 Well, thank you very much. Thank you all. Ladies and gentlemen, and Eureka students who are here and President Hearn, and I can't tell you all of you who are here on behalf of the scholarships that were named in my honor, and to think it was my belief that I'd reached the pinnacle when the 1931 prism commended me for managing the committees in charge of homecoming. I sure wish I could remember just what it was I did. There's a few committees up on Capitol Hill that I'd like to do a little managing with. And then I felt sure that I had reached the pinnacle back in 1955 when I was given a Eureka College centennial citation. Now, it was Eureka's centennial, not mine. And then I was certain that I'd reached the absolute pinnacle in 1957 when Eureka granted me an honorary degree. And as I said at that time, I was grateful for the honor, except that it compounded a sense of guilt I'd been nursing for 25 years. I always figured the first one they gave me was honorary. But I'll tell you, these Reagan scholarships really are the pinnacle. And a big part of the reason they mean so much to me is that they're a way of giving something back to Eureka, giving something back to a college that has given so much to so many. A few permit me moments of nostalgia here. The Eureka story has always been one that I enjoyed telling. A story so American it began with a wagon train traveling west across the prairie. The leader of that wagon train was Ben Major. And I believe his descendants still live there in Eureka. Ben stopped the wagons in central Illinois. And that's where they decided they were going to land. And he sank his axe into a tree there and said, this is where we will build our school. And believe it or not, Ben and his fellow pioneers believe so deeply in the importance of education that they built the school even before they completed their own homes. Walnut Grove Academy it was called for some years. And then Eureka College. And there's another part of the story. I think Eureka comes from the Greek. I may be wrong on that. But at that period, it had become a kind of a slang expression like so many that we have, which the, and what it meant was if you really thought of something in a discussion, you'd say Eureka. And then he said, what, what? You tell them what you thought of. And they decided that Walnut Grove Academy had now reached the stature of it was going to be a college. And they decided to change the name. And as they were all said, someone said, what would the name be? Someone said Eureka. Well, they said, yes, what? He said, Eureka. And that's how it happened. But that deep belief in the life of the mind, that willingness to put education first has always remained at the center of the Eureka tradition. Consider, if you will, my own class. The class of 32 has no yearbook to record its final days on campus. You see, the junior class, do they still do it? That way the junior class produces the prism, the yearbook. And at that time, when we were seniors, the class of 33, the junior class was unable to put out a prism because of the hardships of the Great Depression. But throughout that Great Depression, Eureka went right on putting education first, making it possible for young men and women, including the young Ronald Reagan to go through college, even though we were almost totally without funds. As for the faculty, they sometimes in that period went on for months, on end, without pay. It was just a few years ago that I received a letter from the daughter of my English professor, Professor Tom Wiggins, in which she said that during the Depression, her family ate canned salmon, spinach, and baked beans night after night. The college had an arrangement with the Happy Hour canning factory in Bloomington, which she said allowed us to order canned goods since no salaries were being paid during that time. We also received dairy products from the college farm. Well, some of the college's endowment in that period may be still, were farms. She concluded she said I was too young to be aware then, but the entire community must have pitched in to save Eureka College. And it did. The merchants in the town carried people on the books as with faith that things would turn out all right. Well, I was old enough to remember, and that's just what happened. For years, an entire town made sacrifices to save one little college. People of that town had an abiding faith in education, and yes, in the future of young Americans and of America herself. And now in supporting these scholarships, you here today are expressing that same faith, that faith in education, that faith in the future of our nation, and yes, that faith in a little college in central Illinois. You know, I didn't always study as hard at Eureka as I might have. Football and student drama kept my grades short of average, or sort of average, I should say, in there among the B minuses and the Cs. I wondered ever since about how far I might have been able to go if I'd only had better grades. But the truth is, I owe everything to Eureka. That college believed in me enough to give me a chance. They also gave me one of the best jobs I've had in my life too while I was working my way through. I washed dishes in the girl's dormitory. But to join you in giving something back to the college, or to have you joining me in that, well, my friends, it means more than I can say. And of course, I'm especially pleased that we have with us today some Eureka students who graduated very recently, as recently as last Saturday. I know you want to join me in congratulating these wonderful young people, the first Reagan scholarship winners, to complete their four years at Eureka. Thank you, and God bless you all. And now, I'm going to go right down through the hall here and into the blue room, where I'll have the chance to meet each one of you personally. And at the same time, I think we'll have pictures taken of us. But again, it's just so wonderful to have you all here. And are you lucky that I have to move on and do that, because I can just feel warm nostalgia. I could start college stories that wouldn't stop right about this time. But God bless you all for being here, and I'll go down and get in front of the fireplace, and see you all in a minute.