Ronald Reagan at 100

In addition to kicking off Superbowl XLV, today marks what would've been Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday

Being a young kid growing up in a Western New England hill town, I didn't follow politics that closely and for most of his first term, all I knew about Reagan was that he used to be an actor, survived an assassination attempt, punctuated his sentences with 'well...', and the liberal academia in the nearby college towns absolutely hated the man.

The second term was a little different because as I grew older, I became increasingly worried about Communism and the USSR. I mean honestly- who would want to actually live under such a dehumanizing system, let alone subject millions of other people to it?

Instead of accommodating the Soviets, Reagan (along with British PM Margaret Thatcher, Poland's Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II) would frequently challenge them, most notably in his June 1987 speech at Brandenburg Gate in a then-divided Berlin, Germany in which he urged Soviet Premier Gorbachev to 'Tear down this wall!'.

Indeed, the wall fell a little over two years later and the Soviet Union's Warsaw Pact effectively crumbled, with many of its former nations joining NATO a decade later. The Soviet Union itself would last another two years before breaking up after an unsuccessful coup.

Ronald Reagan passed away in June 2004 at the age of 92 in his Bel Air, CA home.