The fall of the Berlin Wall was indeed a watershed in the collapse of the Soviet Empire, yet one could argue the true death knell came two months before at a small grocery store in Clear Lake, Texas.

Jillian Melchior of the Wall Street Journal reports from the front lines of the protests.

On June 12, 1987, then-President Ronald Reagan was in a limousine on the way to give a speech at the base of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin. While this gate had originally been commissioned by King Frederick William II of Prussia and had been built some two centuries earlier as an entranceway to an avenue leading to the palace, for decades prior to Reagan’s visit the sealed gate had become a symbol of the Berlin Wall that epitomized the division of Germany into two separate countries.

Scraps of paper matter, from red poppies to international treaties.