[DeltAlum]

There was some great stuff on NPR yesterday with a bunch of former Regan aides who had to go out and justify some of the stuff he said off the cuff.

No question that the man was the absolute consumate communicator. He was brilliant, but on occassion inadvertantly caused some raised eyelids.

Consensus was that he brought back stuff from the back of his mind, often from movies that he had made, and mentally turned them into reality for himself and then said them outloud.

One of the aides called them parables.

I don't remember many, but one was when he ad-libbed that more people were at risk from trees than cars pollution-wise.

The guy was a stitch to listen to. Generally very enjoyable. I think the right man for the job at that time.

The 1980 Republican Coronation -- oops, I mean convention, I was Senior Director at a TV station in Detroit, where the convention was held. We had a sky box news set and control room.

Legend was, that no nominee ever came to the podium until the exceptance speech. One afternoon, we were in the control room and heard that there was going to be a security sweep and everyone had to leave the building. But, for some reason, nobody every came to tell us when.

So we're sitting in the control room fat, dumb and happy, with nobody else apparantely in the building, when in comes Regan and his entourage, and he goes up to the podium and practices his acceptance speech.

So much for tradition.

So, we punched up the camera on the line back to the station and opened a microphone on the set and fed it back to the station, who used a few seconds of voice over for a live newsbreak a few moments later.

The big network boys were pretty amazed.