04/22/2026
"Circa the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan rode out each morning from the stables at Rancho del Cielo aboard one of his beloved horses, the Secret Service agents assigned to protect the 40th President of the United States faced a problem nobody at the agency had fully anticipated: his riding skills were so accomplished and his pace so vigorous that the Secret Service was forced to establish its own riding school specifically to keep up with him, a fact that delighted Reagan enormously and says everything about the kind of man he was. Born February 6th, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois, Reagan had been riding horses since his young adult years in Hollywood, where he appeared in numerous Westerns and developed a genuine, deeply personal passion for equestrianism that went far beyond any screen role. During his presidency he stabled seven horses at the ranch, including Quarter Horses, Peruvian Pasos, and Arabians, one of which, the magnificent El Alamein, was a gift from Mexican President Lopez Portillo and had been trained in the refined discipline of dressage. Every single morning at the ranch, Reagan would ring an old railroad bell outside the tack barn at around nine o'clock, signaling to Nancy that he had completed his presidential paperwork so they could take their daily ride together through the mountain trails, and in that one tender detail lives the entire soul of the man: disciplined enough to honor his duties, and wise enough to know that no briefing document ever written was worth more than an hour on horseback beneath a California sky. He said it himself, plainly and perfectly: it was easier to sort out problems on top of a horse. Everyone who watched him return from those rides, visibly lighter and unmistakably restored, knew with absolute certainty that he was speaking the purest truth. "
