REAGAN BIRTHPLACE 上市 Deposited
The E-Sylum: Volume 7, Number 25, June 20, 2004, Article 11
REAGAN BIRTHPLACE
Last week we asked about a piece of numismatically-related
Ronald Reagan trivia. The 40th President was born in 1911
in an apartment above a bank in Tampico, IL. We were
curious about the name of the bank and whether it issued
currency,An anonymous currency collector writes: "As I recall, Ronald
Reagan was born above The First National Bank of Tampico,
Illinois. This bank did issue national bank notes. For further
information, please refer to any of the many national bank note
catalogs (Van Belkum, Ramsey & Polito, Kelly, Hickman &
Oakes, Liddel & Litt, etc.). Among national bank note
enthusiasts, Reagan's birthplace is very old news, particularly
since President Reagan was a close personal friend of Bill
Higgins. Bill was the founder of the Higgins Museum in Lake
Okoboji, Iowa, the country's only museum dedicated to
national bank notes."Bill Burd writes: "I would imagine you received many responses
to your question regarding Reagan's birthplace. I am sending
you the little I know anyway. The Tampico Bank was
established in 1882. In August of 1908 it was chartered as a
National Bank and changed it's name to First National Bank
of Tampico. It issued large size 1902 Date Backs and also
Plain Backs. Also, it issued small size currency dated 1929.
It was liquidated in December 1931."Jess Gaylor provided a link to an article about the bank's
history, noting that when Ronald W. Reagan's family moved
in in 1906, "a bakery or restaurant occupied the building below
the apartment. Tampico National Bank came into existence in
1919 and was privately owned."The site notes: "... the First National Bank of Tampico ...
opened for business on October 1, 1908. Business was first
conducted in the old Burden building, on the west side of
Main Street, which has since been torn down, and later moved
to the building on the east side of Main Street which houses
the Village Administration offices at present."www.tampicohistoricalsociety.citymax.com
[Reagan was born in 1911. It's unclear from this article whether
there was a bank in the same building at the time Reagan was
born. And further documentation or discussion of this issue is
invited.Only history will tell if any leader is worthy of honoring on our
money, and there are many examples of the folly of honoring
living or recently-deceased persons on coins and currency. I
laughed when I first heard of the movement to honor Reagan,
who was still alive at the time. He may be gone now, but it is
still much too early to consider putting his portrait on money.
-Editor]Illustrating the divisions that surround Reagan's legacy is the
following note from Richard Doty, who writes:"IF handing the country more completely to the rich
IF ignoring AIDS while thousands died
IF winning the Cold War by proving that we were capable
of going deeper into debt than were our adversaries
IF breaking one union and weakening the rest;IF all of these were accomplishments
and IF you deem their author worthy of remembrance on
our money - then by all means put him on it.
But I won't use it."- 2004-06-20
- 7