Ronald Reagan statue, Boyhood Home, Dixon, Illinois

Dixon, Illinois — The Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home, at 816 S. Hennepin Avenue, adjoins this small park, centered around a bronze statue of Ronald Reagan holding corn kernels in his hand.The sculpture was a gift from Dwayne Andreas, chief executive officer of Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) of Decatur, Illinois. It was sculpted by Stan Efron of Innocast Execuline, and installed in October 1989. According to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, ADM has an identical statue at their corporate headquarters in Decatur.The six-and-a-half-foot statue of Reagan stands atop a 3-foot black marble base, so most visitors are not tall enough to see the corn kernels resting in Reagan’s left palm, but a brass plaque on the sculpture’s base reads as follows:

RONALD WILSON REAGAN

ERECTED IN 1988
AS A TRIBUTE TO PRESIDENT REAGAN.

ILLINOIS IS FAMOUS FOR IT S PRODUCTION
OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS; SO IT SEEMS
APPROPRIATE FOR HIM TO BE ADMIRING
THE KERNELS OF CORN IN HIS HAND.

On the plaque, you can tell that there originally was an apostrophe in the word “it’s.” Since the word is used in its possessive form, an apostrophe is incorrect.Apparently, someone aware of this mistake partially removed it.

The tendency of certain Republican politicians to misuse apostrophes was memorialized in Paul Slansky‘s hilarious 1989 book, The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American ’80s.