Ronald Reagan: Happy Times, Happy President

President Ronald Reagan passed away on June 5, 2004. His final resting place, the dry hills overlooking Simi Valley, California, is also home to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Exhibits at the Library do a better job of telling his story than we can. But we thought a few choice images from there and other favorite Reagan attractions might be a fitting send-off for the Gipper...

Left: President Reagan, hammered out of California license plates. Artist Michael Kalish's depiction of all the Presidents hangs near the back of the museum.

From the Oval Office, in a building much like this gift tissue dispenser, Ronald Reagan changed American politics. Part of the "Gifts from the Heart" exhibit.		The President could duke it out with world leaders and two-bit dictators. RR and Qaddafi puppets on display in the Reagan Library gift shop.
The collapse of the Soviet Union gathered momentum during the Reagan years, which is why pieces of the Berlin Wall end up in places like Simi Valley to delight school children. Presented to the Reagan Presidential Library in 1990.		Reagan and his wife Nancy were inseparable for 50 years, as their cardboard cutouts illlustrate. He proposed to Nancy in booth #2 in Chasen's,his favorite restaurant. The booth is now exhibited at the Ronald Reagan Museum, Simi Valley.
Ronald Reagan, rendered in jelly beans, at the Jelly Belly Factory tour, Fairfield, California.		In Presidents Park, Lead, South Dakota, Reagan is but one along a continuum of bodiless Chief Executives, from George W. to ... George W. But the park owners haven't constructed any little jokes about the RR legacy (Nixon and Clinton are not as lucky).
A mural in Tampico, Illinois, where Ronald Reagan was born in 1911, captures RR milestones as the heartland likes to remember him... The Gipper playing football, as a radio announcer, with the Reagan family, with Nancy, and at the big box of tissues....