Ronald Reagan

Pictured on a USA 37¢ commemorative postage stamp issued 9 February 2005. When the first-class letter rate was raised to 39¢ in January 2006, the US Postal Service received an unprecedented number of requests to reissue the stamp at the higher value. The 39¢ postage stamp was issued on 14 June 2006, using the same design as the earlier stamp.

A month after his death, items from his burial and week-long public viewing were selling fast on the online auction site eBay. The company has sold 780 pieces of Reagan funeral memorabilia since June 11, 2004, for a total of $66,000. The items range from programs (sold for up to $1,525 each) from the interment at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA, to gratitude cards given to mourners who visited his casket.

(May 16th 2002) Awarded the United States Congressional Gold Medal for ending the "Cold War" against Russia, along with his wife Nancy Reagan, for fighting substance abuse among American youths.

In the film, American Beauty (1999), the Fitts family (Chris Cooper, Allison Janney and Wes Bentley) can be seen watching one of Reagan's wartime films, This Is the Army (1943).

His last public appearance was at Richard Nixon's funeral in April 1994.

After his presidency he and Nancy Reagan moved to 666 St. Cloud Road in Bel Air, California which Ronald lived in until his death. Nancy had the address changed from 666 to 668 due to the fact 666 is known as the devil's number. The house is down the street from 805 St. Cloud Road, the house used in the TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990).

Was presented with George Gipp's letterman's sweater by the University of Notre Dame football team on January 18, 1989, two days before leaving the White House, and his two-term Vice President, 'George Herbert Walker Bush', became President.

In his 1984 presidential re-election victory he received more electoral votes than any president in history, winning 525 out of a possible 538 votes, and ranked third among electoral vote percentages in contested elections, winning 97.6% of the electoral vote and 58.8% of the popular vote. Reagan won 49 out of 50 states against his Democratic opponent Walter Mondale, losing only Mondale's home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Reportedly, Reagan's campaign wanted to recount the narrow Minnesota results to give him a unanimous victory, but Reagan himself rejected the idea, as he had already won the election and it would serve no purpose other than to humiliate Mondale further.

40th president of the United States (20 January 1981 - 20 January 1989).

(After Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980, Melvyn Douglas said of his former friend that Reagan turned to the right after he had begun to believe the pro-business speeches he delivered for General Electric when he was the host of the "G. E. Theater.

In 1978, after having served as governor of California but before running for President, Reagan came out against The Briggs Initiative, a ballot initiative introduced by a right-wing Republican state senator named John Briggs, which would have made it illegal for homosexuals to be employed as teachers in the California school system. Reagan strongly and vocally opposed the measure, saying that it infringed upon basic human rights and bordered on being unconstitutional. He is largely credited for turning public opinion against the measure and it was defeated in the election.

Influenced by the Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver (1976), John Hinckley--the son of a prominent Republican family from Colorado--tried to assassinate Reagan in 1981 in order to impress actress Jodie Foster. Foster had won her first Oscar nomination for the film, in which Robert De Niro's character, "Travis Bickle", tried to assassinate a liberal Democratic presidential candidate to impress Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), the woman he is obsessed with. Hinckley was acquitted by a jury on reasons of insanity and (as of 2010) remains incarcerated in a psychiatric facility.

Was portrayed on Saturday Night Live (1975) by at least eight different actors: Chevy Chase, Randy Quaid, Charles Rocket, Harry Shearer, Robin Williams, Joe Piscopo, Phil Hartman, and Kevin Nealon.

Was the first guest of honor on the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts, in 1973.

On Tuesday, March 14, 1972, during his second term as governor of California, he expunged the criminal record of country-western singer Merle Haggard, granting him a full pardon.

His first bid for the Presidency was actually in 1968, when he finished 3rd in the balloting at the GOP national convention behind Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller. As the Constitution, in practical terms, forbids the president and vice president from being from the same state (a rule that binds the electoral college), Reagan was not considered for the vice presidency when Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973. Besides, though Reagan supported his fellow Californian Nixon for president, the two were never close. In 1976, he challenged incumbent Gerald Ford (the man whom Nixon appointed Vice President to replace Agnew) for the Republican nomination, won several primaries, but narrowly lost the nomination at the convention. Though Ford confided in people he was considering a run for the presidency in 1980 to forestall Reagan's ascendancy, he never did and Reagan won the nomination and the presidency.

Ronald Reagan had quite a prolific career, having catapulted from a Warner Bros. contract player and television star, into serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild, the governorship of California (1967-1975), and lastly, two terms as President of the United States (1981-1989). Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, to Nelle Clyde (Wilson) and John Edward "Jack" Reagan, who was a salesman and storyteller. His father was of Irish descent, and his mother was of half Scottish and half English ancestry.

When Reagan was tipped by the California Republican Party to be its standard-bearer in the 1965 gubernatorial election against Democratic Governor Pat Brown, Lew Wasserman went back in action. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and though Wasserman was a liberal Democrat, having an old friend like Reagan who had shown his loyalty as S. A. G. president in the state house was good for business. Wasserman and his partner, M. C. A. Chairman Jules Styne (a Republican), helped ensure that Reagan would be financially secure for the rest of his life so that he could enter politics. (At the time, he was the host of "Death Valley Days" on TV. )According to the Wall Street Journal, Universal sold Reagan a nice piece of land of many acres north of Santa Barbara that had been used for location shooting. The Reagans sold most of the ranch, then converted the rest of it, about 200 acres, into a magnificent estate overlooking the valley and the Pacific Ocean. The Rancho del Cielo became President Reagan's much needed counterpoint to the buzz of Washington, D. C. There, in a setting both rugged and serene, the Reagans could spend time alone or receive political leaders such as the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, and others.

However, in 1962, the U. S. Justice Department under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy successfully forced M. C. A. - known as "The Octopus" in Hollywood for its monopolistic tendencies - to divest itself of its talent agency.

In 1960, with the election of the Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the black and gray lists went into eclipse. J. F. K. appointed Helen Gahagan Douglas Treasurer of the United States. About this time, as the civil rights movement became stronger and found more support among Democrats and the Kennedy administration, Reagan - fresh from a second stint as S. A. G.

president in 1959 - was in the process of undergoing a personal and political metamorphosis into a right-wing Republican, a process that culminated with his endorsing Barry Goldwater for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. (He narrated a Goldwater campaign film played at the G. O. P. Convention in San Francisco. ) Reagan's evolution into a right-wing Republican sundered his friendship with the Douglases.

")In 1959, while Reagan was back as a second go-round as S. A. G. president, M. C. A. 's exemption from S. A. G. regulations that forbade a talent agency from being a producer was renewed.

For two weeks in 1954, Reagan opened as a stand-up comic at the Ramona Room of the Hotel Last Frontier in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Wasserman repaid Ronald Reagan's largess by structuring a deal by which he hosted and owned part of General Electric Theater (1953), a western omnibus showcase that ran from 1954 to 1961. It made Reagan very comfortable financially, though it did not make him rich. That came later.

Spouses William Holden and Brenda Marshall served as Best Man and Matron of Honor at his wedding to Nancy Reagan in 1952.

The House Un-American Activities Committee investigations of Hollywood (which led to the jailing of the "Hollywood Ten" in the late '40s) sowed the seeds of the McCarthyism that racked Hollywood and America in the 1950s.

In 1950, U. S. Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas (D-CA), the wife of "Dutch" Reagan's friend Melvyn Douglas, ran as a Democrat for the U. S. Senate and was opposed by the Republican nominee, the Red-bating Congressman from Whittier, Richard Nixon. While Nixon did not go so far as to accuse Gahagan Douglas of being a communist herself, he did charge her with being soft on communism due to her opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Nixon tarred her as a "fellow traveler" of communists, a "pinko" who was "pink right down to her underwear. " Gahagan Douglas was defeated by the man she was the first to call "Tricky Dicky" because of his unethical behavior and dirty campaign tactics. Reagan was on the Douglases' side during that campaign. The Douglases, like Reagan and such other prominent actors as Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson, were liberal Democrats, supporters of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, a legacy that increasingly was under attack by the right after World War II. They were NOT fellow-travelers; Melvyn Douglas had actually been an active anti-communist and was someone the communists despised. Melvyn Douglas, Robinson and Henry Fonda - a registered Republican! - wound up "gray-listed. " (They weren't explicitly black-listed, they just weren't offered any work. ) Reagan, who it was later revealed had been an F. B. I. informant while a union leader (turning in suspected communists), was never hurt that way, as he made S. A. G. an accomplice of the black-listing.

Wasserman pioneered this tax avoidance scheme with his client James Stewart, beginning with the Anthony Mann western Winchester '73 (1950) (1950).

It made Stewart enormously rich as he became a top box office draw in the 1950s after the success of "Winchester 73" and several more Mann-directed westerns, all of which he had an ownership stake in.

Ironically, Reagan became a poor-man's James Stewart in the early 1950s, appearing in westerns, but they were mostly B-pictures. He did not have the acting chops of the great Stewart, but he did have his agent. Wasserman at M. C. A. was one of the pioneers of television syndication, and this was to benefit Reagan enormously. M. C. A. was the only talent agency that was also allowed to be a producer through an exemption to union rules granted by S. A. G. when Reagan was the union president, and it used the exemption to acquire Universal International Pictures. Talent agents were not permitted to be producers as there was an inherent conflict of interest between the two professions, one of which was committed to acquiring talent at the lowest possible cost and the other whose focus was to get the best possible price for their client. When a talent agent was also a producer, like M. C. A. was, it had a habit of steering its clients to its own productions, where they were employed but at a lower price than their potential free market value. It was a system that made M. C. A. and Lew Wasserman, enormously wealthy. The ownership of Universal and its entry into the production of television shows that were syndicated to network made M. C. A. the most successful organization in Hollywood of its time, a real cash cow as television overtook the movies as the #1 business of the entertainment industry.

He was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947 and served five years during the most tumultuous times to ever hit Hollywood.

A committed anti-communist, Reagan not only fought more-militantly activist movie industry unions that he and others felt had been infiltrated by communists, but had to deal with the investigation into Hollywood's politics launched by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, an inquisition that lasted through the 1950s.

Rumored studio publicity claimed that he was scheduled to play Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1942); however, this was never the case.

Roosevelt (even after he evolved into a Republican), and was a Democrat in the 1940s, a self-described 'hemophiliac' liberal.

Reagan's career sagged after the late 1940s, and he started appearing in B-movies after he left Warner Bros. to go free-lance. However, he had a eminence grise par excellence in Lew Wasserman, his agent and the head of the Music Corp. of America. Wasserman, later called "The Pope of Hollywood," was the genius who figured out that an actor could make a killing via a tax windfall by turning himself into a corporation. The corporation, which would employ the actor, would own part of a motion picture the actor appeared in, and all monies would accrue to the corporation, which was taxed at a much lower rate than was personal income.

Was a sports announcer in Des Moines, Iowa, before becoming an actor in 1937.

A successful actor beginning in the 1930s, the young Reagan was a staunch admirer of President Franklin D.

His state funeral service took place on the 25th anniversary of the death of his close friend and ally John Wayne.

The younger son of John Edward Reagan and Nelle Clyde Wilson Reagan, and brother of Neil Reagan (1908-1996), Ronald Reagan was of Irish descent on his father's side, and of Scottish and English descent on his mother's side. His paternal grandfather, John Michael Reagan, was born in Peckham, County Kent, England, to Irish parents, and his paternal grandmother, Jennie Cusick, was born in Dixon, Illinois, also to Irish parents. His maternal grandfather, Thomas Wilson, also an Illinois native, was of Scottish descent (partly by way of Canada), and his maternal grandmother, Mary Ann Elsey, was English, from Epsom, co. Surrey. His paternal great-grandfather, Michael Regan, emigrated to the USA from Ballyporeen, Ireland, in the 1860s. Ballyporeen, a tiny rural farming town in County Tipperary, is located in the south-central part of the country and its inhabitants are frequently referred to as "Midlanders". The Regans were one of three primary families, or "clans", that populated St. Mary's Parish in the village of Ballyporeen. The Ronald Reagan Visitors Centre was built down the street from St. Mary's Church following his visit to his ancestral home in the mid-1980s. The spelling of the family name Regan was changed to Reagan after they arrived in the USA.

He was the first president to beat the "zero factor." Before him, every president elected in a year ending in zero (beginning with 1840) had died in office.

Amidst the panic at the hospital after Reagan's assassination attempt, a Secret Service agent was asked information for Reagan's admission forms. The intern asked for Reagan's last name. The agent, who was quite surprised at the question, responded "Reagan". The intern then asked for Reagan's first name. The agent, again surprised, responded "Ronald". The intern didn't look up, instead he unassumingly asked for Reagan's address. The agent paused for a few moments in great surprise before saying "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue". That got the intern's attention.