Checking Out History : Reagan Library Offers Wealth of Information to Scholars and the Public

In the weeks leading up to Presidents Day, archivist Gregory Cumming was rapidly pulling papers from the basement of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library for a hodgepodge of researchers.

There was a Rhodes scholar from Oxford, the regulars (mostly professors and graduate students from Cal Lutheran University), a few high school teachers and about five elementary school students asking for help on class reports about the 40th President.

“For a while,” Cumming said of the holiday rush, “it was hot and heavy.”

Since its opening near Simi Valley three years ago, the library has attracted students and educators from across Southern California seeking an intimate look at the life and times of the former President.

For scholars young and old, the rich archives buried under the hilltop museum are a treasure trove of knowledge. Correspondence between national leaders--some of the letters penned in presidential handwriting--lies at the fingertips of curious researchers.

“I think it is an outstanding facility,” said Thousand Oaks High School teacher Jerry Morris, who spent months researching civil rights issues for his government classes.

“As you read through these things, you get to see the real inner workings of government,” Morris said. “And that is something a textbook just doesn’t have time for.”

Ventura County high school teachers are among the most avid users of the library’s facilities, officials said. They are using documents to bolster curriculum, and leading field trips to the Simi Hills to allow students to view history firsthand.

In addition, elementary and junior high teachers are hauling children by the busloads to the library’s adjacent museum to view Reagan memorabilia and touring exhibits.

In a three-month period in the fall, nearly 3,000 Ventura County students from 25 schools in nine districts visited the facility. Hundreds of students from Los Angeles-area schools and private academies traipsed through the museum between October and December as well.

While classrooms from Ojai to Oak Park were represented during that period, the vast majority of visitors came from within Simi Valley. In December alone, students from nine Simi schools toured the library.

“A lot of our classes at all levels use the library for field trips,” said Susan C. Parks, assistant superintendent of the Simi Valley Unified School District. One elementary school, Lincoln, has even been adopted by the library, and its students participate in various events.

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On Saturday, about 10 students from Cochran Baptist Day School in Simi Valley wandered the hallways of the library’s museum. “I like it,” 11-year-old Dawn Smith said. “It teaches you a lot of neat stuff about the President you can’t learn on TV.”

Oak Park High School teacher Jim Johnson gives his U. S. history students additional class credit for visiting the library. At least half of his 150 students have taken advantage of the offer this school year, he said.

“There’s a lot of information that has either never been out of the archives before or has never been on the West Coast,” Johnson said.

The library’s current exhibit on World War II--featuring a rare collection of letters, photographs, weapons and artifacts--has been extremely popular with students, Johnson said. It has also been a priceless tool for teachers.

From the searing images of war captured in home movies to the personal diaries of soldiers and famous surrender papers signed by Germany and Japan in 1945, the exhibit breathes life into the often dull pages of a textbook.

“Those are pretty realistic documents for a student to look at,” Johnson said.

To help teachers incorporate the exhibits into classwork, the library has developed curriculum guides, and last year started offering preview nights to give local educators a tour of exhibits before they open.

“We are very education-friendly,” Cumming said. “We are not this shining facility on top of a hill that is unreachable.”

Reagan’s library is the largest and most expensive of the nine presidential libraries in the National Archives system, carrying a $58-million price tag. Last year, about 300,000 people toured the sprawling facility.

Although student groups and senior citizens make up the majority of the library’s visitors, the number of researchers using the archives is growing, officials said.

Last year, about 170 researchers, mostly scholars and journalists, explored the library’s vast records. The library also received more than 5,800 verbal or written requests for information, officials said.

Requests have come from as far as China and as close as Thousand Oaks, Cumming said. “We have people literally from around the world and from right here.”

Westlake High School teacher Linda LaSalle is among the locals.

“It is a marvelous resource to me and any government teacher,” LaSalle said. “It could be strictly a monument to Ronald Reagan, but it has gone far beyond that.”

To bring the library back to the classroom, LaSalle and a handful of other Ventura County teachers spent the entire summer of 1993 compiling curriculum guides from library documents.

LaSalle emerged from hidden vaults with a three-inch-thick handbook full of photocopied documents from Reagan’s years, including press briefings, articles and political cartoons.

The handbook, which has been sent to each high school in the Conejo Valley, outlines historical events from Reagan’s presidency, such as the U. S. invasion of Grenada, the explosion of space shuttle Challenger and the 1981 attempted assassination of Reagan.

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In addition, teachers copied letters from Richard Nixon’s Administration and now-declassified documents on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on loan from the Harry S. Truman Library.

“America asks that you take immediate heed of what we say,” reads a copy of the first leaflet dropped on Japanese cities after the bombing of Hiroshima.

“We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by man. . . . This awful fact is one for you to ponder and we solemnly assure you that it is grimly accurate,” the leaflet reads.

It is documents such as these that make history come to life for students, LaSalle said.

Westlake High senior Scott Nussbaum, a student in LaSalle’s advanced placement government class, said the library materials that his teacher uses are more realistic and compelling than information from a textbook.

“It’s real information,” he said. “It’s not filtered . . . through a writer, a researcher and an editor, and then censored by the school district. It is firsthand information. It’s real, and you can relate to it.”

About 50 million presidential papers are housed in the basement of the library. But 85% of those documents are still packed in brown boxes and have yet to be catalogued by library staff. That has discouraged some academicians.

“There is too much that is still uncatalogued,” said Herbert E. Gooch, an associate professor of political science at Cal Lutheran. “It is just a matter of time and money.”

The library’s skeletal eight-person research staff is well aware of its limitations. They do not have a computer database set up for researchers and are years away from cataloguing millions of papers stored in the basement.

“This is by far the largest collection of presidential records in any library,” Cumming said. “(But) we don’t have the largest staff. It is a definite concern.”

When might all those mysterious presidential papers see the light of day?

“Just put it this way,” Cumming said. “They haven’t finished everything at the Roosevelt library.” That facility was opened in 1941.

But Cumming is confident that the Reagan library will eventually emerge as a major research institution.

“If you want to know anything about the 1980s, this is going to be a necessary place to stop,” he said. “Most people think of major research facilities being on the East Coast, but we will have one right here in Ventura County.”