Trip to President Ronald Reagan’s Birthplace & Museum in Tampico, Illinois, USA on Aug. 25, 2022.
© Sanjib Dutta
The museum, a must see for history buffs, houses an incredible array of memorabilia and information about President Reagan.
Museum guides Joan Johnson and Sharon Sumner walked us through the museum, the living quarters and the bank. They were a delight to speak with and told us numerous facts about President Reagan and his life in Tampico. Do visit if you are interested in presidential history and are in the Chicago area.
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States and the only President born in Illinois. He was born in Tampico on Feb. 6, 1911 in an apartment above a bakery. The bakery was purchased by the First National Bank in 1919 and continued as a bank until the 1930s. This apartment where he was born has been refinished to look as it did when he was born there. The bank has been restored to again look like a working bank of the early 1900s. The store located to the South of the Bank originally was a grocery store and now houses the gift shop for the Reagan Museum.
Ronald Reagan served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. A member of the Republican Party from 1962 onward, he also served as the 33rd governor of California from 1967 to 1975 after having a career as a Hollywood actor and union leader.
Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois. He graduated from Eureka College in 1932 and began to work as a radio sports commentator in Iowa. In 1937, Reagan moved to California, where he found work as a film actor. From 1947 to 1952, Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, during which time he worked to root out alleged communist influence within it. In the 1950s, he moved to a career in television and became a spokesman for General Electric. From 1959 to 1960, he again served as president of the Screen Actors Guild. In 1964, his speech “A Time for Choosing” earned him national attention as a new conservative figure. Building a network of supporters, Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966. During his governorship, he raised taxes, turned the state budget deficit into a surplus, challenged protesters at UC Berkeley, and ordered in National Guard troops during a period of protest movements.
After failed presidential bids in 1968 and 1976, challenging and nearly defeating sitting president Gerald Ford in the latter’s Republican primaries, Reagan easily won the Republican nomination in the 1980 presidential election and went on to defeat incumbent Democratic president Jimmy Carter. At the time of his first inauguration, Reagan was the oldest person to assume the U.S. presidency.[a] Early in his presidency, he began implementing new political and economic initiatives. His supply-side economics policies—dubbed “Reaganomics”—advocated tax reduction, economic deregulation, and reduction in government spending. In his first term, he survived an assassination attempt, spurred the war on drugs, invaded Grenada, and fought public-sector labor unions. Reagan ran for reelection in the 1984 presidential election, defeating Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, in an electoral landslide.
Ronald Reagan’s Birthplace & Museum:
https://www.tampicohistoricalsociety.com/R_Reagan_Birthplace_Museum.html
If you go:
111 – 113 S. Main Street,
P. O. Box 344 (Mailing address)
Tampico, IL 61283
USA
Phone: +1-815-622-8705
Joan Johnson, Curator/Mgr.: +1-815-622-8705
Email: reaganbirthplace@thewisp.net or garyjoan@thewisp.net
#RonaldReagan #Tampico #USA
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