Tampico embraces friendship with English city of Grantham

TAMPICO – A friendship forged in a 1980s mission to end the Cold War is seeing a revival of sorts, as the birthplaces of President Ronald Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher agree to work together, each to promote the other.

A month ago, Graham Jeal, the mayor of Grantham in Lincolnshire, England, approached Tampico Mayor Kris Hill with a proposal that the two towns, each of which has a museum devoted to their respective natives, establish a relationship.

Tuesday, their town councils voted to make such a relationship official.

The pairing between Grantham, population 45,000, and Tampico, a village of about 700, will mean increased cooperation between the Ronald Reagan Birthplace and Museum and the Grantham Museum to increase visitors.

Details still are being worked out, but what has been decided is that Jeal will visit the area in the first week in October, said Tampico native Sean Sandrock, now of Lyndon, a Reagan museum volunteer.

On Oct. 6, Jeal will tour the Reagan Boyhood Home in Dixon, then visit Eureka College, where Reagan graduated in 1932, and where Sandrock, who is leading the local effort, now studies law and vocal performance.

Jeal will spend Oct. 7 in Tampico, where a ceremony will be mark the new friendship.

On Oct. 9, he will fly to California to spend the day on the Reagan Ranch, northwest of Santa Barbara, which was the Reagans’ home for 25 years, and to visit the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, where the former president and first lady are buried.

Reagan was born in Tampico on Feb. 6, 1911, in an apartment above a bakery. He was a Republican governor of California from 1967 to 1975, and the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. He died June 5, 2004.

Thatcher was born and raised in Grantham, where her father Alfred, a grocer, was mayor from 1945 to 1946. She was the leader of the Conservative Party before becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. She died April 8, 2013.

The warm relationship between the two staunch political conservatives, who were closely united in their efforts to thwart the Soviet Union, was well documented.

It is, in fact, the subject of a new two-part BBC documentary, “Thatcher & Reagan: A Very Special Relationship.”

“Ronnie and Margaret were political soulmates, committed to freedom and resolved to end communism,” former first lady Nancy Reagan said upon Thatcher’s death.