Pipe Dream is celebrating its 60th year as Binghamton University’s independent student newspaper. It started as the Colonial News in fall 1946, and has been going strong twice a week ever since. So we’re taking a look back into the paper’s archives, at the people and events that have made the news over BU’s past 60 years.

Tuesday, Sept. 11, 1984:

City and Students Prepare for Reagan’s Visit Tomorrow

A day before President Ronald Reagan was scheduled to speak at Union-Endicott High School as part of his 1984 presidential re-election campaign tour, Pipe Dream reported on security measures and protest plans for the event. The security for his visit was considered at the time to be “the most intensive … ever undertaken in the area.”

The president was also scheduled to take a tour of the IBM plant in Endicott, a stop that would tie in to the theme of his speech: the shift in American industry to the production of technology.

Reagan, who went on to win re-election that year with 59 percent of the vote, was expected to draw around 500 protesters from the Progressive Action Network, a collection of activist groups from campuses across the country, as well as from area residents and several labor union leaders.

“Reagan’s cuts in social spending, his increasing militarization of U.S. foreign policy and his administration’s discrimination against minorities, are some of the causes for concern among the group’s members,” the paper published in 1984.

Joan McCarton, a graduate student speaking on behalf of the Progressive Action Network, urged people to attend Reagan’s visit and to protest.

“It’s important for people to be there … [t]o make a statement about people who are left behind in Reagan’s America,” she said, “people who have been excluded from the benefits of any recovery.”