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Thursday, February 03, 2000 Page: 4
Horace Gunster of Wilkes-Barre will celebrate his 94th birthday on
Saturday, Feb. 6. He shares his birthday with former President Ronald Reagan,
whom he met Oct. 1, 1984 when Reagan came to Wilkes-Barre during his campaign
for re-election.
For 15 years, the two men exchanged birthday greetings, and Gunster has
carefully preserved a scrapbook full of letters and cards he received from the
president.
“I hope that your special day was one of happiness and good cheer,”
Reagan wrote to Gunster in March 1984.
“Maybe I’m partial, but I’ve always thought it was a great day to be
born,” he wrote in 1986.
In 1988, the president wrote “I hope that your celebration, like mine, was
blessed with happiness and the warm presence of those you love.”
Throughout his scrapbook, Gunster has included bits of information about
the former president, such as his preference for lemon cake with white icing
and the fact that his inauguration days were noteworthy for extremes of
temperature. The mercury reached 56 degrees on Reagan’s first inauguration day
in 1981 and only 7 on his second inauguration day in 1985.
Gunster, a retired worker from Harris Hardware in Kingston, enjoys
traveling to visit his five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. He has
recently accumulated 26,000 flight miles.