Like many my age, I remember the movies, the GE Theater, the speech at the 1964 Republican convention, the governor who turned California into a police state — and the president.

In my first presidential election as a journalist, I wrote a headline to reflect Reagan's drubbing of Jimmy Carter: "Reagan wins in landslide."

Reagan's pledge to cut back government's role in helping the needy and less fortunate, in effect calling for a retreat in the war on poverty, was not good news in Appalachia. But what appealed to voters was his idea that pruning government would nip inflation in the bud and create a new prosperity.

With American hostages still in Iran and the growing vision of Carter as a softy, voters wanted a tough guy who wouldn't take any crap from Muslim fundamentalists or from Leonid Brezhnev.

A common political cartoon of the day would have Carter and Brezhnev peering at each other across a summit table. The diminutive president would be seated on a pile of Bibles so he could see over the tabletop at the hulking, bear-like Soviet leader, who would be shouting, "You're going to kick my what?"

Americans decided they didn't want a president who tried to use his Christian principles to rule. You couldn't turn the other cheek in the real world, where there were evil empires and heathens.

In the first years of Reagan's presidency, inflation eased while the unemployment rate climbed. David Stockton's "trickle-down" economics were taking a while to reach the people.

I remember the concern in 1982 as each month the jobless rate went up until finally it hit double digits. Plants were closing in the Midwest and Reagan's shift of federal money from social programs, health and the environment to the military was putting countless people dedicated to helping others out of work.

The first AIDS patients were identified in 1981. Reagan didn't say the word publicly until 1987. Locally, toxic dumps were identified in Sidney in 1981 but weren't placed on the Superfund list until 1987.

The plan was to fulfill the president's philosophy that people should take care of themselves, not wait for government to do it. Unfortunately, that doesn't always work in a society whose highest goal is the limitless acquisition of wealth.

But the economy was improving by the election of 1984, so Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro never had a chance. In fact, they won in only four cities in New York state: New York City, Buffalo, Ithaca and, yes, Oneonta. So it seemed quite natural that you could find a visible opposition to Reagan's twisted foreign policy on the streets of the "City of the Hills."

The United States under Reagan supported and armed fundamentalist factions in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Saddam's worst atrocities were committed on Reagan's watch, and he did nothing and Americans heard little about them.

But it was the president's policies in Central America that drew the most criticism.

We financed and aided the brutal military-led regimes in El Salvador and Honduras and did the same with the opposition in Nicaragua, the Contras. I can remember the wonderful spoof of President Reagan played by John Sullivan in Dick Siegfried's street theater, which illustrated our Central American policies for downtown audiences.

Many people are familiar with Oliver North and the Iran-Contra arms scandal. Other excesses of Reagan's policies in Central America are not as well-known, perhaps, because their perpetrators, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams and National Security Adviser John Poindexter were pardoned by President Bush I.

Both Abrams and Poindexter have resurfaced in the administration of President Bush II, as have Donald Rumsfeld, John Negroponte, Richard Perle and others from the Reagan era.

To his credit, Reagan was open to the desire by new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War standoff so he could have the resources to open Russia to social change.

Even though both countries had the weapons to destroy the world hundreds of times and first-strike policies, they backed off from the brink.

I don't know how many times this week I've heard news commentators say that President Reagan's biggest accomplishment was to make people feel good about America again — after the psychic bruises from Vietnam, Nixon/Watergate, oil prices, inflation and the Iran hostages.

But he didn't make everybody feel good. In fact, his approval ratings averaged barely above 50 percent throughout his two terms. Let's not get carried away with greatness.

Maybe, in our apparent need to find a president who we find credible and venerable, we are being as forgetful as Reagan was in the last years of his presidency.

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Cary Brunswick is managing editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at (607) 432-1000, ext. 217, or cary@thedailystar.com.