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Saving one for the Gipper:

Ronald Reagan’s Boyhood Home Set for Wrecking Ball by Month’s End



Ronald Reagan's Chicago Home
To the beat of Joni Mitchell’s song, Big Yellow Taxi running in the background, we’re calling on Michael Reagan and NewsMax.com to come to the rescue of an American tragedy in the making.
Somewhere among the environs of the University of Chicago Medical Center, they’re about to “pave paradise and put up a parking lot”. In political lingo, the university medical center is going to demolish the house where President Ronald Reagan grew up in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighbourhood. In an era where overzealous revisionists are throwing American history out the window, it’s curtains for the building in which the only U.S. president born and bred in Illinois lived during his boyhood. When word first leaked out that the building where Ronaldus Magnus lived with his parents in a cold-water flat in a four-story apartment building at 832 East 57th Street in Chicago’s Hyde Park community was coming down to make way for a grassy strip next to a new parking lot, only Chicagoan Redd Griffin tried to protect the home where the Reagans lived.

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Heartbreakingly, Redd Griffin died unexpectantly late last month. “Now, Mary Claire Kendall, a writer, is picking up Griffin’s cause and working to raise enough money to propose that a non-profit group purchase the building from the university and turn it into a Ronald Reagan Hyde Park museum and public affairs center”. (Presidential Retreats author Peter Hannaford, writing for American Spectator Dec. 11, 2012). Kendall deserves every bit of help that can be mustered by a Reagan-loving America. “Ms. Kendall first became interested in the cause when she was doing research on a book about Frank Lloyd Wright and met Griffin, who was active in the movement to preserve and promote several Wright homes in the Chicago suburbs. About her efforts to raise money for the Reagan Hyde Park preservation project, she says, “Time is of the essence. “ The demolition is scheduled to take place by the end of this year.” Meanwhile back at that ranch known as the University of Chicago, university officials, which once included Michelle Obama, are tied up in a pet project of their own. They are actively lobbying for an Obama Presidential Library. Obama’s own Tony Rezko-enabled home also happens to be in the Hyde Park neighborhood. (A Google map search places the two homes less than half a mile apart.) If there is one cause that should not be put aside during upcoming Christmas holidays, this is it. Obama will be inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2013. Unless stayed, how long after inauguration will the wrecking ball swing on 832 East 57th Street, Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois? Michael Reagan and NewsMax should join up with passionate Reagan defender radio talk show host Mark Levin and begin the work necessary to save Ronnie’s boyhood Chicago home. America needs reminders of Ronald Reagan more now than ever before.


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Judi McLeod -- Bio and Archives -- Judi McLeod, Founder, Owner and Editor of Canada Free Press, is an award-winning journalist with more than 30 years’ experience in the print and online media. A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard. Her work has appeared throughout the ‘Net, including on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

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