HALT:HaltingArkansasLiberalswithTruth.com
President Reagan makes remarks to the crowd as Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra, James Stewart, Virgil Thompson, Katherine Dunham, and Elia Kazan look on in the East Room during a reception in Honor of Kennedy Center award recipients. 12/4/83.
Jimmy Stewart gets academy award in 1940
Above you will notice a picture of Jimmy Stewart. Stewart’s father Alex owned a hardware store in Indiana, PA. For his work in The Philadelphia Story, Stewart won the 1940 Academy Award for Best Actor. On the night of his win, the story goes, after a swirl of post-Oscar parties, the actor took a call from his dad, who wanted to confirm that his only son had won “some kind of prize.” “I heard about it on the radio,” Alex said. “Yeah, Dad,” his son replied. “It’s a Best Actor Award. They give ’em out every year. I won it for The Philadelphia Story.” “What kind of prize is it?” “It’s a kind of statuette. Looks like gold but isn’t. They call it the Oscar.” “Well, that’s fine, I guess. You’d better send it over. I’ll put it on show in the store where folks can take a look at it.” It remained there for the rest of Alex’s life.
The next few days I want to post some portions of an excellent article by Peggy Noonan “Ronald Reagan at 100,” (Wall Street Journal, Feb 3, 2011).
At the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountain Range where old Hollywood directors shot Westerns, they will mark Sunday’s centenary of Reagan’s birth with events and speeches geared toward Monday’s opening of a rethought and renovated museum aimed at making his presidency more accessible to scholars and vividly available to the public. Fifty percent of the artifacts, officials note, have never been shown before—essays and short stories Reagan wrote in high school and college, the suit he wore the day he was shot, the condolence book signed by world leaders at his funeral. (Margaret Thatcher: “Well done, Thou good and faithful servant.”)
Much recently has been written about who he was—a good man who became a great president—but recent conversations about Reagan have me pondering some things he was not.
He wasn’t, for instance, sentimental, though he’s often thought of that way. His nature was marked by a characterological sweetness, and his impulse was to be kind and generous. (His daughter Patti Davis captured this last week in a beautifully remembered essay for Time.) But he wasn’t sentimental about people and events, or about history. Underlying all was a deep and natural skepticism. That, in a way, is why he was conservative. “If men were angels.” They are not, so we must limit the governmental power they might wield. But his skepticism didn’t leave him down. It left him laughing at the human condition, and at himself. Jim Baker, his first and great chief of staff, and his friend, remembered the other day the atmosphere of merriness around Reagan, the constant flow of humor.
But there was often a genial blackness to it, a mordant edge. In a classic Reagan joke, a man says sympathetically to his friend, “I’m so sorry your wife ran away with the gardener.” The guy answers, “It’s OK, I was going to fire him anyway.” Or: As winter began, the young teacher sought to impart to her third-graders the importance of dressing warmly. She told the heart-rending story of her little brother, a fun-loving boy who went out with his sled and stayed out too long, caught a cold, then pneumonia, and days later died. There was dead silence in the schoolroom as they took it in. She knew she’d gotten through. Then a voice came from the back: “Where’s the sled?”
______________________________________
Little known presidential facts:
The Daily Hatch 