In the gift shop of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home is a T-shirt bearing one of the 40th president's best-known sayings: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Since opening to the public in 1984, the home, run by a nonprofit foundation, has lived by that principle, rejecting public money and staying proudly independent. Its website declares, “The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home does not receive State or Federal Funding.”
Nearly 130 years old, the three-bedroom, one-bathroom white house on South Hennepin Avenue in Dixon is a testament to Reagan's modest, all-American childhood. Many of its counterparts around the country, including Bill Clinton's boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy's birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts; and the estate in New York where Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, are run by the National Park Service.
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