For many in the Tristate, Ronald Reagan is a heroic figure, who awakened their pride in America and inspired them to a life in politics. For others, the former president, who turns 90 today, was a bane to their existence, a frustratingly popular president whose conservative vision they did not share.

        How people looked at Ronald Reagan depended on their angle of view.

        For U.S. Rep. Rob Portman, R-Cincinnati, the angle was from a balcony overlooking the foyer of the Executive Office Building in Washington in December 1980, after Mr. Reagan's election but before he took office.

        Mr. Portman was 25 years old and one of the young staffers of a joint presidential-congressional commission on immigration that had gathered for a glimpse of the president-elect as he visited the executive offices.

        “I remember him coming in, wearing a brown

        suit, with this wide, marvelous grin on his face,” Mr. Portman recalled.

        “A lot of the staffers were Democrats; I knew they had no use for Reagan,” Mr. Portman said. “But all he had to do was walk in that room full of these dour bureaucrats who were ready to boo him and they all cheered.”

        It was the first time Mr. Portman laid eyes on Mr. Reagan and it taught him something about politics — that a politician could be a serious person and have a personality as well.

        Greg Vehr, who is now the University of Cincinnati's chief lobbyist, is another Cincinnatian whose youth was influenced by the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.

        He was a 19-year-old student at Miami University when Mr. Reagan, a few months after beginning his first term, was shot and wounded in an assassination attempt outside a Washington hotel.

        “I remember being very shook up,” Mr. Vehr said. “I had a test that day and I went and told the professor that there was no way I could focus on that today; I was too upset. And I said I'd take the consequences, even if that meant I'd flunk the course. But I couldn't do it.”

        As it turned out, the professor let him wait a day to take the exam and Mr. Vehr — inspired by Mr. Reagan — went on to a career in Republican politics before taking the UC job, working as an aide to then-Cincinnati Councilman Steve Chabot, executive director of the Hamilton County Republican Party and chief of staff to Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

        “It was the fact that Ronald Reagan came along and made this country feel good about itself again that really pushed me towards politics,” Mr. Vehr said. “When Ronald Reagan was in the White House, you felt a new strength; you felt proud to be an American.”

        But the Reagan years are seen more darkly by some, such as Dan Radford, executive secretary-treasurer of the Cincinnati AFL-CIO.

        The Reagan years, Mr. Radford said, were “dark days” for labor.

        It started in the first year of Mr. Reagan's presidency, when Mr. Reagan ended a strike by air traffic controllers by firing them all and breaking their union.

        What Mr. Reagan did to the air traffic controllers, Mr. Radford said, “changed the whole philosophy of many companies that didn't like us but had always been willing to work with us.”

        “After that, they looked around and decided that if Ronald Reagan could break a union, so could they,” Mr. Radford said. “Reagan gave them the green light.”

        As a result, labor's membership and influence in politics plummeted and has never fully recovered.

        Mr. Chabot, the congressman from the 1st District whose entry into politics coincided with the rise of Ronald Reagan, said he believes Mr. Reagan will be remembered as a great president “because he restored the American people's faith in themselves.”

        Mr. Reagan's tax cut in the early 1980s, Mr. Chabot believes, triggered a boom in the economy “that lasted for decades.”

        “Clinton and the Congress tried to take credit for the good economy, but you can trace it all the way back to Ronald Reagan,” Mr. Chabot said. “History will remember that.”

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