Boyhood

Ronald Reagan's childhood home in Dixon would become a federal historic site under a bill passed by the House. The home where the former president lived in the early 1920s is owned by the private Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home Foundation. The bill authorizes the Interior Department to buy the site from the foundation, which would continue managing and operating it. Reagan lived in the home for three years from the ages of 9 to 12.

Since free agency appears to be the key issue in the players' strike, may I suggest that the NFL owners take heed from the baseball owners and concede to the players' demands, thus they can freeze the market and be slave owners of a different nature. FRED THOMAS Los Angeles

Two 72-year-old men who were boyhood friends in Hungary were reunited after more than 50 years recently in the emergency room at San Gabriel Valley Medical Center in San Gabriel. Miklos Moldvan, who now lives in San Gabriel, had come to the emergency room feeling ill. When he heard Karoy Palatinus in the next bed speaking Hungarian, the two began to talk. The men realized that they were not only school buddies but also had played on the same professional football team in Budapest.

Paxton Davis, 69, whose trilogy of autobiographical novels depicted boyhood in Depression-era North Carolina. Davis published 10 books and was at work on an 11th, about the 1932 killing of an heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune. His first novel, "Being a Boy," told of growing up in Buena Vista, a well-to-do Winston-Salem neighborhood. "A Boy's War" and "A Boy No More" completed the trilogy. Davis also taught journalism at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.

Beatles star John Lennon collected stamps as a schoolboy -- and the public will soon have a chance to see them. The Smithsonian Institution's National Postal Museum announced it had acquired Lennon's stamp album from a British stamp dealer and planned to display it in October. The album contains more than 550 stamps from around the world including many from former British colonies.

Americans can barely be bothered to vote in our own elections, so why should we care enough about anyone else's to watch the gripping examination of Ghana's 2008 presidential contest on display in "An African Election"? That reservation was frankly shared by director Jarreth Merz, who went to Ghana to make a much more personal film and ended up documenting this landmark election because it turned out to be too compelling to turn away from, a judgment viewers are likely to agree with.