My first exposure to Ronald Reagan was at governors’ conferences in the 1970s.

Hard as it may be to believe, he was not popular with his peers. He arrived late for everything and was regarded by other governors as a scene-stealer, because the minute he’d enter a room, the press would rush to his side, he being the most colorful and quotable of the bunch. He was always surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards who made sure strangers didn’t get too close.

Then-Gov. Dan Evans was not an admirer of Ronald Reagan then although he later came to appreciate and admire him. He says so anyway. Evans supported Gerald Ford in 1976 and was one of the prominent Republicans to ask Reagan in writing to withdraw his candidacy. Reagan declined. A December 1975 poll showed him leading Ford. I attended the 1976 GOP convention in Kansas City and witnessed one of the most spine-tingling events in my political history.

It was the last night. Ford had given his acceptance speech, as had his running mate, Bob Dole, whom he chose despite predictions by many, including me, that a Ford-Reagan ticket would have a better chance against Carter-Mondale. Reagan had sent a handwritten note to his California delegation prior to the selection of Dole that “There is no circumstance whatsoever under which I would accept the nomination for vice president. This is absolutely final!”

I regarded the letter as face saving, and I was proven right when Reagan said later that not only would he have accepted, he let that be known to top Ford advisers. The call never came. I was told by a top Republican it was feared that if Reagan was veep, Ford would be assassinated by Reagan fanatics so Ford picked Dole.

But Reagan’s support was needed to win the election so they threw him the bone of inviting him to be the final speaker on that final night. Beaten but still defiant, Reagan gave what sounded like the speech he intended to give if he had been nominated for president. It was a rip-roaring call to arms that brought the delegates out of their seats, cheering and weeping.

You could see it, you could feel it, a welling up of emotion as they suddenly realized they’d nominated the wrong man. The Fords, the Doles, the Nelson Rockefellers stood, frozen faced, on the platform as the rest of the room went crazy. It was too late, of course, to do anything now, and Ford, thanks to his compassion in pardoning Nixon, was never elected president.

Reagan, incidentally, was savagely attacked after he became president, for naming the disgraced Nixon to represent the U.S. at the funeral of Anwar Sadat in 1981.

And if you think the political cartoons of today are venomous, look at some newspapers of the 1980s. Reagan was portrayed as a doddering old wreck (he was 69 when elected), staggering along on a cane or huddled in a shawl, looking like Dick Tracy’s Pruneface. Letters to the editor frequently called him a senile old fool, an old liar and a dirty lying, old crook. Always “old.”

When he asked Americans during the winter holidays of 1981-82 to put a lighted candle in a window as a symbol of support for the Poles, someone’s house burned down and Reagan was blamed for it. When friends of the Reagans gave Nancy an expensive set of china for the White House, letter writers bitched that the money should have gone to needy students. When Nancy got a dog in 1987, the public carped that pay for its upkeep would care for a few street people.

Obviously, a lot of people still loved the Gipper, and even his enemies admitted that he was hard to hate. My favorite Reagan story that I heard him tell was about the time he was in the hospital for something or other and dropped a glass of water on the bathroom floor, breaking it. Instead of calling someone, the president of the U.S. got down on his hands and knees and cleaned up the mess himself. He’d made it. It was his duty to clean it up.

They used to play the theme from “Superman” during campaign rallies as he entered or left a room. In bringing the Soviet Union to its knees, he made it come true.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, WA., 98340.).