Boyhood

The old man in the gray felt hat walks purposefully around to the back of the house, through the yard with the malodorous mesh-wire chicken coop and past the mangy dog yelping at visitors, and casts his eyes upward to the mountain that looms just beyond. "Yes, yes," he murmurs with approval, pointing with his cane toward the crest of the mountain. "You can feel the energy."

Nearly a year after President Bush signed a bill intended to make Ronald Reagan's boyhood home in Dixon, Ill., a national historic site, a dispute over what the home is worth may keep it from achieving that status. Private appraisals contracted by the U.S. Interior Department put the fair market value of the real and personal property at $420,000. This is millions of dollars below what the private Ronald Reagan Boyhood Foundation that now owns and runs the home argues is the true value.

The white-haired man squinted from the lectern at the star-struck youngsters and old friends eager to hear his stories. But the words that usually came so easily weren't there. The bittersweet recollection of his boyhood; thoughts of time's passage; lost friends and loved ones; and the knowledge that he was home for the final time overcame him. Mark Twain bowed his head and sobbed.

He was a college instructor and a part-time grammar-school basketball coach and knew how to manipulate kids. He drew them in with the patience of a cat stalking its prey. When he knew they were vulnerable, he leaped. Chuck Rosenthal sits in my office and talks about the man and about six years of sexual abuse at his hands. He won't name him, he said, and he's not going to sue anyone, because relief--not vengeance or money--is what he's seeking.

The state of Ohio has bought the boyhood home of Ulysses S. Grant, the nation's 18th president and a Civil War hero. The state paid $200,000 for the two-story brick house built in sections by Grant's father, tanner Jesse Grant, between 1823 and 1829 in Georgetown, a small southern Ohio town. The Ohio Historical Society will oversee its operation. It also operated the state-owned schoolhouse that Grant attended and the one-room home in nearby Point Pleasant where he was born in 1822.

"MacArthur Park Crime Troubles Neighbors" (Dec. 17) brought back memories of a different time. I remember sailing my model boat (my best-ever Christmas present) on the lake as a 10-year-old boy in 1925. The park was quiet, peaceful and beautiful, with couples rowing quietly on the lake on weekend afternoons. I see myself putting my boat in the water, giving it a gentle push and watching the wind catch it and having it keel over as it started its trip across the lake, while I ran around to the other side to meet it at the end of its voyage.

Johnny "Mike" Spann seemed never to have had much doubt about the path he would pursue out of his rural home town. High school classmates said Spann had mapped out a life in the military and national security before career plans ever occurred to most of his peers. Family members said it's hard to remember a time when he wasn't focused on a future that seemed so certain to him.

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.

It is Saturday night in Lake Wobegon, Minn., a town that time has definitely not forgotten. To be sure, Garrison Keillor, who invented the town as the venue for his "A Prairie Home Companion" show on public radio, likes to pretend that Lake Wobegon is quaint and sleepy and sort of innocently Middle Western. But compare it to a town that really is sleepy, such as Thornton Wilder's beloved Grover's Corners, N.H.

For Howard West, it couldn't get any better than this. Jack Welch, the legendary chairman of General Electric, was putting on a full-court press for him, partner George Shapiro and their client Jerry Seinfeld, hoping to woo the comic to return for a 10th season of his eponymous NBC series.