Reagan Roundtable: Ronald Reagan: A Personal Reflection by Historyguy99
Historyguy99 at the Ronald Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz:
Ronald Reagan: A Personal Reflection
….My first introduction to Reagan was unrelated to politics as I would be allowed to watch the General Electric Theater, which Reagan hosted, on Sunday evenings whenever there was school holiday on Mondays. Later, in my teens, he was a familiar figure with a cowboy hat that hosted Death Valley Days. Reagan made no impact on me in those early years and it was not until November of 1968 that I was introduced to his leadership style.
After Vietnam, I was married and stationed at Fort Campbell, Ky and we were expecting our first child in April 1969. We decided to move my wife home to be near her parents and undertook a cross country drive to California. Just after sunset, three days later, we crossed over the Colorado River on I-10 and were met with two things that signaled that we were back in what at the time was the “Golden State.” First, was the roadway, brightly lit as far as one’s headlights carried, with little glass reflectors that were an invention of a Cal-Trans engineer named Botts. They had been installed after I had joined the army and California was the only state in the nation to have them. Driving in the desert that night, the first California radio station we tuned in was carrying a live interview with then Governor Ronald Reagan. As I drove along, and listened to him discuss the affairs of California and the state of the nation after changing leadership with the election Nixon a couple of weeks earlier, I was struck by the tenor of the way he presented his convictions. I was still naive about most politics and frankly had not formed any political affiliation, but listening to his positive message about individuality and the human spirit that night, left me with a very favorable impression. To reveal my ignorance about the history of Bott’s Dots, I was initially left to credit Reagan with lighting our way across the California desert that night, only to learn later, they were approved the summer before he was elected.
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