by Anne Edwards
On this day, September 12, 1941, World War II was two years old, and although America had remained neutral, most of Europe had been overrun by the Nazis and England was suffering an almost nightly blitz from the German air force. Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in his wheelchair in the Oval Office of the White House preparing for an unprecedented third term, struggling with the burden of operating a vast peaceable democracy in a war-gripped world, trying to hold together his now sagging social-welfare program. But in Hollywood the war in Europe still seemed distant. If not riding high, American films were at least charged with a new vitality. Gone With the Wind’s recent grand success had proved that Americans were caught up in their own history. And although movie audiences had responded well to English stars during the previous decade, Hollywood had developed its own stables.
“Reagan was at Warner Brothers, where Bette Davis was champion and other players, such as Errol Flynn, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Humphrey Bogart, and James Cagney, jockeyed for top scripts and roles that would bring them into the winners’ circle. Below them were the contract players, who were closely watched over by the studio in hopes that one or two might break through and exhibit top-class potential. Reagan had been in this last group for four years and had been given leads only in B films and supporting roles in a few A films. But he had recently made a low-budget picture, International Squadron (to be premiered in Dixon on the tour), thought by executives at Warners to have great potential. He had also completed major scenes on an A film—Kings Row—and the rushes had looked encouragingly good. For years, Warners had not believed an audience would buy a ticket expressly to see Ronald Reagan in a movie. He had to be, more or less, packaged—either in a supporting role in a feature that starred one of their more popular players, or as a lead in a programmer (a picture that was made as a second feature to accompany the studios’ A films—usually those that needed all the help they could get). Louella Parsons’s columns were read by millions and her power to thrust a player into the forefront of the movie fans’ attention was phenomenal. Therefore, Reagan and the studio readily agreed he should accompany her on this tour to their small hometown, Dixon, Illinois.
Nine years had elapsed since Reagan had lived in Dixon. Despite his celebrity status, returning would not be easy for him, for wherever he turned he would be reminded of some of the more unhappy problems of his youth—the tough times, his father’s drinking, the girl he had loved and lost. Yet, this was the town that he felt had formed him. His ties to it were strong. Perhaps some force other than coincidence had guided his return at a critical time of reassessment.
The train was due to arrive in Dixon at ten-thirty A.M. on Sunday, September 14. Reagan spent the last hours of the journey with his eyes steady on the Midwest farmlands that bordered the railroad tracks. As a young boy he had watched the chicken hawks circling over the hen houses of Dixon’s outlying farms—the youngest chicks, white feathers coming through the soft yellow, never knew enough to hide, and the hawks would dive and snatch them up in their sharp beaks. The image was disturbing, for in spite of the urge, he was powerless to rescue or warn the chicks. When he grew a bit older and became a lifeguard at Lowell Park, some of this guilt had been assuaged. He had saved seventy-seven lives over the many seasons he worked at the park. People in Dixon respected him for that. Some of the younger kids had even made him a kind of hero. That’s what Dutch Reagan (as he was known in Dixon) really wanted. To be a hero. People remembered heroes.
Bill Thompson had been six years younger than Dutch Reagan, but Lowell Park’s only lifeguard had not treated the youngster with condescension. Dutch liked kids, and at fifteen he found their admiration for him a boon to his sometimes shaky ego. Thompson was to drive the returning Dutch around Dixon during Louella Parsons’s week-long celebration, and he could not wait until his childhood hero arrived. What kept coming to his mind was the great old log that used to sit by the lifeguard station at Lowell Park. It had been large enough for him to teeter on as a kid, his feet not touching the ground, as he watched Dutch take a bead on a bobbing figure struggling to keep afloat and screaming for help. Dutch would throw down his glasses and slash through the rough undertow like “a torpedo in the water” as he struck a straight course toward the distressed swimmer. People on the shore would cheer Dutch on and soon the long, lean teenager would have the drowning person securely in his strong grasp and be heading back to shore. Once there, he would perform artificial resuscitation. Then, when the formerly endangered swimmer had revived satisfactorily, Dutch would replace his glasses and carve a deep notch in the log that young Thompson had been balanced upon.
By the end of seven summers, Dutch Reagan had carved his seventy-seven notches in that log. A few skeptics hinted the young man might have slipped in a few extras, but all agreed that the river—”Dixon’s only outdoor swimming facility”—was a treacherous place because of the unexpected undertow. There had been a series of drownings, and the Park Authority had considered closing Lowell Park to swimmers before Dutch undertook the job no one else wanted, an act Dixonites considered of extreme courage.
After Dutch left Dixon, better safety precautions were instituted in the park—buoys were placed to mark off the dangerous areas, signs warned swimmers not to go beyond a certain point, and on days when the current was unduly swift, the river was closed to them. Still, boys played mumblety-peg on the old log with their pocket knives as the older men watching them bragged at seeing Dutch Reagan put in one of the notches. “On hot summer days,” one of them recalled, “old men would sit on it [the log], their hats in their hands, fanning themselves while the sun sparked the river and cast shadows on their faces.” They exchanged stories about Dutch Reagan too. Different ones. On Saturday nights, they had seen him come to the aid of his father—out cold or barely able to stand on his own after a night of hard drinking. They admired the boy’s attitude toward his alcoholic father. Dutch Reagan never publicly displayed anything but respect for Jack Reagan, and when success came to him (and even Hollywood substardom was looked upon as great success in smalltown Dixon) he made sure his dad—and his mom too—was right there to enjoy it with him.
One summer, high tides carried the log downstream and it disappeared. But by then the stories of Dutch Reagan’s bravery had reached mythic proportions. Dutch had become a wellknown actor and Dixonites could say, “I always knew he was going places.” Dutch believed this too. However, unlike his fellow hometowners, he already suspected that stardom in films might not be his final destination.
The terrain changed dramatically as the City of Los Angeles crossed the Iowa-Illinois border over one of the narrowest spans of the Mississippi and headed toward Dixon. The land loomed straight ahead, flat as the bottom of an old iron. Trees were scarce. During the Depression, Illinois farmers had needed every inch of their land and had planted crops to the edge of the railroad tracks and the highways, cutting down trees that had once given shade to farm laborers and foot travelers and a sense of life and beauty to the land. Too many of the local farms that had fallen under the auctioneers’ gavels in the thirties remained unattended in 1941, the paint peeling from their boarded-up buildings, their fields lying fallow. This did not embitter Dutch, for he had confidence that in Roosevelt’s third term prosperity would return fully to the land.
Dutch had a great belief in Mr. Roosevelt, who was his own contemporary hero. One of his best party imitations was a loving one of Franklin D. A select group of people in Hollywood realized the depth of his interest in politics—his wife, Jane Wyman, the actress, of course, the crews and actors on his films, and a few close friends. He had been too midwestern, too hick-town unsophisticated, to be accepted by Hollywood’s liberal intellectuals, and too prim a Sunday-church—type to travel with the macho, womanizing hard drinkers. His best friends were his golf buddies and conservative men like actor Dick Powell and businessman Justin Dart, with whom he enjoyed arguing politics. Lately, he had become more and more involved with unions and the rights of actors
, even while he favored cowboy films and read Zane Grey Westerns.
He liked to act, did the best he could, and recognized his own limitations. To his co-workers, he appeared to lack the ambition and dedication needed to be a great actor or even a top star. Those who did not know him judged him by the naive or brassy characters he generally portrayed onscreen and by his mediocre talent, and pretty much dismissed him. Those who knew him had recognized long before that Ronald Reagan’s true passion was politics. He kept at acting because it had not yet come to him what he really wanted to accomplish. At thirty years of age, he considered he still had time. Recently, he had seemed to Jane Wyman, his actress wife, to be devoured by something she could not define, when she heard him pacing the rooms of their apartment at night or discovered he had gone horseback riding alone in the early morning. She noted that he was a good deal more involved when working with the Screen Actors Guild than when shooting a film, and more enthusiastic about discussing world conditions and politics than about his current script.
The train creaked through the dry, hot morning; sun-drenched fields lay scorched between the shabby houses they separated. Thirteen of Dixon’s neighboring towns had declared September 14, 1941, “‘Louella Parsons Day’—a public holiday to give the folks a chance to attend the festivities.” The train crossed over small-town main streets; children waved and gaunt figures came out of luncheonettes or paused at gas pumps (the only businesses left open) to watch the celebrity train pass through.
About ten minutes before they reached Dixon, Sam Israel poked his head around Reagan’s door. “Louella wants you—now.” Reagan followed him to the last car. Parsons threw her arms around her fellow hometowner as he entered. “They’ve declared a school holiday just for ME!” she cried in a voice that was part rasp and part coo. “It’s a dream come true… I am going to break down and cry!”
“What,” he laughed as she pulled away. “And spoil that swell makeup?”
Not only was Dixon the town where she had attended school, it was where Parsons had worked at Geisenheimers Department Store as a salesperson in the corset department before being hired at five dollars a week by the Dixon Evening Telegraph. Parsons had thought “bitter thoughts many times” during her youth in Dixon, when it seemed to her “that not only my family but all the townspeople were amused and laughing because I wanted to be a writer.” Now, Dixon had accepted her generosity in helping raise funds for a Louella Parsons Children’s Ward to be built as an addition to Dixon’s Katherine Shaw Bethea Hospital. The funds, however, were not to come from her but out of the proceeds from a local banquet and tea to be held in her honor during her visit.
The high school band played a medley of patriotic pieces as the sleek City of Los Angeles slithered into Dixon’s North Western Station. Crowds waved banners and cheered from behind a rope barricade. Little Louella Oettinger Parsons (“You remember her? She used to think she was going to be a writer!”) disembarked and led her troop to a specially constructed wood platform. A curious expression flashed across her face. The majority of the banners declared WELCOME HOME DUTCH! As soon as he was visible, the cheer “We love Dutch!” could be heard above all the rest of the cacophony of welcome-home noise. Reagan waved back at his fans. Parsons was presented with a massive bouquet of American beauty roses as she stepped up to the microphone. “Thanks, thanks, thanks—” she began. News photographers and hundreds of candid-camera fans went into action. There was a loud cheer when Bob Hope was recognized as he sprang out of the station house, pushed through the crowd, jumped the barricade and hopped onto the platform, grabbing the microphone from her.
Pointing to a dilapidated hovel on the other side of the tracks, he announced, “Ladies and gentlemen—over there is the birthplace of your townswoman, Louella Parsons. Do you wonder that this glamour girl ablaze with orchids, dressed to the teeth, bedecked and bejeweled, wants to forget it? Do you wonder the little lady is overcome with emotion?” Parsons was not amused—although she forced a laugh. Hope handed her back the microphone. “This is an event, my old friends in Dixon, which I shall never forget,” she said. “I will remember this occasion as long as I live, and I know that Ronald will too.…” Cries of “We love Dutch” came up again and Parsons turned to Reagan and continued. “Good friends, Dutch Reagan—my boy of whom I am most proud, and who is the same today as he was when he left Dixon.”
The huge crowd (an estimated thirty-five thousand people*) shouted “We love Dutch” again as he stepped to the microphone battery. He raised his hand and they grew quiet. Parsons expected him to say a few words and step down. “I do not feel at ease on this platform,” he began in an even, melodious, boyishly humble voice, the color rising in his face to an endearing blush. “I would much rather be out at Lowell Park beach calling to the kids to quit rocking the raft and to the smaller ones to stay in the shallow water…” The crowd sent up a cheer and Reagan paused, smiling, seeming able to sense the right moment to continue. “When I stepped off the train I was greeted by a Dixon policeman and his star twinkled as he recalled that the last Dixon cop I had an experience with was the means of my paying a fine for shooting firecrackers off the Galena Avenue bridge.…” (Laughter and applause.)
“I want all of you to know that I did not sleep last night, thinking of my trip back to Dixon where I could meet my old friends. I counted the seventy-seven persons whom I have been credited with pulling out of Rock River at Lowell Park many times during the night.”
Jerry Colonna turned to Louella and quipped, “This fellow must be running for Congress!”
Parsons edged her way back to the microphone and Reagan’s side just as he confided to the audience, “It is with sincere regret that I am not able to present my wife, Mrs. Reagan, who in the movie world is known as Jane Wyman, but as you doubtless know, she submitted to an operation a few days ago [a curettage] and while her condition was not serious, the operation was necessary. When I left Hollywood she was crying because she could not accompany us on this trip.” Parsons leaned into the microphone and Reagan backed away.
“Well—thank you Ronnie and thank YOU—all of YOU—” A few moments later the publicity people hustled the celebrities into open-topped cars to lead the planned parade through town. Reagan insisted his mother ride with him.
“Hi, Dutch.” Bill Thompson grinned over his shoulder at his movie-star passenger. “Why, Bill, you old son of a gun.” Reagan pressed forward, grasped the man’s shoulders and took several minutes inquiring about his family and himself. To Thompson and many others present that day, Dutch Reagan was the real returning celebrity. Jerry Colonna was not too far off target. Reagan could well have run for Congress in this district and won. After all, he had been a local hero, a man of the people, humble with his success, a good son and a true-blue American.
* Dixon’s population was approximately eleven thousand in 1941. The crowds came from surrounding towns.
BEGINNINGS
1911-28
“Among the three or four million cradles now rocking in the land are some which this nation would preserve for ages as sacred things, if we could know which ones they are.”
—SAMUEL CLEMENS
November 14, 1879
2
DARK AND MUSCULAR, JOHN EDWARD (“JACK”) Reagan, Ronald’s father, was a dashing dresser who possessed a glib tongue, a great thirst for Irish whiskey and an enormous pride in his Irish-Catholic ancestry. The Reagans had come from Ireland to Illinois before the Civil War and had always taken care of their own members. The men were as well known for their intelligence and charm as for their manly vigor.
Jack’s grandfather—the first Reagan to arrive in America—was Michael Reagan (born O’Regan in 1829), the youngest of Thomas and Margaret O’Regan’s six children. The O’Regans lived in Doolis, a small impoverished village in the shadow of the Galtee Mountains in the barony of Iffa and Offa West in County Tipperary. Doolis was nothing more than a group of crude stone huts with dirt floors. Thomas O’Regan and his three son
s worked in the fields of a wealthy landowner. William O’Brien, a member of Parliament from North Cork in 1829, recorded a visit to Doolis, describing his horror at conditions and at seeing a Widow Conlon (a neighbor of the O’Regans): “a starved-looking and half-naked old woman barefooted and shivering with age and pain… the unfortunate creature had built [her cabin] herself of sods and bits of timber… fastened against the walls here and there to prevent it from falling to pieces. An iron pot was the entire furniture. There were stones for seats, a mound of wild plants for a bedstead. The approaches to the house were swimming in liquid manure and mud.”
At night, Doolis peasants kept any livestock they were fortunate enough to own inside their huts to protect them from being stolen, and slept on mud floors on straw or rushes, whole families and livestock often in the same room. They were permitted a small amount of the potatoes they grew, and these were the mainstay of their diet. Even this meager way of life could be threatened by the land baron if he decided to move the family out. The potato blight that began in 1845 and continued for three consecutive years resulted in great famine for the area. Those Doolis peasants who survived and could travel immediately emigrated to England and America. But the O’Regans did not because the women (Michael Reagan’s mother and three sisters) were in too weakened a condition to endure such a strenuous journey.
Education was normally out of the question for the potato farmers’ children. But Michael was bright and ambitious, and a teacher from nearby Ballyporeen took a fancy to him and surreptitiously taught him to read and write. At twenty-three, Michael ran off to London with a local colleen, Catherine Mulcahy (born 1830), the daughter of Patrick Mulcahy, a laborer.* They were wed on October 30, 1852, at St. George’s Roman Catholic Church. The registrar recorded the Irish spelling “Regan,” but Michael signed himself “Reagan,” taking on the English spelling of his name (the first syllable, however, would still have rhymed with sea or pea and the name pronounced the same). Catherine could only make a mark and was listed as illiterate. Three children were born to them in London: Thomas, May 15, 1853; John Michael, May 29, 1854 (to become Jack Reagan’s father); and Margaret, November 3, 1855 (who was eventually to raise Jack). They all were baptized in the Catholic church.
