Brockport's connection
to the late President Ronald Reagan

She was a three-year-old girl standing amidst a throng of adults who were anxiously waiting to meet Ronald Reagan - she was much too young to know who he was or what was going on but the man who would go on to be president singled Laurie Gurnett out of the crowd for a bit of a conversation.

Gurnett said that she was at her grandparents' house on College Street the day actor Ronald Reagan came to tour Brockport's GE plant in the late 1950s. The late former president was a performer on GE Theater, a popular television program of the time. "My grandparents heard he was coming and apparently they thought it would be fun to go down and see him," Gurnett said. "I was standing there in my plaid rummage sale coat with all of these ladies who were dressed in their furs and Mr. Reagan just stooped down to talk to me."

It was sometime after that, Gurnett said, that a friend told her parents there was a picture in one of the shops on Main Street, that had been snapped by a local photographer. "It was perfectly me and him standing on the steps at the Roxbury Restaurant," she said.

When Ronald Reagan went on to be elected president, Gurnett sent him two copies of the photograph and asked if he wanted to keep one and if he would autograph the other for her. He complied with her request.

Gurnett said that the unsigned photo of the two of them has been in a silver frame on the mantel for many years and that the signed copy is "somewhere" in the house. The autographed copy has also made its way into one of the local history books written by Eunice Chesnut for the Morgan Manning House.

Former President Ronald Reagan died June 5, 2004.