Marathon Pundit: Reagan's birthday 2013: Win one more for the Gipper

Chicago Reagan apartment

Back when I first started Marathon Pundit eight years ago--one of the people I worked with pn a story was a student at DePaul University, Nicholas Hahn III.

Hahn wrote a moving tribute to Ronald Reagan on the 102nd anniversary of this birth--and he eloquently elucidated the importance of saving the Gipper's Chicago home in RealClearReligion:

Until the election of Barack Obama, Reagan was the only President to have ever lived in the city of Chicago and is the only President to have been born and raised in Illinois. He attended Eureka College (about 140 miles southwest of the City) and after graduation became a play-by-play announcer for the Chicago Cubs. Reagan was a Chicagoan at heart.

Now, on what would have been the Gipper's 102nd birthday, a wrecking ball is swinging dangerously close to our Great Communicator's boyhood home. The building, now owned by the University of Chicago, is set for demolition to make way for a hospital facility fittingly associated with Alzheimer's disease research. But as a Hyde Park Historical Society board member warned: "Whatever you think of Reagan -- once the building's gone, it's gone forever."

Berlin Wall section,
Eureka College

There is some hope. Just as Young America's Foundation saved Reagan's Rancho del Cielo in California, the Friends of President Reagan's Chicago Home was incorporated to save another piece of history. You can do your part here.

No, an old apartment is not a slab of the Berlin Wall, but the time the Reagans spent in the big city helped develop the character of our 40th President of the United States. This rough-and-tumble working-class city taught Reagan his Midwestern grit at an early age.