President Reagan survived assassination try 25 years ago.

It was 25 years ago today that the recently inaugurated President Ronald Reagan was shot and seriously wounded outside a Washington, D.C., hotel, along with then-White House press secretary James Brady and a Secret Service agent.

His would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr. remains confined in Washington's St. Elizabeth's Hospital, soon to be 41 years old, and now, thanks to a federal judge's ruling last December, able to make some overnight visits to his parents.

The superstitious among us may remember that when Reagan -- the oldest man ever elected president -- survived to the end of his second term in 1989, it appeared that a thing called "Tecumseh's Curse" was broken.

Whether this was some urban legend hatched when not much of America was urbanized or an ex-post facto explanation of one of the creepier coincidences in American history, the "curse" goes like this:

Either the Indian leader Tecumseh or his brother (known as "The Prophet") pronounced doom on all presidents elected every 20 years in a year ending in zero.

It supposedly began with President William Henry Harrison who defeated Tecumseh's followers in the Battle of Tippecanoe and was elected president in 1840. Harrison died of pneumonia he supposedly caught on his Inauguration Day.

Then, like clockwork, every president elected in a zero-ending year died in office: Abraham Lincoln (1860), James Garfield (1880), William McKinley (1900), Warren G. Harding (1920), Franklin D. Roosevelt (1940) and John F. Kennedy (1960).

Until Ronald Reagan, who was elected in 1980.

Historians pooh-pooh the notion, but it is a little strange that the only other president besides those listed to die in office was Zachary Taylor, who was elected in 1848 and died of indigestion in 1850, according to Wikipedia.

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