by Anne Edwards
The Reagans moved into a five-room flat over a bakery on Main Street.* There were no toilet facilities. Few homes in Tampico had an indoor toilet, but many did have a bathroom with tub and sink. In the Reagans’ Main Street flat, the kitchen was used for this purpose and an outside pump supplied water. A treacherous stairway led from the dining room to the toilet around back. Water was heated on a coal-burning stove that was also a source of heat. The flat had two bedrooms with windows that overlooked the alley behind. Nelle used one as a sewing room, hoping one day to turn it into a nursery. Life was not easy for Nelle in Tampico in the early days, and “hauling coal to the second floor apartment for 3 stoves, carrying water up endless flights of stairs, struggling to keep tidiness without bathroom facilities and indoor toilets took its toll on [her].” Jack was not one to help much with household chores and divided his spare time between the local tavern and his interest in wrestling events.
Tampico (population 1,276 in 1910), about one-third the size of Fulton, was “pretty much all stores then—two drug, two hardware, two lumberyards, two [grain] elevators, two or three meat markets, two or three grocery stores, two barber shops, an opera house…” The railway that stopped at Tampico served mainly as a shipping and shopping center for neighboring farmers. No one was rich in Tampico, but no one starved or went without shoes in winter. Social life centered around school or church activities. Patriotic holidays were occasion for picnics and firework displays. The community was fairly cohesive and its residents shared similar educational and economic backgrounds. Very few had gone past grade school. Most had never traveled as far as Chicago and considered nearby Dixon and Fulton—which were an equidistant twenty-six miles—an excursion.
On September 16, 1908, the Reagans’ first son, John Neil, was born at home. Father Defore from the Catholic church came to pay the new mother a visit. ‘“It’s time, Nellie, to baptize the baby,’“ Neil Reagan reports his mother told him the priest said.
“T’m still trying to make up my mind, Father,’ she replied.
“And Father Defore said, ‘You don’t have any choice, Nellie, you promised to bring up the children as Catholic when you were married to Jack in Fulton.’
“And she said, ‘No, I didn’t. Nothing was mentioned about that.’
“And the priest turned to my dad, and said, ‘Jack, Nellie says nothing was told to her about bringing the children up Catholic. Why is that?’
“Jack snapped his fingers and said, ‘Father, I completely forgot! The priest who married us* told me right after the ceremony that he had forgotten to tell Nellie, and I told him not to worry about it, that I would tell her. I’ve never thought a thing about it until this very moment!’“
John Neil was baptized, and Nelle and Jack made a pact. Their children would be raised Catholic, but at an age when they could think for themselves they were to have a free choice. The Bible had always been Nelle’s companion and she was drawn to the Christian Church,† which derived all its beliefs from the New Testament and was an offshoot of the Presbyterian Church. Their belief was in unity among all Christians and they followed “the primitive and simple gospel.”
On Easter, March 27, 1910, Nelle was received into the Christian Church of Tampico, professing her faith in Christ. Not long after, she became pregnant for the second time. “One of the worst blizzards occurred late Sunday [February 5],” the Tampico Tornado reported on February 6, 1911. “After the wind and snow had spent its fury, the snow was ten inches to a foot on the level and drifted badly making the highways nearly impassable.” Nelle was in hard labor and having a difficult time, and Jack feared for her life. Neil was sent downstairs to stay with the neighbors. Jack managed to make his way to Dr. Terry’s house, but the doctor was on another call. Jack then tracked through the snow to the house of Mrs. Roy Rasine, the local midwife, and brought her back to help Nelle deliver. The birth was difficult and long. Finally Dr. Terry arrived and the child’s squeals and screams filled the small bedroom. Jack Reagan peered closely at his second son, who the doctor had just informed him would be Nelle’s last child.
“For such a little bit of a Dutchman, he makes a hell of a lot of noise, doesn’t he?” he commented.
“I think he’s perfectly wonderful,” Nelle said weakly. “Ronald Wilson Reagan.”
The next day the Tornado announced, “Jack Reagan has been calling 37 inches a yard and giving 17 ounces for a pound this week at Pitney’s store; he has been feeling so jubilant over the arrival of a 10 pound boy Monday.”
Jack continued to brag about his “fat little Dutchman” (a term chosen because of the child’s robust appearance) and so “Dutch” was what the child was nicknamed and most often called.
(Neil relates that he remained downstairs for several days before he was told, “Now you can go home and see your baby brother… for two days after I was home I would not go in the room where my brother and my mother were. I didn’t want any part of a brother. I had been promised a sister by my mother and father. That’s all I wanted. I guess that shows you early in life I determined not to be queer [laughter]. I was strictly a girl man.”)
Three months after Ronald Wilson Reagan’s birth, his family moved to a small white-frame structure (known as the Burden House) across from a park that was distinguished by a Civil War cannon and a seventeen-foot memorial column with a statue of a Union soldier atop. Burden House had been built in the 1870s, but the bungalow had an indoor toilet and modern plumbing. The house was also near the railroad tracks. One day when Dutch was about eighteen months old, he toddled after Neil, who had plans to take some ice from a wagon parked on the other side of the tracks. The two crawled beneath a train that was stopped in the station just moments before it lurched into motion. Nelle watched “horrified from the front porch of the house until she saw them emerge [from the other side] safely.”
Leaving Fulton had not ended the problems caused by William Reagan’s drinking. He became gravely ill in 1912, a result of his alcoholism, and suffered such intense delirium tremens that his mind was affected. Fearing that William might do harm to himself or others, Jack filed a petition in 1914 to have his brother declared insane. The authorities rejected the request. (Neil comments that “[William] really went off the track with his drinking, over a girl… he had hoped to marry, but she jilted him. He never recovered.”)*
By now, Nelle was active in the Christian Church. More important, the church’s doctrine had had a strong effect on her. She attended prayer meetings with both children every Wednesday and Sunday nights. Sunday mornings, the boys were taken to Sunday School. (“In between all the churchgoing,” Neil said, “I had to run an important errand every Sunday for Dad; it was to fetch a nickel’s worth of beer from the local saloon.”) Within a short time, Nelle had developed into a visiting disciple, helping anyone she knew who was in distress or moral confusion, praying with or for them, taking more and more time away from her family to help others. She remained close to her sister Jennie, who lived in nearby Coleta. Christmas holidays were spent together with Jennie and her family, traveling by bobsled and teams to Tampico where the children played tag and fox and goose in the snow.
“I can remember,” Neil says, “when we were little kids in Tampico, and I can remember very vividly [one Christmas]… my mother saying, ‘What do you fellas want for Santa Claus to bring you?’ I had only one thing: ‘I want an electric train.’ Now that was the furthest from the family budget, even though they probably didn’t cost very much in those days. My mother then started the campaign that maybe Santa Claus didn’t have electric trains, you know. Every day, some way or another, she’d get around to the subject, trying to soften the blow when I got up Christmas morning and there was no electric train.
“The night before Christmas, boy, we [Dutch and Neil] heard the whees and laughing and all the noise. We sneaked part way down the stairway and looked across into the parlor (we had a living room, and then we had a parlor) where the Christmas tree was, and here’s Jack with the train al
l set up on the track. It’s going around the track—the engine, one car, and this caboose is going around this track, and he’s getting a bigger kick out of it than I was getting. We didn’t dare let them know we saw it.”
Neither parent was ever demonstrative toward their sons. Neil could recall no physical contact except for an occasional spanking. But Jack was a softer touch when it came to giving in to one or the other of the boys’ strong wishes, even if it meant no meat on the table for a week or two to pay for it. And to please Nelle, he did join her drama group, which had space above the bank in a building called the Opera House. Jack loved to dance, but acting was another matter. Still, he appeared with Nelle in The Dust of the Earth, a play that required a dying child. Nelle carried Neil onstage, his face painted with calcimine to make him look ghostly.
In January 1914, President Woodrow Wilson approved the landing of U.S. Marines in Veracruz in retaliation for the arrest of U.S. sailors in Tampico, Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution. Nothing as dramatic was taking place in Tampico, Illinois. But the Reagans did begin a series of moves—first to a small coldwater flat on the South Side of Chicago near the Chicago State University campus. Jack was employed as a shoe salesman at the Fair Store on South State Street. Opened in 1897, the monolithic building occupied a square block and was nine stories high and known as the largest department store in the world. The Fair Store was Jack’s first experience at punching a time clock and being just one of more than three hundred employees, a difficult situation for him.
Ronald Reagan recalled that one day in Chicago he and Neil had been left alone while Nelle had gone on “one of her periodic goodwill trips. We got scared, with twilight coming on, and went to scour the city for our parents.” After carefully blowing out the gas lamp, they wandered about two or three blocks and finally got “engaged in a debate with a friendly drunk who thought we shouldn’t be out so late. Nelle [the Reagan sons always called their parents by their first names] arrived just in time to agree with him. Nelle had almost lost her mind, coming home to a gas-filled house with us missing. [For once she lost] her temper and stood as a figure of righteous wrath while Jack clobbered us.”
That December, Jack lost his job and they packed up their possessions and took the train to Galesburg, a fairly large manufacturing center in Knox County where Jack had relatives who helped him obtain a good job with a prospering shoe store.* The Reagans moved into a rented house on a tree-lined, red-brick street. The house had an attic where the landlord had stored an enormous collection of birds’ eggs and butterflies. Dutch would sneak up alone and “sit for hours… looking at those glass-encased collections.” He was five at the time and the Galesburg school had no kindergarten, but Nelle had taught Dutch to read by sitting with him every evening and having him follow her finger as she read.
“One evening,” he recalled, “all the funny black marks on paper clicked into place.” He was lying on the floor with the evening paper and his father asked him what he was doing. He replied that he was reading. Jack asked him to read something then, and he did. Nelle proudly invited the neighbors to come in while he recited “such events as the aftermath of a bomb that had exploded in San Francisco during a parade and the exciting details of the two-dead, Black Tom explosion in New Jersey [perpetrated by German saboteurs].”
Europe was at war—Germany and the Kaiser the enemy. After the sinking of the American ship Sussex by a German submarine, Wilson issued an ultimatum for Germany to cease such unrestricted attacks. In the November 1916 election, the Democratic campaign slogan “He kept us out of war” helped return Wilson to the presidency, but war was imminent. On February 3, 1917, after the sinking of other U.S. vessels, Wilson broke diplomatic relations with Germany, and on April 6, 1917, America entered World War I. There were rally parades in Galesburg and lines at the Army Recruiting Office. Jack tried to sign up, but to Nelle’s relief was not accepted. His younger son recalled, “He always protested his bad timing… too young for the Spanish-American—and too old for ‘Over There.’“
Dutch had been enrolled in the first grade of Filas Willard School in February 1916. In the middle of his second year (1918), the Reagans were forced to move again (Jack had been fired because of his drinking), this time to a two-story house at 218 Seventh Avenue in Monmouth, Illinois, where Jack was again employed as a shoe clerk in the E. B. Colwell Department Store on South Main Street. Monmouth was remembered most vividly by Dutch for “the parades, the torches, the bands, the shoutings and the drunks and the burning of Kaiser Bill in effigy [in 1918 at the time of the Armistice].” Monmouth was also the birthplace of Wyatt Earp, a fact that gave the small city of about eight thousand a romantic aura.
Entering a new school was never an easy task. Dutch must have found Monmouth tougher than Galesburg. “I remember six or eight of us from old Central School decided he was too new around here,” the former Gertrude Crockett said. “We chased him all the way home—up onto his porch. (When he came through here in 1976 campaigning for the nomination [Reagan’s first bid for the presidency], he told me it was the only time in his life he’d been truly terrified, scared to death.) I don’t know why I did what I did. He lived on Seventh. I lived on Ninth and a huge, big, black gal lived on Eighth. We all walked east from school going home every day. This afternoon, some boys joined us and that’s when it happened. His mother was a tough old gal and came out on the porch and gave us a red-hot lecture.…*
“Maybe the kids thought he was stuck-up or something. My best girlfriend was Laura Hays… she was the smart kid in our class. The day Dutch entered our class for the first time, Laura brought him into the room and I remember that she introduced him to all us staring kids. He was startling to look at (not only good-looking but he had this air about him), and she sensed that he was special and should be introduced. I sensed it too and used to turn around in class just to stare back at him. His jaw was always set—as though somebody was going to take a poke at him and he was ready for the punches… I looked at his thrust out chin every day and wondered ‘Why?’“
The flu epidemic hit Monmouth when Dutch was in the third grade and “the school closed down and everyone wore masks.” Nelle, a victim of the disease, nearly died. “The house grew so quiet,” he recalled, “and I sat watching for the guy with the black bag [a Dr. Laurence, who lived around the corner], and when he came down Jack went outside with him and I waited with a lurking terror for him to come back, and he’d say, ‘She’s going to be all right,’ but his face didn’t say so, and I went to bed and woke up with a weight dragging at the pit of my stomach till one day Jack said ‘she’s going to be all right,’ and his face looked as if the sun was out…”
Nelle had begun to feel she had found her rightful niche in life. The prayers she expended on behalf of Jack’s drinking were extended to the husbands and sons of church members. She had a melodious voice, an ability to speak with conviction and she could quote the Bible at length. When words of comfort or hope were needed, she always knew the right and meaningful passage. She became what might be considered a local missionary, dispensing the word of the Good Book. (The promise she had made to Father Defore had long been forgotten. The boys were being raised in the Christian Church.)
The Reagans were unaware of Dutch’s poor sight. He managed to do well in school mainly because of his prodigious memory. His third-grade teacher, Miss Luhens, was amazed at the way he could rattle off dates and names and how fast he was at multiplication and division. Monmouth’s Central School was a large, foreboding four-story brick building without much land for a playground and with very few shade trees. Neil adjusted better and faster than his brother. Gertrude Crockett, however, points out Dutch’s “charisma—everyone was taken with it, Miss Luhens, Laura Hays—he had a crush on her, although he didn’t think any of us knew… I remember thinking—make up your mind—is your name R^gan or R ygan. he sometimes pronounced it differently. but he had super ability, like laura, and—i guess—class.”
Winter 1918 was seve
re, and before it ended Dutch contracted pneumonia, his first serious illness. After Nelle’s siege, the Reagans were on constant vigil. The first day he was up all the neighborhood kids brought their lead soldiers in (apparently a gesture to make up for their earlier attack). “The sun streamed through the window and I felt like a king with an army of 500,” he recalled. The family’s medical difficulties did not end with Dutch’s recovery. A short time after, a truck hit Neil and ran over his leg. Miraculously, the leg healed without complication.
The country was enjoying a postwar prosperity, but the Reagan family was still suffering hard times. Jack’s salary was not enough to cover inflationary prices, the high medical bills they had incurred and the alcohol he consumed. Nelle was more than careful with the dollar, but she never let her kids go without anything she thought important. Life revolved around Nelle in the home. She read aloud every evening, Jack seated at one end of the kitchen table with his newspaper, while at the other end the kids crowded next to Nelle. A huge pan of buttered popcorn stood in the middle of the table. Apples and salted crackers were other Reagan staples as Nelle read to the boys about King Arthur and the Round Table or the Three Musketeers.
During the summer of 1919, Jack’s old boss, H. C. Pitney, blindness encroaching upon him and with no one to help him manage the store, wrote Jack offering better pay and a chance to become a partner if he returned to Tampico. The Reagans were quick to accept. They left Monmouth in August. This time they moved into a flat above the Pitney Store and across Main Street from the bakery. Dutch and Neil were delighted with the freedom the small town gave them to roam the outskirts or play in the streets. Nelle became involved in the high school theater group; Jack, however, was restless. After the more cosmopolitan life of the larger cities they had been living in, Tampico, with two of everything except a tavern, was claustrophobic. He told Pitney he did not want to stay. Pitney decided to sell, and evoked a promise from Reagan to remain until a buyer for the business was found.
