board of directors were aging and approached Hastert because they thought the Park Service might be a good candidate to carry on their work. They changed their minds, however, and spurned the help,in part because Congress wouldn’t match the millions of dollars private donors had invested in the property, and in part because that’s not how Reagan would have wanted it.
“He didn’t think government needed to be involved in our daily lives,” Connie Lange, the executive director at the time, said of the 40th president. “And people really took that to heart here.”
The Reagan boyhood home’s independence made it a rallying point for conservatives. Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the Reagan Legacy Project, told theWashington Times, “I’m not in favor of the government owning property, never mind Reagan’s house.” In a 2013 report about the “congressional shortsightedness and bureaucratic mismanagement” around U.S. national parks, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma used the Reagan house as evidence that historic sites could be just fine in private hands, writing that the home had recently reported an annual net income of $172,000 and “can manage its affairs just as well as many of the nonprofits administering the nation’s celebrated presidential sites.”
Now, though, it turns out the mantle of Reaganism might be too much for Reagan’s boyhood home and his small hometown to carry.The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation, beset by shrinking attendance, a shortage of volunteer docents, an aging house and—crucially—the death of its most generous benefactor,is finally asking the government for a bailout. And this time, it’s basically inviting Congress to name its price.
A year ago, Patrick Gorman, who became the foundation’s executive director in 2016, wrote a letter to the National Park Service, offering, at long last, to sell the home to the federal government. He understood, and sympathized with, the former president’s philosophy. But it had reached the point that clinging to Reagan’s anti-government principles might mean the demise of the most important tourist attraction in Dixon. He and the foundation were not willing to leave the home to the whims of the free market.
“It’s not gonna close, if I have to stay here and run it myself,” says Gorman, who grew up nearby in another home the Reagan family inhabited. “It would be a loss to this community, the status, the tourism. Those 5,000 people that come to see us [every year], they eat in restaurants, spend money here.”
The boyhood home would not be the first presidential property to pass from a private foundation to the Park Service. James Garfield’s Lawnfield in Mentor, Ohio; William Taft’s house in Cincinnati; Herbert Hoover’s home in West Branch, Iowa; and Clinton’s home in Hope, have all gone through the process. But none did so after such a concerted resistance, in the name of a president’s legacy. Now, a monument to private-sector gumption is becoming, instead, a testament to its limits.
***
Ronald Reagan moved intothe house at 816 South Hennepin Avenue in December 1920, when his father, an itinerant shoe salesman, finally settled down as co-owner of a store called the Fashion Boot Shop. The Reagans—including Ronald’s mother and older brother—occupied the house until 1924, first paying $12 per month in rent, then $15. Reagan would spend the remainder of his youth in Dixon, leaving at 18 to attend Eureka College downstate.
In his autobiography,An American Life, Reagan wrote that life in Dixon “was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain inThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “Dutch” Reagan, as he was known in his hometown, skated on the frozen Rock River (“the Hudson of the West”), played right guard on the Dixon High School football team and launched his acting career in student theatricals. During the summers, he worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, where he claimed to have saved 77 swimmers, though locals will tell you a lot of those would-be drowning victims were girls who wanted to be saved by the handsome young man in the tank suit.
As even Reagan admitted, though, life in Dixon was not always sweet. Reagan’s father was an alcoholic, and the house on South Hennepin Avenue was the scene of Reagan’s darkest childhood memory. One night, when he was 11 years old, Dutch came home from the YMCA to find Jack Reagan sprawled out on the snowy lawn, dead drunk after a binge at a speakeasy. Reagan dragged him inside by the overcoat, “then put him to bed and never mentioned the incident to my mother,” he wrote in the autobiography.
The house was later chopped up into two apartments, and it stood vacant by the time Reagan ran for president in 1980. Thatyear,a mailman alerted local business leaders to its history. They pooled their money to buy the house, starting the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation.
The Queen Anne-style home, built in 1891, would probably have been demolished long ago if Reagan hadn’t lived there. It is furnished with period beds, old-fashioned china, a Detroit Jewel stove and an icebox. The furniture, which was purchased at second-hand shops around Illinois, didn’t belong to the Reagans—though there is a chair Dutch sat in when he visited a neighbor to listen to the radio. The only feature connecting the house to its long-ago occupants is a loose tile in front of the fireplace, under which Reagan and his brother hid pennies. (A photo in the upstairs hallway shows Reagan and his brother during a 1984 visit, sitting on a replica of the bed they shared.)
Even so, in the 1990s, the home was drawing 20,000 visitors a year—only a 10th the number of visitors Lincoln’s home in Springfield draws, but enough to make it a viable tourist attraction in Dixon, a town of 16,000 people a two-hour drive from Chicago.
Author Bob Spitz says the home also was a valuable research tool, giving him a sense of Reagan’s humble background that informed Spitz’s biography,Reagan: An American Journey. “His bedroom was no bigger than a closet; it is where he often shared a single bed with his brother,” Spitz says. “The tiny porch is where he occasionally found his father passed out from a binge and had to drag him not only inside, but up a steep flight of stairs. The ‘garden’ where his mother raised vegetables so the family could eat when meat was unaffordable was no more than a patch out the back door, by the garage shed.”
The National Park Service manages 16 presidential homes, including Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Illinois, and FDR��s in Hyde Park, New York—each of which has six-figure annual attendance and could probably get by without government help. (Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo in California is owned by the Young America’s Foundation, which uses it as a center to promote conservative ideals. The Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, which receives 400,000 visitors a year, is jointly run by the National Archives and the Reagan Foundation.) There are at least 20other presidential homes besides Reagan’s that are run by private foundations, including George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Buchanan’s Wheatland and Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage. Most survive on a mixture of tourist dollars and local investment.
But among presidential attractions, childhood homes like Reagan’s are not in the same league as Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The best known—JFK’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts—is a Park Service property that receives about 25,000 visitors a year, less than a 10th of the traffic at Kennedy’s presidential library in Boston.
It doesn’t help the Reagan home that Illinois is not the state most Americans associate with the 40th president, and Dixon is not a major population center. The town also doesn’t have much to offer visitors other than Reagan. (It does have a lot of Reagan, though: a History and Learning Center; Reagan statues; a Reagan museum; his original lifeguard chair. There’s also a Ronald Reagan Middle School.)
“It has less to do with presidencies and more to do with the tourist business,” says Hugh Howard, author ofHomes of the Presidents. “If you go to Charlottesville, which is a fun place, you can’t not go to Monticello.”
***
One of the main reasons the boyhood homefoundation could maintain the Reaganite principle of independence from government for so longwas Norm Wymbs, a Florida grocery store magnate who knew Reagan personally and was the home’s biggest benefactor—a “sugar daddy,” in the words of staffers and board members. Wymbs idolized Reagan—he even wrote a book about the president’s years in Dixon—and spent $5 million to restore the house to its 1920s look and build a visitor center. Shortly before his death, he deeded a home he owned in Dixon to the foundation, which sold it in 2013 to a private buyer for $270,000 (the source of the $172,000 profit cited in Coburn’s 2013 report, according to a foundation board member).
That money was used to purchase four small houses near the boyhood home as part of a since-abandoned expansion plan. Wymbs—who called Hastert’s 2002 allocation of $420,000 to buy the home “insulting,” because it didn’t approach his investment over the years—died in 2016, leaving the Reagan home to support itself.
As Reagan has receded into history, attendance has fallen to 5,000 visitors per year. In 2016, finding the home in a state of decrepitude, Gorman took out a $100,000 line of credit. A retired nuclear power plant mechanic, Gorman went a year without taking a salary, but the home was still losing $20,000 to $25,000 annually. Although a pair of $25,000 donations from a local charity will help pay off the line of credit, no one has stepped forward to replace the home’s sugar daddy. Last year, Reagan’s post-presidential secretary, Peggy Grande, came to Dixon for a fundraiser; it netted only $7,500.
When Gorman told the board of directors that he was seeking a Park Service takeover, this time, there was no pushback. Everyone realized the home could no longer raise enough money to remain open.
“It’s the only move,” says Joe Rudolphi, the board’s treasurer. “I don’t think we have much choice, unless we can find someone in Chicago to support us. We need to put a new roof on the house. That’s going to cost thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars. You look at an old house, an old property—it’s a money pit.”
Hastert’s act of Congress establishing a Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home National Historic Site is still in effect, but the appropriation to buy the house has expired. The Park Service is aware of the foundation’s desire to sell, and is working to arrange for an appraisal, says Brent Everitt, a spokesperson for the National Park Service: “Once the due diligence process is completed, the NPS would likely begin the process of developing a land acquisition budget request through Congress.”
Dixon’s current congressman, Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, “supports the National Park Service purchasing the site,” he said through a spokesperson. This time, the money to honor Reagan will have to come from a Democratic Congress. One factor in the home’s favor, however: The Park Service can name its own price.
“Whatever we can get, I would recommend that we take,” Rudolphi says. “If we can get out of there, just get. We can use the money to help kids through college, give them a Reagan scholarship, help the people in the community.”
In the meantime, the Reagan boyhood home soldiers on, with dwindling resources and visitors. Gorman says he has “mixed emotions” about selling the anti-big government president’s house to the government. (Although maybe he shouldn’t: Despite Reagan’s rhetoric, the Park Service acquired plenty of land when he was president, including an $8 million purchase in the Santa Monica Mountains.) But Gorman believes it’s the best way to honor Reagan. As it stands, Gorman is the home’s only full-time employee. He has trouble attracting volunteer docents. He doesn’t have time to raise funds or promote the home on social media.
“I think even Ronald Reagan would admit that times have changed,” Gorman says. “I have the utmost respect for Ronald Reagan the man, the president. I don’t want to say we’re doing him a disservice here, but we could be doing a lot better.”
Howard, theHouses of the Presidentsauthor, says he hopes the Park Service takes over the house but adds, “My suspicion is … they will stabilize it and put it on their website, but their visitation is not going to quadruple.”
A lot of Dixonites have mixed feelings about the potential sale, too. “I don’t have a problem with it, because it’s struggling, and the Park Service can help,” says Marlin Misner, a former foundation board member who wrote a history of the boyhood home. “Whether they will or not, we’ll see. If you want to ruin a project, get the federal government involved.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better himself.
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How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-reagans-childhood-home-gave-up-on-reaganism-7/
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
Photograph by M. Scott Mahaskey
DIXON, Illinois—In the gift shop of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home is a T-shirt bearing one of the 40th president’s best-known sayings: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Since opening to the public in 1984, the home, run by a nonprofit foundation, has lived by that principle, rejecting public money and staying proudly independent. Its website declares, “The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home does not receive State or Federal Funding.”
Nearly 130 years old, the three-bedroom, one-bathroom white house onSouth Hennepin Avenue in Dixon is a testament to Reagan’s modest, all-American childhood.Many of its counterparts around the country, includingBill Clinton’s boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts; andthe estate in New York where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, are run by the National Park Service.
Not Reagan’s house.In 2002, Dixon’s congressman, Dennis Hastert, then the Republican speaker of the House, passed a bill authorizing the National Park Service to buy the property and manage the house, as it does so many other presidential properties. The members of the Reagan home’s board of directors were aging and approached Hastert because they thought the Park Service might be a good candidate to carry on their work. They changed their minds, however, and spurned the help,in part because Congress wouldn’t match the millions of dollars private donors had invested in the property, and in part because that’s not how Reagan would have wanted it.
“He didn’t think government needed to be involved in our daily lives,” Connie Lange, the executive director at the time, said of the 40th president. “And people really took that to heart here.”
The Reagan boyhood home’s independence made it a rallying point for conservatives. Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the Reagan Legacy Project, told theWashington Times, “I’m not in favor of the government owning property, never mind Reagan’s house.” In a 2013 report about the “congressional shortsightedness and bureaucratic mismanagement” around U.S. national parks, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma used the Reagan house as evidence that historic sites could be just fine in private hands, writing that the home had recently reported an annual net income of $172,000 and “can manage its affairs just as well as many of the nonprofits administering the nation’s celebrated presidential sites.”
Now, though, it turns out the mantle of Reaganism might be too much for Reagan’s boyhood home and his small hometown to carry.The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation, beset by shrinking attendance, a shortage of volunteer docents, an aging house and—crucially—the death of its most generous benefactor,is finally asking the government for a bailout. And this time, it’s basically inviting Congress to name its price.
A year ago, Patrick Gorman, who became the foundation’s executive director in 2016, wrote a letter to the National Park Service, offering, at long last, to sell the home to the federal government. He understood, and sympathized with, the former president’s philosophy. But it had reached the point that clinging to Reagan’s anti-government principles might mean the demise of the most important tourist attraction in Dixon. He and the foundation were not willing to leave the home to the whims of the free market.
“It’s not gonna close, if I have to stay here and run it myself,” says Gorman, who grew up nearby in another home the Reagan family inhabited. “It would be a loss to this community, the status, the tourism. Those 5,000 people that come to see us [every year], they eat in restaurants, spend money here.”
The boyhood home would not be the first presidential property to pass from a private foundation to the Park Service. James Garfield’s Lawnfield in Mentor, Ohio; William Taft’s house in Cincinnati; Herbert Hoover’s home in West Branch, Iowa; and Clinton’s home in Hope, have all gone through the process. But none did so after such a concerted resistance, in the name of a president’s legacy. Now, a monument to private-sector gumption is becoming, instead, a testament to its limits.
***
Ronald Reagan moved intothe house at 816 South Hennepin Avenue in December 1920, when his father, an itinerant shoe salesman, finally settled down as co-owner of a store called the Fashion Boot Shop. The Reagans—including Ronald’s mother and older brother—occupied the house until 1924, first paying $12 per month in rent, then $15. Reagan would spend the remainder of his youth in Dixon, leaving at 18 to attend Eureka College downstate.
In his autobiography,An American Life, Reagan wrote that life in Dixon “was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain inThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “Dutch” Reagan, as he was known in his hometown, skated on the frozen Rock River (“the Hudson of the West”), played right guard on the Dixon High School football team and launched his acting career in student theatricals. During the summers, he worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, where he claimed to have saved 77 swimmers, though locals will tell you a lot of those would-be drowning victims were girls who wanted to be saved by the handsome young man in the tank suit.
As even Reagan admitted, though, life in Dixon was not always sweet. Reagan’s father was an alcoholic, and the house on South Hennepin Avenue was the scene of Reagan’s darkest childhood memory. One night, when he was 11 years old, Dutch came home from the YMCA to find Jack Reagan sprawled out on the snowy lawn, dead drunk after a binge at a speakeasy. Reagan dragged him inside by the overcoat, “then put him to bed and never mentioned the incident to my mother,” he wrote in the autobiography.
The house was later chopped up into two apartments, and it stood vacant by the time Reagan ran for president in 1980. Thatyear,a mailman alerted local business leaders to its history. They pooled their money to buy the house, starting the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation.
The Queen Anne-style home, built in 1891, would probably have been demolished long ago if Reagan hadn’t lived there. It is furnished with period beds, old-fashioned china, a Detroit Jewel stove and an icebox. The furniture, which was purchased at second-hand shops around Illinois, didn’t belong to the Reagans—though there is a chair Dutch sat in when he visited a neighbor to listen to the radio. The only feature connecting the house to its long-ago occupants is a loose tile in front of the fireplace, under which Reagan and his brother hid pennies. (A photo in the upstairs hallway shows Reagan and his brother during a 1984 visit, sitting on a replica of the bed they shared.)
Even so, in the 1990s, the home was drawing 20,000 visitors a year—only a 10th the number of visitors Lincoln’s home in Springfield draws, but enough to make it a viable tourist attraction in Dixon, a town of 16,000 people a two-hour drive from Chicago.
Author Bob Spitz says the home also was a valuable research tool, giving him a sense of Reagan’s humble background that informed Spitz’s biography,Reagan: An American Journey. “His bedroom was no bigger than a closet; it is where he often shared a single bed with his brother,” Spitz says. “The tiny porch is where he occasionally found his father passed out from a binge and had to drag him not only inside, but up a steep flight of stairs. The ‘garden’ where his mother raised vegetables so the family could eat when meat was unaffordable was no more than a patch out the back door, by the garage shed.”
The National Park Service manages 16 presidential homes, including Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Illinois, and FDR’s in Hyde Park, New York—each of which has six-figure annual attendance and could probably get by without government help. (Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo in California is owned by the Young America’s Foundation, which uses it as a center to promote conservative ideals. The Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, which receives 400,000 visitors a year, is jointly run by the National Archives and the Reagan Foundation.) There are at least 20other presidential homes besides Reagan’s that are run by private foundations, including George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Buchanan’s Wheatland and Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage. Most survive on a mixture of tourist dollars and local investment.
But among presidential attractions, childhood homes like Reagan’s are not in the same league as Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The best known—JFK’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts—is a Park Service property that receives about 25,000 visitors a year, less than a 10th of the traffic at Kennedy’s presidential library in Boston.
It doesn’t help the Reagan home that Illinois is not the state most Americans associate with the 40th president, and Dixon is not a major population center. The town also doesn’t have much to offer visitors other than Reagan. (It does have a lot of Reagan, though: a History and Learning Center; Reagan statues; a Reagan museum; his original lifeguard chair. There’s also a Ronald Reagan Middle School.)
“It has less to do with presidencies and more to do with the tourist business,” says Hugh Howard, author ofHomes of the Presidents. “If you go to Charlottesville, which is a fun place, you can’t not go to Monticello.”
***
One of the main reasons the boyhood homefoundation could maintain the Reaganite principle of independence from government for so longwas Norm Wymbs, a Florida grocery store magnate who knew Reagan personally and was the home’s biggest benefactor—a “sugar daddy,” in the words of staffers and board members. Wymbs idolized Reagan—he even wrote a book about the president’s years in Dixon—and spent $5 million to restore the house to its 1920s look and build a visitor center. Shortly before his death, he deeded a home he owned in Dixon to the foundation, which sold it in 2013 to a private buyer for $270,000 (the source of the $172,000 profit cited in Coburn’s 2013 report, according to a foundation board member).
That money was used to purchase four small houses near the boyhood home as part of a since-abandoned expansion plan. Wymbs—who called Hastert’s 2002 allocation of $420,000 to buy the home “insulting,” because it didn’t approach his investment over the years—died in 2016, leaving the Reagan home to support itself.
As Reagan has receded into history, attendance has fallen to 5,000 visitors per year. In 2016, finding the home in a state of decrepitude, Gorman took out a $100,000 line of credit. A retired nuclear power plant mechanic, Gorman went a year without taking a salary, but the home was still losing $20,000 to $25,000 annually. Although a pair of $25,000 donations from a local charity will help pay off the line of credit, no one has stepped forward to replace the home’s sugar daddy. Last year, Reagan’s post-presidential secretary, Peggy Grande, came to Dixon for a fundraiser; it netted only $7,500.
When Gorman told the board of directors that he was seeking a Park Service takeover, this time, there was no pushback. Everyone realized the home could no longer raise enough money to remain open.
“It’s the only move,” says Joe Rudolphi, the board’s treasurer. “I don’t think we have much choice, unless we can find someone in Chicago to support us. We need to put a new roof on the house. That’s going to cost thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars. You look at an old house, an old property—it’s a money pit.”
Hastert’s act of Congress establishing a Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home National Historic Site is still in effect, but the appropriation to buy the house has expired. The Park Service is aware of the foundation’s desire to sell, and is working to arrange for an appraisal, says Brent Everitt, a spokesperson for the National Park Service: “Once the due diligence process is completed, the NPS would likely begin the process of developing a land acquisition budget request through Congress.”
Dixon’s current congressman, Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, “supports the National Park Service purchasing the site,” he said through a spokesperson. This time, the money to honor Reagan will have to come from a Democratic Congress. One factor in the home’s favor, however: The Park Service can name its own price.
“Whatever we can get, I would recommend that we take,” Rudolphi says. “If we can get out of there, just get. We can use the money to help kids through college, give them a Reagan scholarship, help the people in the community.”
In the meantime, the Reagan boyhood home soldiers on, with dwindling resources and visitors. Gorman says he has “mixed emotions” about selling the anti-big government president’s house to the government. (Although maybe he shouldn’t: Despite Reagan’s rhetoric, the Park Service acquired plenty of land when he was president, including an $8 million purchase in the Santa Monica Mountains.) But Gorman believes it’s the best way to honor Reagan. As it stands, Gorman is the home’s only full-time employee. He has trouble attracting volunteer docents. He doesn’t have time to raise funds or promote the home on social media.
“I think even Ronald Reagan would admit that times have changed,” Gorman says. “I have the utmost respect for Ronald Reagan the man, the president. I don’t want to say we’re doing him a disservice here, but we could be doing a lot better.”
Howard, theHouses of the Presidentsauthor, says he hopes the Park Service takes over the house but adds, “My suspicion is … they will stabilize it and put it on their website, but their visitation is not going to quadruple.”
A lot of Dixonites have mixed feelings about the potential sale, too. “I don’t have a problem with it, because it’s struggling, and the Park Service can help,” says Marlin Misner, a former foundation board member who wrote a history of the boyhood home. “Whether they will or not, we’ll see. If you want to ruin a project, get the federal government involved.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better himself.
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How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-reagans-childhood-home-gave-up-on-reaganism-6/
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
Photograph by M. Scott Mahaskey
DIXON, Illinois—In the gift shop of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home is a T-shirt bearing one of the 40th president’s best-known sayings: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Since opening to the public in 1984, the home, run by a nonprofit foundation, has lived by that principle, rejecting public money and staying proudly independent. Its website declares, “The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home does not receive State or Federal Funding.”
Nearly 130 years old, the three-bedroom, one-bathroom white house onSouth Hennepin Avenue in Dixon is a testament to Reagan’s modest, all-American childhood.Many of its counterparts around the country, includingBill Clinton’s boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts; andthe estate in New York where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, are run by the National Park Service.
Not Reagan’s house.In 2002, Dixon’s congressman, Dennis Hastert, then the Republican speaker of the House, passed a bill authorizing the National Park Service to buy the property and manage the house, as it does so many other presidential properties. The members of the Reagan home’s board of directors were aging and approached Hastert because they thought the Park Service might be a good candidate to carry on their work. They changed their minds, however, and spurned the help,in part because Congress wouldn’t match the millions of dollars private donors had invested in the property, and in part because that’s not how Reagan would have wanted it.
“He didn’t think government needed to be involved in our daily lives,” Connie Lange, the executive director at the time, said of the 40th president. “And people really took that to heart here.”
The Reagan boyhood home’s independence made it a rallying point for conservatives. Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the Reagan Legacy Project, told theWashington Times, “I’m not in favor of the government owning property, never mind Reagan’s house.” In a 2013 report about the “congressional shortsightedness and bureaucratic mismanagement” around U.S. national parks, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma used the Reagan house as evidence that historic sites could be just fine in private hands, writing that the home had recently reported an annual net income of $172,000 and “can manage its affairs just as well as many of the nonprofits administering the nation’s celebrated presidential sites.”
Now, though, it turns out the mantle of Reaganism might be too much for Reagan’s boyhood home and his small hometown to carry.The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation, beset by shrinking attendance, a shortage of volunteer docents, an aging house and—crucially—the death of its most generous benefactor,is finally asking the government for a bailout. And this time, it’s basically inviting Congress to name its price.
A year ago, Patrick Gorman, who became the foundation’s executive director in 2016, wrote a letter to the National Park Service, offering, at long last, to sell the home to the federal government. He understood, and sympathized with, the former president’s philosophy. But it had reached the point that clinging to Reagan’s anti-government principles might mean the demise of the most important tourist attraction in Dixon. He and the foundation were not willing to leave the home to the whims of the free market.
“It’s not gonna close, if I have to stay here and run it myself,” says Gorman, who grew up nearby in another home the Reagan family inhabited. “It would be a loss to this community, the status, the tourism. Those 5,000 people that come to see us [every year], they eat in restaurants, spend money here.”
The boyhood home would not be the first presidential property to pass from a private foundation to the Park Service. James Garfield’s Lawnfield in Mentor, Ohio; William Taft’s house in Cincinnati; Herbert Hoover’s home in West Branch, Iowa; and Clinton’s home in Hope, have all gone through the process. But none did so after such a concerted resistance, in the name of a president’s legacy. Now, a monument to private-sector gumption is becoming, instead, a testament to its limits.
***
Ronald Reagan moved intothe house at 816 South Hennepin Avenue in December 1920, when his father, an itinerant shoe salesman, finally settled down as co-owner of a store called the Fashion Boot Shop. The Reagans—including Ronald’s mother and older brother—occupied the house until 1924, first paying $12 per month in rent, then $15. Reagan would spend the remainder of his youth in Dixon, leaving at 18 to attend Eureka College downstate.
In his autobiography,An American Life, Reagan wrote that life in Dixon “was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain inThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “Dutch” Reagan, as he was known in his hometown, skated on the frozen Rock River (“the Hudson of the West”), played right guard on the Dixon High School football team and launched his acting career in student theatricals. During the summers, he worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, where he claimed to have saved 77 swimmers, though locals will tell you a lot of those would-be drowning victims were girls who wanted to be saved by the handsome young man in the tank suit.
As even Reagan admitted, though, life in Dixon was not always sweet. Reagan’s father was an alcoholic, and the house on South Hennepin Avenue was the scene of Reagan’s darkest childhood memory. One night, when he was 11 years old, Dutch came home from the YMCA to find Jack Reagan sprawled out on the snowy lawn, dead drunk after a binge at a speakeasy. Reagan dragged him inside by the overcoat, “then put him to bed and never mentioned the incident to my mother,” he wrote in the autobiography.
The house was later chopped up into two apartments, and it stood vacant by the time Reagan ran for president in 1980. Thatyear,a mailman alerted local business leaders to its history. They pooled their money to buy the house, starting the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation.
The Queen Anne-style home, built in 1891, would probably have been demolished long ago if Reagan hadn’t lived there. It is furnished with period beds, old-fashioned china, a Detroit Jewel stove and an icebox. The furniture, which was purchased at second-hand shops around Illinois, didn’t belong to the Reagans—though there is a chair Dutch sat in when he visited a neighbor to listen to the radio. The only feature connecting the house to its long-ago occupants is a loose tile in front of the fireplace, under which Reagan and his brother hid pennies. (A photo in the upstairs hallway shows Reagan and his brother during a 1984 visit, sitting on a replica of the bed they shared.)
Even so, in the 1990s, the home was drawing 20,000 visitors a year—only a 10th the number of visitors Lincoln’s home in Springfield draws, but enough to make it a viable tourist attraction in Dixon, a town of 16,000 people a two-hour drive from Chicago.
Author Bob Spitz says the home also was a valuable research tool, giving him a sense of Reagan’s humble background that informed Spitz’s biography,Reagan: An American Journey. “His bedroom was no bigger than a closet; it is where he often shared a single bed with his brother,” Spitz says. “The tiny porch is where he occasionally found his father passed out from a binge and had to drag him not only inside, but up a steep flight of stairs. The ‘garden’ where his mother raised vegetables so the family could eat when meat was unaffordable was no more than a patch out the back door, by the garage shed.”
The National Park Service manages 16 presidential homes, including Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Illinois, and FDR’s in Hyde Park, New York—each of which has six-figure annual attendance and could probably get by without government help. (Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo in California is owned by the Young America’s Foundation, which uses it as a center to promote conservative ideals. The Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, which receives 400,000 visitors a year, is jointly run by the National Archives and the Reagan Foundation.) There are at least 20other presidential homes besides Reagan’s that are run by private foundations, including George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Buchanan’s Wheatland and Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage. Most survive on a mixture of tourist dollars and local investment.
But among presidential attractions, childhood homes like Reagan’s are not in the same league as Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The best known—JFK’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts—is a Park Service property that receives about 25,000 visitors a year, less than a 10th of the traffic at Kennedy’s presidential library in Boston.
It doesn’t help the Reagan home that Illinois is not the state most Americans associate with the 40th president, and Dixon is not a major population center. The town also doesn’t have much to offer visitors other than Reagan. (It does have a lot of Reagan, though: a History and Learning Center; Reagan statues; a Reagan museum; his original lifeguard chair. There’s also a Ronald Reagan Middle School.)
“It has less to do with presidencies and more to do with the tourist business,” says Hugh Howard, author ofHomes of the Presidents. “If you go to Charlottesville, which is a fun place, you can’t not go to Monticello.”
***
One of the main reasons the boyhood homefoundation could maintain the Reaganite principle of independence from government for so longwas Norm Wymbs, a Florida grocery store magnate who knew Reagan personally and was the home’s biggest benefactor—a “sugar daddy,” in the words of staffers and board members. Wymbs idolized Reagan—he even wrote a book about the president’s years in Dixon—and spent $5 million to restore the house to its 1920s look and build a visitor center. Shortly before his death, he deeded a home he owned in Dixon to the foundation, which sold it in 2013 to a private buyer for $270,000 (the source of the $172,000 profit cited in Coburn’s 2013 report, according to a foundation board member).
That money was used to purchase four small houses near the boyhood home as part of a since-abandoned expansion plan. Wymbs—who called Hastert’s 2002 allocation of $420,000 to buy the home “insulting,” because it didn’t approach his investment over the years—died in 2016, leaving the Reagan home to support itself.
As Reagan has receded into history, attendance has fallen to 5,000 visitors per year. In 2016, finding the home in a state of decrepitude, Gorman took out a $100,000 line of credit. A retired nuclear power plant mechanic, Gorman went a year without taking a salary, but the home was still losing $20,000 to $25,000 annually. Although a pair of $25,000 donations from a local charity will help pay off the line of credit, no one has stepped forward to replace the home’s sugar daddy. Last year, Reagan’s post-presidential secretary, Peggy Grande, came to Dixon for a fundraiser; it netted only $7,500.
When Gorman told the board of directors that he was seeking a Park Service takeover, this time, there was no pushback. Everyone realized the home could no longer raise enough money to remain open.
“It’s the only move,” says Joe Rudolphi, the board’s treasurer. “I don’t think we have much choice, unless we can find someone in Chicago to support us. We need to put a new roof on the house. That’s going to cost thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars. You look at an old house, an old property—it’s a money pit.”
Hastert’s act of Congress establishing a Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home National Historic Site is still in effect, but the appropriation to buy the house has expired. The Park Service is aware of the foundation’s desire to sell, and is working to arrange for an appraisal, says Brent Everitt, a spokesperson for the National Park Service: “Once the due diligence process is completed, the NPS would likely begin the process of developing a land acquisition budget request through Congress.”
Dixon’s current congressman, Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, “supports the National Park Service purchasing the site,” he said through a spokesperson. This time, the money to honor Reagan will have to come from a Democratic Congress. One factor in the home’s favor, however: The Park Service can name its own price.
“Whatever we can get, I would recommend that we take,” Rudolphi says. “If we can get out of there, just get. We can use the money to help kids through college, give them a Reagan scholarship, help the people in the community.”
In the meantime, the Reagan boyhood home soldiers on, with dwindling resources and visitors. Gorman says he has “mixed emotions” about selling the anti-big government president’s house to the government. (Although maybe he shouldn’t: Despite Reagan’s rhetoric, the Park Service acquired plenty of land when he was president, including an $8 million purchase in the Santa Monica Mountains.) But Gorman believes it’s the best way to honor Reagan. As it stands, Gorman is the home’s only full-time employee. He has trouble attracting volunteer docents. He doesn’t have time to raise funds or promote the home on social media.
“I think even Ronald Reagan would admit that times have changed,” Gorman says. “I have the utmost respect for Ronald Reagan the man, the president. I don’t want to say we’re doing him a disservice here, but we could be doing a lot better.”
Howard, theHouses of the Presidentsauthor, says he hopes the Park Service takes over the house but adds, “My suspicion is … they will stabilize it and put it on their website, but their visitation is not going to quadruple.”
A lot of Dixonites have mixed feelings about the potential sale, too. “I don’t have a problem with it, because it’s struggling, and the Park Service can help,” says Marlin Misner, a former foundation board member who wrote a history of the boyhood home. “Whether they will or not, we’ll see. If you want to ruin a project, get the federal government involved.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better himself.
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How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-reagans-childhood-home-gave-up-on-reaganism-4/
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
Photograph by M. Scott Mahaskey
DIXON, Illinois—In the gift shop of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home is a T-shirt bearing one of the 40th president’s best-known sayings: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Since opening to the public in 1984, the home, run by a nonprofit foundation, has lived by that principle, rejecting public money and staying proudly independent. Its website declares, “The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home does not receive State or Federal Funding.”
Nearly 130 years old, the three-bedroom, one-bathroom white house onSouth Hennepin Avenue in Dixon is a testament to Reagan’s modest, all-American childhood.Many of its counterparts around the country, includingBill Clinton’s boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts; andthe estate in New York where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, are run by the National Park Service.
Not Reagan’s house.In 2002, Dixon’s congressman, Dennis Hastert, then the Republican speaker of the House, passed a bill authorizing the National Park Service to buy the property and manage the house, as it does so many other presidential properties. The members of the Reagan home’s board of directors were aging and approached Hastert because they thought the Park Service might be a good candidate to carry on their work. They changed their minds, however, and spurned the help,in part because Congress wouldn’t match the millions of dollars private donors had invested in the property, and in part because that’s not how Reagan would have wanted it.
“He didn’t think government needed to be involved in our daily lives,” Connie Lange, the executive director at the time, said of the 40th president. “And people really took that to heart here.”
The Reagan boyhood home’s independence made it a rallying point for conservatives. Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the Reagan Legacy Project, told theWashington Times, “I’m not in favor of the government owning property, never mind Reagan’s house.” In a 2013 report about the “congressional shortsightedness and bureaucratic mismanagement” around U.S. national parks, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma used the Reagan house as evidence that historic sites could be just fine in private hands, writing that the home had recently reported an annual net income of $172,000 and “can manage its affairs just as well as many of the nonprofits administering the nation’s celebrated presidential sites.”
Now, though, it turns out the mantle of Reaganism might be too much for Reagan’s boyhood home and his small hometown to carry.The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation, beset by shrinking attendance, a shortage of volunteer docents, an aging house and—crucially—the death of its most generous benefactor,is finally asking the government for a bailout. And this time, it’s basically inviting Congress to name its price.
A year ago, Patrick Gorman, who became the foundation’s executive director in 2016, wrote a letter to the National Park Service, offering, at long last, to sell the home to the federal government. He understood, and sympathized with, the former president’s philosophy. But it had reached the point that clinging to Reagan’s anti-government principles might mean the demise of the most important tourist attraction in Dixon. He and the foundation were not willing to leave the home to the whims of the free market.
“It’s not gonna close, if I have to stay here and run it myself,” says Gorman, who grew up nearby in another home the Reagan family inhabited. “It would be a loss to this community, the status, the tourism. Those 5,000 people that come to see us [every year], they eat in restaurants, spend money here.”
The boyhood home would not be the first presidential property to pass from a private foundation to the Park Service. James Garfield’s Lawnfield in Mentor, Ohio; William Taft’s house in Cincinnati; Herbert Hoover’s home in West Branch, Iowa; and Clinton’s home in Hope, have all gone through the process. But none did so after such a concerted resistance, in the name of a president’s legacy. Now, a monument to private-sector gumption is becoming, instead, a testament to its limits.
***
Ronald Reagan moved intothe house at 816 South Hennepin Avenue in December 1920, when his father, an itinerant shoe salesman, finally settled down as co-owner of a store called the Fashion Boot Shop. The Reagans—including Ronald’s mother and older brother—occupied the house until 1924, first paying $12 per month in rent, then $15. Reagan would spend the remainder of his youth in Dixon, leaving at 18 to attend Eureka College downstate.
In his autobiography,An American Life, Reagan wrote that life in Dixon “was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain inThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “Dutch” Reagan, as he was known in his hometown, skated on the frozen Rock River (“the Hudson of the West”), played right guard on the Dixon High School football team and launched his acting career in student theatricals. During the summers, he worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, where he claimed to have saved 77 swimmers, though locals will tell you a lot of those would-be drowning victims were girls who wanted to be saved by the handsome young man in the tank suit.
As even Reagan admitted, though, life in Dixon was not always sweet. Reagan’s father was an alcoholic, and the house on South Hennepin Avenue was the scene of Reagan’s darkest childhood memory. One night, when he was 11 years old, Dutch came home from the YMCA to find Jack Reagan sprawled out on the snowy lawn, dead drunk after a binge at a speakeasy. Reagan dragged him inside by the overcoat, “then put him to bed and never mentioned the incident to my mother,” he wrote in the autobiography.
The house was later chopped up into two apartments, and it stood vacant by the time Reagan ran for president in 1980. Thatyear,a mailman alerted local business leaders to its history. They pooled their money to buy the house, starting the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation.
The Queen Anne-style home, built in 1891, would probably have been demolished long ago if Reagan hadn’t lived there. It is furnished with period beds, old-fashioned china, a Detroit Jewel stove and an icebox. The furniture, which was purchased at second-hand shops around Illinois, didn’t belong to the Reagans—though there is a chair Dutch sat in when he visited a neighbor to listen to the radio. The only feature connecting the house to its long-ago occupants is a loose tile in front of the fireplace, under which Reagan and his brother hid pennies. (A photo in the upstairs hallway shows Reagan and his brother during a 1984 visit, sitting on a replica of the bed they shared.)
Even so, in the 1990s, the home was drawing 20,000 visitors a year—only a 10th the number of visitors Lincoln’s home in Springfield draws, but enough to make it a viable tourist attraction in Dixon, a town of 16,000 people a two-hour drive from Chicago.
Author Bob Spitz says the home also was a valuable research tool, giving him a sense of Reagan’s humble background that informed Spitz’s biography,Reagan: An American Journey. “His bedroom was no bigger than a closet; it is where he often shared a single bed with his brother,” Spitz says. “The tiny porch is where he occasionally found his father passed out from a binge and had to drag him not only inside, but up a steep flight of stairs. The ‘garden’ where his mother raised vegetables so the family could eat when meat was unaffordable was no more than a patch out the back door, by the garage shed.”
The National Park Service manages 16 presidential homes, including Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Illinois, and FDR’s in Hyde Park, New York—each of which has six-figure annual attendance and could probably get by without government help. (Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo in California is owned by the Young America’s Foundation, which uses it as a center to promote conservative ideals. The Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, which receives 400,000 visitors a year, is jointly run by the National Archives and the Reagan Foundation.) There are at least 20other presidential homes besides Reagan’s that are run by private foundations, including George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Buchanan’s Wheatland and Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage. Most survive on a mixture of tourist dollars and local investment.
But among presidential attractions, childhood homes like Reagan’s are not in the same league as Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The best known—JFK’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts—is a Park Service property that receives about 25,000 visitors a year, less than a 10th of the traffic at Kennedy’s presidential library in Boston.
It doesn’t help the Reagan home that Illinois is not the state most Americans associate with the 40th president, and Dixon is not a major population center. The town also doesn’t have much to offer visitors other than Reagan. (It does have a lot of Reagan, though: a History and Learning Center; Reagan statues; a Reagan museum; his original lifeguard chair. There’s also a Ronald Reagan Middle School.)
“It has less to do with presidencies and more to do with the tourist business,” says Hugh Howard, author ofHomes of the Presidents. “If you go to Charlottesville, which is a fun place, you can’t not go to Monticello.”
***
One of the main reasons the boyhood homefoundation could maintain the Reaganite principle of independence from government for so longwas Norm Wymbs, a Florida grocery store magnate who knew Reagan personally and was the home’s biggest benefactor—a “sugar daddy,” in the words of staffers and board members. Wymbs idolized Reagan—he even wrote a book about the president’s years in Dixon—and spent $5 million to restore the house to its 1920s look and build a visitor center. Shortly before his death, he deeded a home he owned in Dixon to the foundation, which sold it in 2013 to a private buyer for $270,000 (the source of the $172,000 profit cited in Coburn’s 2013 report, according to a foundation board member).
That money was used to purchase four small houses near the boyhood home as part of a since-abandoned expansion plan. Wymbs—who called Hastert’s 2002 allocation of $420,000 to buy the home “insulting,” because it didn’t approach his investment over the years—died in 2016, leaving the Reagan home to support itself.
As Reagan has receded into history, attendance has fallen to 5,000 visitors per year. In 2016, finding the home in a state of decrepitude, Gorman took out a $100,000 line of credit. A retired nuclear power plant mechanic, Gorman went a year without taking a salary, but the home was still losing $20,000 to $25,000 annually. Although a pair of $25,000 donations from a local charity will help pay off the line of credit, no one has stepped forward to replace the home’s sugar daddy. Last year, Reagan’s post-presidential secretary, Peggy Grande, came to Dixon for a fundraiser; it netted only $7,500.
When Gorman told the board of directors that he was seeking a Park Service takeover, this time, there was no pushback. Everyone realized the home could no longer raise enough money to remain open.
“It’s the only move,” says Joe Rudolphi, the board’s treasurer. “I don’t think we have much choice, unless we can find someone in Chicago to support us. We need to put a new roof on the house. That’s going to cost thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars. You look at an old house, an old property—it’s a money pit.”
Hastert’s act of Congress establishing a Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home National Historic Site is still in effect, but the appropriation to buy the house has expired. The Park Service is aware of the foundation’s desire to sell, and is working to arrange for an appraisal, says Brent Everitt, a spokesperson for the National Park Service: “Once the due diligence process is completed, the NPS would likely begin the process of developing a land acquisition budget request through Congress.”
Dixon’s current congressman, Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, “supports the National Park Service purchasing the site,” he said through a spokesperson. This time, the money to honor Reagan will have to come from a Democratic Congress. One factor in the home’s favor, however: The Park Service can name its own price.
“Whatever we can get, I would recommend that we take,” Rudolphi says. “If we can get out of there, just get. We can use the money to help kids through college, give them a Reagan scholarship, help the people in the community.”
In the meantime, the Reagan boyhood home soldiers on, with dwindling resources and visitors. Gorman says he has “mixed emotions” about selling the anti-big government president’s house to the government. (Although maybe he shouldn’t: Despite Reagan’s rhetoric, the Park Service acquired plenty of land when he was president, including an $8 million purchase in the Santa Monica Mountains.) But Gorman believes it’s the best way to honor Reagan. As it stands, Gorman is the home’s only full-time employee. He has trouble attracting volunteer docents. He doesn’t have time to raise funds or promote the home on social media.
“I think even Ronald Reagan would admit that times have changed,” Gorman says. “I have the utmost respect for Ronald Reagan the man, the president. I don’t want to say we’re doing him a disservice here, but we could be doing a lot better.”
Howard, theHouses of the Presidentsauthor, says he hopes the Park Service takes over the house but adds, “My suspicion is … they will stabilize it and put it on their website, but their visitation is not going to quadruple.”
A lot of Dixonites have mixed feelings about the potential sale, too. “I don’t have a problem with it, because it’s struggling, and the Park Service can help,” says Marlin Misner, a former foundation board member who wrote a history of the boyhood home. “Whether they will or not, we’ll see. If you want to ruin a project, get the federal government involved.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better himself.
Read More
0 notes
Text
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-reagans-childhood-home-gave-up-on-reaganism-3/
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
Photograph by M. Scott Mahaskey
DIXON, Illinois—In the gift shop of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home is a T-shirt bearing one of the 40th president’s best-known sayings: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Since opening to the public in 1984, the home, run by a nonprofit foundation, has lived by that principle, rejecting public money and staying proudly independent. Its website declares, “The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home does not receive State or Federal Funding.”
Nearly 130 years old, the three-bedroom, one-bathroom white house onSouth Hennepin Avenue in Dixon is a testament to Reagan’s modest, all-American childhood.Many of its counterparts around the country, includingBill Clinton’s boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts; andthe estate in New York where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, are run by the National Park Service.
Not Reagan’s house.In 2002, Dixon’s congressman, Dennis Hastert, then the Republican speaker of the House, passed a bill authorizing the National Park Service to buy the property and manage the house, as it does so many other presidential properties. The members of the Reagan home’s board of directors were aging and approached Hastert because they thought the Park Service might be a good candidate to carry on their work. They changed their minds, however, and spurned the help,in part because Congress wouldn’t match the millions of dollars private donors had invested in the property, and in part because that’s not how Reagan would have wanted it.
“He didn’t think government needed to be involved in our daily lives,” Connie Lange, the executive director at the time, said of the 40th president. “And people really took that to heart here.”
The Reagan boyhood home’s independence made it a rallying point for conservatives. Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the Reagan Legacy Project, told theWashington Times, “I’m not in favor of the government owning property, never mind Reagan’s house.” In a 2013 report about the “congressional shortsightedness and bureaucratic mismanagement” around U.S. national parks, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma used the Reagan house as evidence that historic sites could be just fine in private hands, writing that the home had recently reported an annual net income of $172,000 and “can manage its affairs just as well as many of the nonprofits administering the nation’s celebrated presidential sites.”
Now, though, it turns out the mantle of Reaganism might be too much for Reagan’s boyhood home and his small hometown to carry.The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation, beset by shrinking attendance, a shortage of volunteer docents, an aging house and—crucially—the death of its most generous benefactor,is finally asking the government for a bailout. And this time, it’s basically inviting Congress to name its price.
A year ago, Patrick Gorman, who became the foundation’s executive director in 2016, wrote a letter to the National Park Service, offering, at long last, to sell the home to the federal government. He understood, and sympathized with, the former president’s philosophy. But it had reached the point that clinging to Reagan’s anti-government principles might mean the demise of the most important tourist attraction in Dixon. He and the foundation were not willing to leave the home to the whims of the free market.
“It’s not gonna close, if I have to stay here and run it myself,” says Gorman, who grew up nearby in another home the Reagan family inhabited. “It would be a loss to this community, the status, the tourism. Those 5,000 people that come to see us [every year], they eat in restaurants, spend money here.”
The boyhood home would not be the first presidential property to pass from a private foundation to the Park Service. James Garfield’s Lawnfield in Mentor, Ohio; William Taft’s house in Cincinnati; Herbert Hoover’s home in West Branch, Iowa; and Clinton’s home in Hope, have all gone through the process. But none did so after such a concerted resistance, in the name of a president’s legacy. Now, a monument to private-sector gumption is becoming, instead, a testament to its limits.
***
Ronald Reagan moved intothe house at 816 South Hennepin Avenue in December 1920, when his father, an itinerant shoe salesman, finally settled down as co-owner of a store called the Fashion Boot Shop. The Reagans—including Ronald’s mother and older brother—occupied the house until 1924, first paying $12 per month in rent, then $15. Reagan would spend the remainder of his youth in Dixon, leaving at 18 to attend Eureka College downstate.
In his autobiography,An American Life, Reagan wrote that life in Dixon “was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain inThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “Dutch” Reagan, as he was known in his hometown, skated on the frozen Rock River (“the Hudson of the West”), played right guard on the Dixon High School football team and launched his acting career in student theatricals. During the summers, he worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, where he claimed to have saved 77 swimmers, though locals will tell you a lot of those would-be drowning victims were girls who wanted to be saved by the handsome young man in the tank suit.
As even Reagan admitted, though, life in Dixon was not always sweet. Reagan’s father was an alcoholic, and the house on South Hennepin Avenue was the scene of Reagan’s darkest childhood memory. One night, when he was 11 years old, Dutch came home from the YMCA to find Jack Reagan sprawled out on the snowy lawn, dead drunk after a binge at a speakeasy. Reagan dragged him inside by the overcoat, “then put him to bed and never mentioned the incident to my mother,” he wrote in the autobiography.
The house was later chopped up into two apartments, and it stood vacant by the time Reagan ran for president in 1980. Thatyear,a mailman alerted local business leaders to its history. They pooled their money to buy the house, starting the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation.
The Queen Anne-style home, built in 1891, would probably have been demolished long ago if Reagan hadn’t lived there. It is furnished with period beds, old-fashioned china, a Detroit Jewel stove and an icebox. The furniture, which was purchased at second-hand shops around Illinois, didn’t belong to the Reagans—though there is a chair Dutch sat in when he visited a neighbor to listen to the radio. The only feature connecting the house to its long-ago occupants is a loose tile in front of the fireplace, under which Reagan and his brother hid pennies. (A photo in the upstairs hallway shows Reagan and his brother during a 1984 visit, sitting on a replica of the bed they shared.)
Even so, in the 1990s, the home was drawing 20,000 visitors a year—only a 10th the number of visitors Lincoln’s home in Springfield draws, but enough to make it a viable tourist attraction in Dixon, a town of 16,000 people a two-hour drive from Chicago.
Author Bob Spitz says the home also was a valuable research tool, giving him a sense of Reagan’s humble background that informed Spitz’s biography,Reagan: An American Journey. “His bedroom was no bigger than a closet; it is where he often shared a single bed with his brother,” Spitz says. “The tiny porch is where he occasionally found his father passed out from a binge and had to drag him not only inside, but up a steep flight of stairs. The ‘garden’ where his mother raised vegetables so the family could eat when meat was unaffordable was no more than a patch out the back door, by the garage shed.”
The National Park Service manages 16 presidential homes, including Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Illinois, and FDR’s in Hyde Park, New York—each of which has six-figure annual attendance and could probably get by without government help. (Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo in California is owned by the Young America’s Foundation, which uses it as a center to promote conservative ideals. The Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, which receives 400,000 visitors a year, is jointly run by the National Archives and the Reagan Foundation.) There are at least 20other presidential homes besides Reagan’s that are run by private foundations, including George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Buchanan’s Wheatland and Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage. Most survive on a mixture of tourist dollars and local investment.
But among presidential attractions, childhood homes like Reagan’s are not in the same league as Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The best known—JFK’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts—is a Park Service property that receives about 25,000 visitors a year, less than a 10th of the traffic at Kennedy’s presidential library in Boston.
It doesn’t help the Reagan home that Illinois is not the state most Americans associate with the 40th president, and Dixon is not a major population center. The town also doesn’t have much to offer visitors other than Reagan. (It does have a lot of Reagan, though: a History and Learning Center; Reagan statues; a Reagan museum; his original lifeguard chair. There’s also a Ronald Reagan Middle School.)
“It has less to do with presidencies and more to do with the tourist business,” says Hugh Howard, author ofHomes of the Presidents. “If you go to Charlottesville, which is a fun place, you can’t not go to Monticello.”
***
One of the main reasons the boyhood homefoundation could maintain the Reaganite principle of independence from government for so longwas Norm Wymbs, a Florida grocery store magnate who knew Reagan personally and was the home’s biggest benefactor—a “sugar daddy,” in the words of staffers and board members. Wymbs idolized Reagan—he even wrote a book about the president’s years in Dixon—and spent $5 million to restore the house to its 1920s look and build a visitor center. Shortly before his death, he deeded a home he owned in Dixon to the foundation, which sold it in 2013 to a private buyer for $270,000 (the source of the $172,000 profit cited in Coburn’s 2013 report, according to a foundation board member).
That money was used to purchase four small houses near the boyhood home as part of a since-abandoned expansion plan. Wymbs—who called Hastert’s 2002 allocation of $420,000 to buy the home “insulting,” because it didn’t approach his investment over the years—died in 2016, leaving the Reagan home to support itself.
As Reagan has receded into history, attendance has fallen to 5,000 visitors per year. In 2016, finding the home in a state of decrepitude, Gorman took out a $100,000 line of credit. A retired nuclear power plant mechanic, Gorman went a year without taking a salary, but the home was still losing $20,000 to $25,000 annually. Although a pair of $25,000 donations from a local charity will help pay off the line of credit, no one has stepped forward to replace the home’s sugar daddy. Last year, Reagan’s post-presidential secretary, Peggy Grande, came to Dixon for a fundraiser; it netted only $7,500.
When Gorman told the board of directors that he was seeking a Park Service takeover, this time, there was no pushback. Everyone realized the home could no longer raise enough money to remain open.
“It’s the only move,” says Joe Rudolphi, the board’s treasurer. “I don’t think we have much choice, unless we can find someone in Chicago to support us. We need to put a new roof on the house. That’s going to cost thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars. You look at an old house, an old property—it’s a money pit.”
Hastert’s act of Congress establishing a Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home National Historic Site is still in effect, but the appropriation to buy the house has expired. The Park Service is aware of the foundation’s desire to sell, and is working to arrange for an appraisal, says Brent Everitt, a spokesperson for the National Park Service: “Once the due diligence process is completed, the NPS would likely begin the process of developing a land acquisition budget request through Congress.”
Dixon’s current congressman, Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, “supports the National Park Service purchasing the site,” he said through a spokesperson. This time, the money to honor Reagan will have to come from a Democratic Congress. One factor in the home’s favor, however: The Park Service can name its own price.
“Whatever we can get, I would recommend that we take,” Rudolphi says. “If we can get out of there, just get. We can use the money to help kids through college, give them a Reagan scholarship, help the people in the community.”
In the meantime, the Reagan boyhood home soldiers on, with dwindling resources and visitors. Gorman says he has “mixed emotions” about selling the anti-big government president’s house to the government. (Although maybe he shouldn’t: Despite Reagan’s rhetoric, the Park Service acquired plenty of land when he was president, including an $8 million purchase in the Santa Monica Mountains.) But Gorman believes it’s the best way to honor Reagan. As it stands, Gorman is the home’s only full-time employee. He has trouble attracting volunteer docents. He doesn’t have time to raise funds or promote the home on social media.
“I think even Ronald Reagan would admit that times have changed,” Gorman says. “I have the utmost respect for Ronald Reagan the man, the president. I don’t want to say we’re doing him a disservice here, but we could be doing a lot better.”
Howard, theHouses of the Presidentsauthor, says he hopes the Park Service takes over the house but adds, “My suspicion is … they will stabilize it and put it on their website, but their visitation is not going to quadruple.”
A lot of Dixonites have mixed feelings about the potential sale, too. “I don’t have a problem with it, because it’s struggling, and the Park Service can help,” says Marlin Misner, a former foundation board member who wrote a history of the boyhood home. “Whether they will or not, we’ll see. If you want to ruin a project, get the federal government involved.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better himself.
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How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-reagans-childhood-home-gave-up-on-reaganism-2/
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
Photograph by M. Scott Mahaskey
DIXON, Illinois—In the gift shop of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home is a T-shirt bearing one of the 40th president’s best-known sayings: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Since opening to the public in 1984, the home, run by a nonprofit foundation, has lived by that principle, rejecting public money and staying proudly independent. Its website declares, “The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home does not receive State or Federal Funding.”
Nearly 130 years old, the three-bedroom, one-bathroom white house onSouth Hennepin Avenue in Dixon is a testament to Reagan’s modest, all-American childhood.Many of its counterparts around the country, includingBill Clinton’s boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts; andthe estate in New York where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, are run by the National Park Service.
Not Reagan’s house.In 2002, Dixon’s congressman, Dennis Hastert, then the Republican speaker of the House, passed a bill authorizing the National Park Service to buy the property and manage the house, as it does so many other presidential properties. The members of the Reagan home’s board of directors were aging and approached Hastert because they thought the Park Service might be a good candidate to carry on their work. They changed their minds, however, and spurned the help,in part because Congress wouldn’t match the millions of dollars private donors had invested in the property, and in part because that’s not how Reagan would have wanted it.
“He didn’t think government needed to be involved in our daily lives,” Connie Lange, the executive director at the time, said of the 40th president. “And people really took that to heart here.”
The Reagan boyhood home’s independence made it a rallying point for conservatives. Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the Reagan Legacy Project, told theWashington Times, “I’m not in favor of the government owning property, never mind Reagan’s house.” In a 2013 report about the “congressional shortsightedness and bureaucratic mismanagement” around U.S. national parks, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma used the Reagan house as evidence that historic sites could be just fine in private hands, writing that the home had recently reported an annual net income of $172,000 and “can manage its affairs just as well as many of the nonprofits administering the nation’s celebrated presidential sites.”
Now, though, it turns out the mantle of Reaganism might be too much for Reagan’s boyhood home and his small hometown to carry.The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation, beset by shrinking attendance, a shortage of volunteer docents, an aging house and—crucially—the death of its most generous benefactor,is finally asking the government for a bailout. And this time, it’s basically inviting Congress to name its price.
A year ago, Patrick Gorman, who became the foundation’s executive director in 2016, wrote a letter to the National Park Service, offering, at long last, to sell the home to the federal government. He understood, and sympathized with, the former president’s philosophy. But it had reached the point that clinging to Reagan’s anti-government principles might mean the demise of the most important tourist attraction in Dixon. He and the foundation were not willing to leave the home to the whims of the free market.
“It’s not gonna close, if I have to stay here and run it myself,” says Gorman, who grew up nearby in another home the Reagan family inhabited. “It would be a loss to this community, the status, the tourism. Those 5,000 people that come to see us [every year], they eat in restaurants, spend money here.”
The boyhood home would not be the first presidential property to pass from a private foundation to the Park Service. James Garfield’s Lawnfield in Mentor, Ohio; William Taft’s house in Cincinnati; Herbert Hoover’s home in West Branch, Iowa; and Clinton’s home in Hope, have all gone through the process. But none did so after such a concerted resistance, in the name of a president’s legacy. Now, a monument to private-sector gumption is becoming, instead, a testament to its limits.
***
Ronald Reagan moved intothe house at 816 South Hennepin Avenue in December 1920, when his father, an itinerant shoe salesman, finally settled down as co-owner of a store called the Fashion Boot Shop. The Reagans—including Ronald’s mother and older brother—occupied the house until 1924, first paying $12 per month in rent, then $15. Reagan would spend the remainder of his youth in Dixon, leaving at 18 to attend Eureka College downstate.
In his autobiography,An American Life, Reagan wrote that life in Dixon “was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain inThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “Dutch” Reagan, as he was known in his hometown, skated on the frozen Rock River (“the Hudson of the West”), played right guard on the Dixon High School football team and launched his acting career in student theatricals. During the summers, he worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, where he claimed to have saved 77 swimmers, though locals will tell you a lot of those would-be drowning victims were girls who wanted to be saved by the handsome young man in the tank suit.
As even Reagan admitted, though, life in Dixon was not always sweet. Reagan’s father was an alcoholic, and the house on South Hennepin Avenue was the scene of Reagan’s darkest childhood memory. One night, when he was 11 years old, Dutch came home from the YMCA to find Jack Reagan sprawled out on the snowy lawn, dead drunk after a binge at a speakeasy. Reagan dragged him inside by the overcoat, “then put him to bed and never mentioned the incident to my mother,” he wrote in the autobiography.
The house was later chopped up into two apartments, and it stood vacant by the time Reagan ran for president in 1980. Thatyear,a mailman alerted local business leaders to its history. They pooled their money to buy the house, starting the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation.
The Queen Anne-style home, built in 1891, would probably have been demolished long ago if Reagan hadn’t lived there. It is furnished with period beds, old-fashioned china, a Detroit Jewel stove and an icebox. The furniture, which was purchased at second-hand shops around Illinois, didn’t belong to the Reagans—though there is a chair Dutch sat in when he visited a neighbor to listen to the radio. The only feature connecting the house to its long-ago occupants is a loose tile in front of the fireplace, under which Reagan and his brother hid pennies. (A photo in the upstairs hallway shows Reagan and his brother during a 1984 visit, sitting on a replica of the bed they shared.)
Even so, in the 1990s, the home was drawing 20,000 visitors a year—only a 10th the number of visitors Lincoln’s home in Springfield draws, but enough to make it a viable tourist attraction in Dixon, a town of 16,000 people a two-hour drive from Chicago.
Author Bob Spitz says the home also was a valuable research tool, giving him a sense of Reagan’s humble background that informed Spitz’s biography,Reagan: An American Journey. “His bedroom was no bigger than a closet; it is where he often shared a single bed with his brother,” Spitz says. “The tiny porch is where he occasionally found his father passed out from a binge and had to drag him not only inside, but up a steep flight of stairs. The ‘garden’ where his mother raised vegetables so the family could eat when meat was unaffordable was no more than a patch out the back door, by the garage shed.”
The National Park Service manages 16 presidential homes, including Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Illinois, and FDR’s in Hyde Park, New York—each of which has six-figure annual attendance and could probably get by without government help. (Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo in California is owned by the Young America’s Foundation, which uses it as a center to promote conservative ideals. The Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, which receives 400,000 visitors a year, is jointly run by the National Archives and the Reagan Foundation.) There are at least 20other presidential homes besides Reagan’s that are run by private foundations, including George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Buchanan’s Wheatland and Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage. Most survive on a mixture of tourist dollars and local investment.
But among presidential attractions, childhood homes like Reagan’s are not in the same league as Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The best known—JFK’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts—is a Park Service property that receives about 25,000 visitors a year, less than a 10th of the traffic at Kennedy’s presidential library in Boston.
It doesn’t help the Reagan home that Illinois is not the state most Americans associate with the 40th president, and Dixon is not a major population center. The town also doesn’t have much to offer visitors other than Reagan. (It does have a lot of Reagan, though: a History and Learning Center; Reagan statues; a Reagan museum; his original lifeguard chair. There’s also a Ronald Reagan Middle School.)
“It has less to do with presidencies and more to do with the tourist business,” says Hugh Howard, author ofHomes of the Presidents. “If you go to Charlottesville, which is a fun place, you can’t not go to Monticello.”
***
One of the main reasons the boyhood homefoundation could maintain the Reaganite principle of independence from government for so longwas Norm Wymbs, a Florida grocery store magnate who knew Reagan personally and was the home’s biggest benefactor—a “sugar daddy,” in the words of staffers and board members. Wymbs idolized Reagan—he even wrote a book about the president’s years in Dixon—and spent $5 million to restore the house to its 1920s look and build a visitor center. Shortly before his death, he deeded a home he owned in Dixon to the foundation, which sold it in 2013 to a private buyer for $270,000 (the source of the $172,000 profit cited in Coburn’s 2013 report, according to a foundation board member).
That money was used to purchase four small houses near the boyhood home as part of a since-abandoned expansion plan. Wymbs—who called Hastert’s 2002 allocation of $420,000 to buy the home “insulting,” because it didn’t approach his investment over the years—died in 2016, leaving the Reagan home to support itself.
As Reagan has receded into history, attendance has fallen to 5,000 visitors per year. In 2016, finding the home in a state of decrepitude, Gorman took out a $100,000 line of credit. A retired nuclear power plant mechanic, Gorman went a year without taking a salary, but the home was still losing $20,000 to $25,000 annually. Although a pair of $25,000 donations from a local charity will help pay off the line of credit, no one has stepped forward to replace the home’s sugar daddy. Last year, Reagan’s post-presidential secretary, Peggy Grande, came to Dixon for a fundraiser; it netted only $7,500.
When Gorman told the board of directors that he was seeking a Park Service takeover, this time, there was no pushback. Everyone realized the home could no longer raise enough money to remain open.
“It’s the only move,” says Joe Rudolphi, the board’s treasurer. “I don’t think we have much choice, unless we can find someone in Chicago to support us. We need to put a new roof on the house. That’s going to cost thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars. You look at an old house, an old property—it’s a money pit.”
Hastert’s act of Congress establishing a Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home National Historic Site is still in effect, but the appropriation to buy the house has expired. The Park Service is aware of the foundation’s desire to sell, and is working to arrange for an appraisal, says Brent Everitt, a spokesperson for the National Park Service: “Once the due diligence process is completed, the NPS would likely begin the process of developing a land acquisition budget request through Congress.”
Dixon’s current congressman, Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, “supports the National Park Service purchasing the site,” he said through a spokesperson. This time, the money to honor Reagan will have to come from a Democratic Congress. One factor in the home’s favor, however: The Park Service can name its own price.
“Whatever we can get, I would recommend that we take,” Rudolphi says. “If we can get out of there, just get. We can use the money to help kids through college, give them a Reagan scholarship, help the people in the community.”
In the meantime, the Reagan boyhood home soldiers on, with dwindling resources and visitors. Gorman says he has “mixed emotions” about selling the anti-big government president’s house to the government. (Although maybe he shouldn’t: Despite Reagan’s rhetoric, the Park Service acquired plenty of land when he was president, including an $8 million purchase in the Santa Monica Mountains.) But Gorman believes it’s the best way to honor Reagan. As it stands, Gorman is the home’s only full-time employee. He has trouble attracting volunteer docents. He doesn’t have time to raise funds or promote the home on social media.
“I think even Ronald Reagan would admit that times have changed,” Gorman says. “I have the utmost respect for Ronald Reagan the man, the president. I don’t want to say we’re doing him a disservice here, but we could be doing a lot better.”
Howard, theHouses of the Presidentsauthor, says he hopes the Park Service takes over the house but adds, “My suspicion is … they will stabilize it and put it on their website, but their visitation is not going to quadruple.”
A lot of Dixonites have mixed feelings about the potential sale, too. “I don’t have a problem with it, because it’s struggling, and the Park Service can help,” says Marlin Misner, a former foundation board member who wrote a history of the boyhood home. “Whether they will or not, we’ll see. If you want to ruin a project, get the federal government involved.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better himself.
Read More
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Text
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-reagans-childhood-home-gave-up-on-reaganism/
How Reagan’s Childhood Home Gave Up on Reaganism
Photograph by M. Scott Mahaskey
DIXON, Illinois—In the gift shop of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home is a T-shirt bearing one of the 40th president’s best-known sayings: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Since opening to the public in 1984, the home, run by a nonprofit foundation, has lived by that principle, rejecting public money and staying proudly independent. Its website declares, “The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home does not receive State or Federal Funding.”
Nearly 130 years old, the three-bedroom, one-bathroom white house onSouth Hennepin Avenue in Dixon is a testament to Reagan’s modest, all-American childhood.Many of its counterparts around the country, includingBill Clinton’s boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts; andthe estate in New York where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, are run by the National Park Service.
Not Reagan’s house.In 2002, Dixon’s congressman, Dennis Hastert, then the Republican speaker of the House, passed a bill authorizing the National Park Service to buy the property and manage the house, as it does so many other presidential properties. The members of the Reagan home’s board of directors were aging and approached Hastert because they thought the Park Service might be a good candidate to carry on their work. They changed their minds, however, and spurned the help,in part because Congress wouldn’t match the millions of dollars private donors had invested in the property, and in part because that’s not how Reagan would have wanted it.
“He didn’t think government needed to be involved in our daily lives,” Connie Lange, the executive director at the time, said of the 40th president. “And people really took that to heart here.”
The Reagan boyhood home’s independence made it a rallying point for conservatives. Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the Reagan Legacy Project, told theWashington Times, “I’m not in favor of the government owning property, never mind Reagan’s house.” In a 2013 report about the “congressional shortsightedness and bureaucratic mismanagement” around U.S. national parks, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma used the Reagan house as evidence that historic sites could be just fine in private hands, writing that the home had recently reported an annual net income of $172,000 and “can manage its affairs just as well as many of the nonprofits administering the nation’s celebrated presidential sites.”
Now, though, it turns out the mantle of Reaganism might be too much for Reagan’s boyhood home and his small hometown to carry.The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation, beset by shrinking attendance, a shortage of volunteer docents, an aging house and—crucially—the death of its most generous benefactor,is finally asking the government for a bailout. And this time, it’s basically inviting Congress to name its price.
A year ago, Patrick Gorman, who became the foundation’s executive director in 2016, wrote a letter to the National Park Service, offering, at long last, to sell the home to the federal government. He understood, and sympathized with, the former president’s philosophy. But it had reached the point that clinging to Reagan’s anti-government principles might mean the demise of the most important tourist attraction in Dixon. He and the foundation were not willing to leave the home to the whims of the free market.
“It’s not gonna close, if I have to stay here and run it myself,” says Gorman, who grew up nearby in another home the Reagan family inhabited. “It would be a loss to this community, the status, the tourism. Those 5,000 people that come to see us [every year], they eat in restaurants, spend money here.”
The boyhood home would not be the first presidential property to pass from a private foundation to the Park Service. James Garfield’s Lawnfield in Mentor, Ohio; William Taft’s house in Cincinnati; Herbert Hoover’s home in West Branch, Iowa; and Clinton’s home in Hope, have all gone through the process. But none did so after such a concerted resistance, in the name of a president’s legacy. Now, a monument to private-sector gumption is becoming, instead, a testament to its limits.
***
Ronald Reagan moved intothe house at 816 South Hennepin Avenue in December 1920, when his father, an itinerant shoe salesman, finally settled down as co-owner of a store called the Fashion Boot Shop. The Reagans—including Ronald’s mother and older brother—occupied the house until 1924, first paying $12 per month in rent, then $15. Reagan would spend the remainder of his youth in Dixon, leaving at 18 to attend Eureka College downstate.
In his autobiography,An American Life, Reagan wrote that life in Dixon “was as sweet and idyllic as it could be, as close as I could imagine for a young boy to the world created by Mark Twain inThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “Dutch” Reagan, as he was known in his hometown, skated on the frozen Rock River (“the Hudson of the West”), played right guard on the Dixon High School football team and launched his acting career in student theatricals. During the summers, he worked as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, where he claimed to have saved 77 swimmers, though locals will tell you a lot of those would-be drowning victims were girls who wanted to be saved by the handsome young man in the tank suit.
As even Reagan admitted, though, life in Dixon was not always sweet. Reagan’s father was an alcoholic, and the house on South Hennepin Avenue was the scene of Reagan’s darkest childhood memory. One night, when he was 11 years old, Dutch came home from the YMCA to find Jack Reagan sprawled out on the snowy lawn, dead drunk after a binge at a speakeasy. Reagan dragged him inside by the overcoat, “then put him to bed and never mentioned the incident to my mother,” he wrote in the autobiography.
The house was later chopped up into two apartments, and it stood vacant by the time Reagan ran for president in 1980. Thatyear,a mailman alerted local business leaders to its history. They pooled their money to buy the house, starting the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation.
The Queen Anne-style home, built in 1891, would probably have been demolished long ago if Reagan hadn’t lived there. It is furnished with period beds, old-fashioned china, a Detroit Jewel stove and an icebox. The furniture, which was purchased at second-hand shops around Illinois, didn’t belong to the Reagans—though there is a chair Dutch sat in when he visited a neighbor to listen to the radio. The only feature connecting the house to its long-ago occupants is a loose tile in front of the fireplace, under which Reagan and his brother hid pennies. (A photo in the upstairs hallway shows Reagan and his brother during a 1984 visit, sitting on a replica of the bed they shared.)
Even so, in the 1990s, the home was drawing 20,000 visitors a year—only a 10th the number of visitors Lincoln’s home in Springfield draws, but enough to make it a viable tourist attraction in Dixon, a town of 16,000 people a two-hour drive from Chicago.
Author Bob Spitz says the home also was a valuable research tool, giving him a sense of Reagan’s humble background that informed Spitz’s biography,Reagan: An American Journey. “His bedroom was no bigger than a closet; it is where he often shared a single bed with his brother,” Spitz says. “The tiny porch is where he occasionally found his father passed out from a binge and had to drag him not only inside, but up a steep flight of stairs. The ‘garden’ where his mother raised vegetables so the family could eat when meat was unaffordable was no more than a patch out the back door, by the garage shed.”
The National Park Service manages 16 presidential homes, including Abraham Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Illinois, and FDR’s in Hyde Park, New York—each of which has six-figure annual attendance and could probably get by without government help. (Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo in California is owned by the Young America’s Foundation, which uses it as a center to promote conservative ideals. The Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, which receives 400,000 visitors a year, is jointly run by the National Archives and the Reagan Foundation.) There are at least 20other presidential homes besides Reagan’s that are run by private foundations, including George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Buchanan’s Wheatland and Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage. Most survive on a mixture of tourist dollars and local investment.
But among presidential attractions, childhood homes like Reagan’s are not in the same league as Mount Vernon or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The best known—JFK’s birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts—is a Park Service property that receives about 25,000 visitors a year, less than a 10th of the traffic at Kennedy’s presidential library in Boston.
It doesn’t help the Reagan home that Illinois is not the state most Americans associate with the 40th president, and Dixon is not a major population center. The town also doesn’t have much to offer visitors other than Reagan. (It does have a lot of Reagan, though: a History and Learning Center; Reagan statues; a Reagan museum; his original lifeguard chair. There’s also a Ronald Reagan Middle School.)
“It has less to do with presidencies and more to do with the tourist business,” says Hugh Howard, author ofHomes of the Presidents. “If you go to Charlottesville, which is a fun place, you can’t not go to Monticello.”
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One of the main reasons the boyhood homefoundation could maintain the Reaganite principle of independence from government for so longwas Norm Wymbs, a Florida grocery store magnate who knew Reagan personally and was the home’s biggest benefactor—a “sugar daddy,” in the words of staffers and board members. Wymbs idolized Reagan—he even wrote a book about the president’s years in Dixon—and spent $5 million to restore the house to its 1920s look and build a visitor center. Shortly before his death, he deeded a home he owned in Dixon to the foundation, which sold it in 2013 to a private buyer for $270,000 (the source of the $172,000 profit cited in Coburn’s 2013 report, according to a foundation board member).
That money was used to purchase four small houses near the boyhood home as part of a since-abandoned expansion plan. Wymbs—who called Hastert’s 2002 allocation of $420,000 to buy the home “insulting,” because it didn’t approach his investment over the years—died in 2016, leaving the Reagan home to support itself.
As Reagan has receded into history, attendance has fallen to 5,000 visitors per year. In 2016, finding the home in a state of decrepitude, Gorman took out a $100,000 line of credit. A retired nuclear power plant mechanic, Gorman went a year without taking a salary, but the home was still losing $20,000 to $25,000 annually. Although a pair of $25,000 donations from a local charity will help pay off the line of credit, no one has stepped forward to replace the home’s sugar daddy. Last year, Reagan’s post-presidential secretary, Peggy Grande, came to Dixon for a fundraiser; it netted only $7,500.
When Gorman told the board of directors that he was seeking a Park Service takeover, this time, there was no pushback. Everyone realized the home could no longer raise enough money to remain open.
“It’s the only move,” says Joe Rudolphi, the board’s treasurer. “I don’t think we have much choice, unless we can find someone in Chicago to support us. We need to put a new roof on the house. That’s going to cost thirty, thirty-five thousand dollars. You look at an old house, an old property—it’s a money pit.”
Hastert’s act of Congress establishing a Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home National Historic Site is still in effect, but the appropriation to buy the house has expired. The Park Service is aware of the foundation’s desire to sell, and is working to arrange for an appraisal, says Brent Everitt, a spokesperson for the National Park Service: “Once the due diligence process is completed, the NPS would likely begin the process of developing a land acquisition budget request through Congress.”
Dixon’s current congressman, Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, “supports the National Park Service purchasing the site,” he said through a spokesperson. This time, the money to honor Reagan will have to come from a Democratic Congress. One factor in the home’s favor, however: The Park Service can name its own price.
“Whatever we can get, I would recommend that we take,” Rudolphi says. “If we can get out of there, just get. We can use the money to help kids through college, give them a Reagan scholarship, help the people in the community.”
In the meantime, the Reagan boyhood home soldiers on, with dwindling resources and visitors. Gorman says he has “mixed emotions” about selling the anti-big government president’s house to the government. (Although maybe he shouldn’t: Despite Reagan’s rhetoric, the Park Service acquired plenty of land when he was president, including an $8 million purchase in the Santa Monica Mountains.) But Gorman believes it’s the best way to honor Reagan. As it stands, Gorman is the home’s only full-time employee. He has trouble attracting volunteer docents. He doesn’t have time to raise funds or promote the home on social media.
“I think even Ronald Reagan would admit that times have changed,” Gorman says. “I have the utmost respect for Ronald Reagan the man, the president. I don’t want to say we’re doing him a disservice here, but we could be doing a lot better.”
Howard, theHouses of the Presidentsauthor, says he hopes the Park Service takes over the house but adds, “My suspicion is … they will stabilize it and put it on their website, but their visitation is not going to quadruple.”
A lot of Dixonites have mixed feelings about the potential sale, too. “I don’t have a problem with it, because it’s struggling, and the Park Service can help,” says Marlin Misner, a former foundation board member who wrote a history of the boyhood home. “Whether they will or not, we’ll see. If you want to ruin a project, get the federal government involved.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better himself.
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