During the Reagan years, I taught Special Education at a middle school in Carson, California, part of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Although my students had certain learning disabilities, they were not mentally handicapped, but were of average to better intelligence who just had something that kept them from grasping various school subjects and were behind their peers in achievement.

My job was to find ways for them to get around what was limiting them, and get them educated.

One example was teaching them Algebra simply by teaching a math game where by following certain rules they could find the missing number. They were good at it.

Eventually they found they had been fooled into learning a branch of math they had been told they were too stupid to be able to learn, and were very proud of themselves that they had proved people wrong.

One time, going through a storage closet near the school library, I found an unused video camera, one of those cameras that in the 80s was considered compact but now could be used as an end table, and got the principal’s permission to use it in my classroom. With it I got my kids to improve their writing as they needed to come up with scripts; increase their ability to work in groups as they were part of the cast or production crew and had to follow directions and work as a team; and got them reading more about the world around them as they needed to find ideas for videos.

My students eventually became the inspiration for a district wide contest involving the use of video in the classroom as a learning tool, either in production or viewing, and became the case study to justify to the state government in Sacramento why the Los Angeles school district’s television production facility should continue to receive funding.

One day, I decided to teach a complicated lesson.

I had been explaining satire and the author’s pleasure in pulling something over on an audience who thought they were fully grasping the message they were actually missing as it was the opposite, even if the author was the only one who knew what was going on, a personal inside joke.

I had also explained to the students that even though they and those around them may think they were of no consequence, if they took the initiative, they could actually promote themselves to a point beyond what they and others assumed was as far as they could go.

Nancy Reagan had just come out with her “Just Say No” campaign which the two students who had been placed in my class because their involvement with dealing drugs had resulted in some time in a juvenile center that had kept them out of school for a number of months and behind their peers, found to be cute, but would prove ineffective as, if someone had refused their offering, they would just go sell it to someone else more willing to buy it.

Just saying no simply moved the food cart to a different location.

The inspiration for many of our long and short videos were objects in the room, and I had recently bought an inflatable punching bag in the toy section of a local Target that had a molded plastic cartoonish head of Ronald Reagan on it. During our brainstorming session for ideas, the students came up with the idea to do an anti-drug PSA based on “Just Say No”, using the punching bag as a prop and the two “reformed” drug dealers as the heroes.

It would combine current events with satire, and, if we sent a copy to the White House and got a response it would elevate the standing of my students in the eyes of the school and their peers.
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And so it was that we made a video of a student who should have passed a test but failed to do so because a drug he took negatively affected his performance on that test, and ended it with the class gathered around the punching bag that was dressed in a suit and sitting in a desk as if Ronnie himself was in the room, with the kids signing off by yelling, “Just Say No”.

We mailed a copy of the VHS tape to the White House, not really expecting a response.

Months went by.

Then one day a letter from the White House addressed to my class arrived at the school.

Since it was an official White House envelope, everyone in the school office was curious, and word spread that the White House had written to my class, and, as I had explained to my class, suddenly they were extremely important people because they had manufactured what had created that importance.

At a designated time, and with curious guests in the classroom, like the school’s administrative staff, some secretaries, and teachers on their planning period, I opened the envelope and read the letter to my class who knew that even though they had not been sincere in their video, the person who viewed it praise them for making it.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that when we discussed current events in Social Studies class I did not hold back on my opinions of the events of the day and the people involved. My students would often throw in what was said at home about the same, and the opinions of my students, and apparently their families, were similar to mine when it came to the Reagans, especially Nancy who always seemed starry eyed to them as if she was on one of the drugs she should have said “no” to.

After I read the letter aloud to my class and those who had come from the office for the “official” unsealing of the envelope and the reading of its content, I passed the letter around so the class could read it themselves.

They handled it with great reverence as it bore the real signature of Nancy Reagan, and, as it made its way from desk to desk, one student held it for a moment, turned it upside down, pulled it close to his eyes, and then started laughing.

It struck him that Nancy Reagan’s signature, when looked at upside down, began with the word “nobody”, and the student saw the upside down Nancy part as “home”.

As the letter continued around the room the initial reverence that it was met with as it changed hands became laughter as the subsequent viewers all agreed that Nancy Reagan’s signature when turned became “Nobody Home”.

From that point on, that is how my students referred to Nancy Reagan.

Or,