Mattingly: Large turnout touches Reagan family
SIMI VALLEY, California (CNN) -- Tens of thousands of mourners poured into the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library this week to participate in a public viewing of a casket bearing the body of the 40th president.
Reagan died Saturday at 93 at his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. He had battled Alzheimer's disease for a decade. CNN's David Mattingly reported Tuesday on the turnout at the Reagan library.
MATTINGLY: It was several hours before dawn this morning, a time when normally there isn't much traffic on the expressway. But we encountered a long line of stopped traffic. And strangely enough this was on the Ronald Reagan Freeway.
At that hour of the morning, way before dawn, it had become more or less the Ronald Reagan parking lot because the traffic just was not moving.
This was traffic that was backed up from people trying to get to Moorpark, California, the staging area where people are supposed to catch the buses to go up to the Reagan library in nearby Simi Valley.
This is just the first example we encountered today of this overwhelming show of public respect for the memory of President Ronald Reagan. When we first arrived on the scene, the line of people snaked its way through the parking lots here at the Moorpark College campus. The line did not seem to end because it wound back into the darkness.
There were people who had been there for seven hours standing in line. They had not anticipated that the line would move so slowly.
Some people were caught out in the cold night air. Some had to ask Red Cross workers who were on hand for blankets to keep themselves warm. Some people were not prepared to stand up for that period of time.
It really turned into an endurance contest, giving so many people a reason to say, "I'm not going to do this, and I'm going back home." But apparently not that many people did. There were easily 20,000 people here in line throughout Monday evening, and a similar number remains there now.
A representative for the Reagan family said that the family is deeply touched by this public show of support. It's greater than anything anyone had anticipated today.
They were at one time predicting that somewhere between 45,000 to 60,000 people would come out to visit the Reagan casket. But by dawn this morning, we had already passed the 40,000 mark. Add to that the 20,000 people who are still in line, and we are easily going to pass all expectations today.
One thing that I noticed here that really seemed to stand out was that there were so many families here, making this a family affair. Parents and grandparents old enough to have voted for Reagan or to have been a supporter of the Reagan administration -- they have an emotional attachment that they want to express here.
But at the same time, they want their children to participate in this as well so that their children will understand what Ronald Reagan meant to their parents and to their grandparents as they go through this together.
One young man I spoke to was born after Ronald Reagan left office in 1989 so he had no idea what life was like during the Reagan years, but he wanted to be out here today to be a part of history.
Once he went through and viewed the casket, he was talking about how solemn an occasion this was and what an emotional occasion this was. And he realized what Ronald Reagan meant to so many people.
