by Anne Edwards
Dixon’s growth was more steady than spectacular. Once the riches of Galena had vanished along with its lead mines, the population influx slowed down to a languorous trickle. Nearly 6,000 people poured into Dixon between 1850 and 1860. Fifty years later, in 1910, Dixon’s census recorded a population increase of only 1,216. Ninety-eight miles west of Chicago by rail and 105 miles by highway, Dixon was too distant to benefit from the growth of Illinois’s major city. By 1920, which saw a boom that doubled and tripled the size of many Midwest towns as privately owned companies were taken over by large corporations, the population had reached only 8,191. Despite the advent of the telephone and the telegraph, the radio, the automobile and the train, Dixon remained a backwater—an isolated and overgrown prairie village little more than an enlargement of Tampico. Still, a young boy fed stories by a father with a glib manner and a penchant for exaggeration might view the town not in “the drab hues of reality” but with a certain enchantment.
Actually, Dixon sat squat in the middle of rich farmland, unprotected and unprotecting. No great homes were to be found. People there earned lower wages than the national average. (Reagan was later to state, “We didn’t know we were poor because the people around us were of the same circumstance.”) Even the more successful merchants, small manufacturers, lawyers, doctors and bankers earned modest incomes and lived in the “gaunt frame shelters like grocery boxes” that made up the fictional Gopher Prairie of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and were typical of small midwestern towns in the earlier part of the century. Front porches extended in buck-toothed fashion, destroying the natural lines of the low frame houses. Architectural innovation had never reached Dixon. Houses built in 1920 looked like spruced-up versions of homes constructed fifty years earlier.
Little choice of merchandise was offered in its Main Street stores. Mail order was used for most household or farm items. Eggs and chickens, bacon slabs and catfish were easy to come by. But fruits and vegetables grown out of the state were as exotic as litchi nuts and escargots. The drugstore had a soda fountain. The hotel was strictly a hotel—no dining room. There were a couple of luncheonettes, but mostly Dixon’s workers brown-bagged it or went home at noon. For amusement, there was a movie house (the Dixon Theater), a small playhouse (the Old Family Theater) and Plum Hollows Golf Club. Ladies held meetings at the library or at church. Dances were given in the high school gymnasium. In the summer, Lowell Park offered boating, bathing and fishing; and the Chautauqua, which lasted about two weeks, was located a mile up the highway at the end of the trolley line. The Chautauqua, named for the town in New York where it originated, was a national organization that arranged church seminars and presented visiting lecturers in small towns across the country. People who came from a distance lived in tents during the Chautauqua, and the campsites took on a fairgrounds atmosphere, with concessionaires and picnic areas along the banks of the Rock River.
The river’s swift currents bisected Dixon. Catfish from its waters were said to be the best you could catch anywhere. Almost everyone had to cross it at some point on a daily basis. Kids fished on the banks, pants rolled up but never quite high enough to avoid the mud. Heavy rains all too often caused damaging floods, and sighs of “The river’s low” indicated droughts. An area on the south bank, Demon Town, contained, until Prohibition, a number of thriving taverns. But in a section farther up the bank, known as Bootleggers’ Knob, black-market alcohol could still be purchased.
Instead of driving directly to their new home, Jack took a detour of a few blocks to Galena Street so that they could pass under the recently built wooden Memorial Arch with “D I X O N” emblazoned across it. The arch had replaced a temporary structure that had been raised in honor of “Dixon’s Returning Heroes”* after the signing of the Armistice. The Dixon Evening Telegraph reported that on that occasion, “As the [three Dixon] heroes marched beneath the arch, thousands of flowers were strewn in their path by ladies and to the riot of color was added color-paper streamers thrown from upper floors of the Nachusa Tavern [the hotel].” Painted on the back of the arch were the following words: “A grateful people pause in their welcome to the victorious living to pay silent tribute to the illustrious dead.”
The Reagans had rented a boxy two-story white frame dwelling at 816 South Hennepin Avenue, a narrow tree-lined street of similar middle-class houses all set fairly close together and to the street. A front porch extended only across the entryway. The house had been built in the summer of 1891 for William C. Thompson* on a fifteen-hundred-dollar loan from the Dixon Loan and Building Association. The property was now owned by Teresa and John Donovan, who had inherited the deed from Mrs. Donovan’s mother. Jack had driven to Dixon on his own a few weeks earlier, signed the lease and paid twenty-three dollars for the first month’s rent, high by Dixon’s standards.
The house was modest—small rooms and lowish ceilings—but at the top of a narrow staircase were three bedrooms and an indoor toilet. The boys were to share one room, their parents another and the third was to be Nelle’s sewing room, where she could keep her new, prized Singer sewing machine. The third bedroom represented a measure of security to Nelle. It meant she could take in a roomer if there should ever be a need. For that reason, the boys were given the smallest room, which held little more than a single bed (to be shared) and a chest of drawers. Downstairs, the front parlor had a tile fireplace,† A back parlor led off this room through an archway. The dining room was actually the alcove between the staircase and the kitchen, but was papered elegantly in a raised rococo design (all the rooms were wallpapered, but not quite so extravagantly). Nelle’s first purchase for the house—from a Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog—was a cabinet to hold her china. Out back was an unused and rather ramshackle barn, fourteen feet by twenty-four feet with a loft in it—a perfect clubhouse for Neil and Dutch.
The boys were enrolled at South Central Grammar School (a five-minute walk), Dutch in the second half of the fifth grade (he was skipped a half-term, which meant he would now matriculate in the summer) and Neil in the seventh grade. From the time that he moved into Hennepin Avenue until he reached twenty-one, Dixon would be home to Dutch, the first permanent one he would have. “All of us have a place to go back to. Dixon is that place for me,” Reagan later wrote. “There was the life that shaped my mind and body for all the years to come after.”
Jack Reagan believed that in coming to Dixon as a partner in the Fashion Boot Shop he would soon improve his economic standing. Pitney had put up all the money. But neither the “partnership” nor the profits from it would become effective until some far distant time when Jack had earned his half-interest in the business. This meant that any commissions he could make above his meager salary were to be deducted and applied toward his indebtedness for his share. Not too many weeks had passed before the Reagans realized commerce in Dixon would dictate a much longer period of repayment than Jack had anticipated.* To add to this, the cost of living was considerably higher than in Tampico.
To manage on Jack’s small salary, Nelle forfeited such great delicacies as chicken on Sunday. Liver was considered pet food, and the butcher, if requested, would throw a pound or so in with an order. Nelle bought soup bones and asked for liver for the cats. Soup, potatoes and bread were served daily. On Sundays—since the cats ate the mice they caught in the barn anyway—the Reagans ate the cats’ liver dressed up with a slab of bacon and some homegrown onions.
Neil made friends and adjusted more quickly to the new environment than his brother. “Everybody thought he [Neil] would go into the movies or go on the stage… he was always… putting on,” Bill Thompson remembers. The kids at South Central nicknamed him “Moon” (from the comic-strip character Moon Mullins) and it stuck. The Reagan boys were now Dutch and Moon. Moon was a good athlete and Dutch tried hard but could not keep up with him. George and Ed O’Malley lived across the street and the four boys played football together—George and Moon squaring off against their younger brothers.
“Dutch wa
s a bit nearsighted,” Ed O’Malley says, “but he always wanted to carry the ball.” Ed would give it to him and Dutch “would go charging ahead.” The older boys would let him “just start to get by when they would trip him, sending him flying into the bushes.”
Dutch’s poor eyesight contributed greatly to his love of football over baseball. He claims it never occurred to him that he was seriously nearsighted. In his mind, “the whole world was made up of colored blobs that became distinct when I got closer—and I was sure it appeared the same way to everyone else.” He never cared for baseball because when he stood at the plate, “the ball appeared out of nowhere about two feet in front of me.” And he was “the last chosen for a side in any game.” This changed when he “discovered football; no little invisible ball—just another guy to grab or knock down, and it didn’t matter if his face was blurred.” He had trouble reading the blackboard even from a front seat in the schoolroom and bluffed his lessons, receiving good marks despite this.
Not long after his thirteenth birthday, the Reagans went for a Sunday afternoon ride. Neil kept quoting the highway advertising signs as they drove past. The Burma-Shave signs were the best, usually a series of six red panels stuck in the ground along the highway a short distance apart, each carrying a few words of the complete message. Most were amusing bits of doggerel like: DOES YOUR HUSBAND/MISBEHAVE/GRUNT AND GRUMBLE/RANT AND RAVE?/SHOOT THE BRUTE SOME/BURMA-SHAVE! Dutch could not see them and, kidding around, borrowed his mother’s glasses. For the first time in his life, he saw “a glorious, sharply outlined world jump into focus… houses had a definite texture and hills really made a clear silhouette against the sky.” Nelle had him fitted out “with huge black-rimmed spectacles.” And though he felt that “the miracle of seeing was beyond believing,” he soon began to hate the big glasses.*
Nonetheless, the visual aids made his two favorite pastimes—reading and the movies—much more pleasurable. He remained addicted to Western films, but also liked the new cliff-hangers that starred sports figures like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and Red Grange, “who strutted, grimaced, thrashed the villains, kissed the heroines and, not incidentally, showed off their athletic prowess.” He took out his first library number* when he was ten and checked out an average of two books a week (always on a weekend), leaning toward boys’ adventure stories—the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books and Burt L. Standish’s Frank Merriwell series. Frank Merriwell’s Bravery, Frank Merriwell’s Foes and Frank Merriwell’s Sports Afield ranked as favorites, for they were checked out twice each. The family generally attended the movies together on Friday nights. Whenever he could get Jack to give the extra dime, Dutch would go to the Saturday matinees. (“Think I’m made of money?” Jack would growl. But he usually gave in.) One Saturday Birth of a Nation came to town in a revival.
The Ku KIux Klan, whose antiblack activities were featured in the film, were again visible, spreading this time to the Midwest from its beginnings in the South. The Klan’s objective of white supremacy had broadened to include opposition to Jews and Catholics. Klansmen violently opposed parochial schools and Catholic candidates for office, flaming crosses were set on the front lawns of Catholic schools and churches, and Jack swore that no son of his “was going to sit through their shenanigans.” When he saw that his pleading approach was not working, Dutch introduced what he thought was logic. The Klan in the film, he argued, represented another period of history, not the one Jack loathed.
His father’s mouth turned a shade grimmer. “The Klan’s the Klan, and a sheet’s a sheet, and any man who wears one over his head is a bum. And I want no more words on the subject.” Jack’s response seemed more logical than his, so Dutch went off to the library.
Of Dixon’s twelve black families,† one breadwinner, Tom McReynolds, rode through town with an old horse and wagon collecting junk and carting it away. McReynolds made a respectable living by driving up to Rockford and selling anything good in his wagon to a scrap-metal dealer there. The McReynoldses lived on the south side of Dixon with their two sons, Winston (“Wink”) and Elwood. Wink was a pretty good football player, and he and Moon sat next to each other at the back of Molly Duffy’s sixth-grade class. The boys became good friends and Wink was often in the Reagan home. Thompson claims, “Nobody in those days thought of [Wink’s] being black.… In Dixon there was no thought of it. There was just Wink… and Elwood and Tom, their father.”
The individual feelings of certain Dixonites notwithstanding, the town was not free from prejudice. Violet McReynolds (Wink McReynolds’s future wife) says there was no equality between blacks and whites. “Dixon was no different than any other city in America at that time. There weren’t the same housing and job opportunities.” Blacks were not allowed to register at the hotel, a rule that was enforced for many years. Nor could they get their hair done in Dixon’s beauty salons or barber shops. They were excluded from membership to the Golf Club, although they did eat at the counters of the luncheonettes, attended the movie houses and never were excluded from any school function. The Reagan household was free of intolerance toward blacks. The Christian Church preached equality of color and had black parishes with black ministers.
Dixonites felt strong ties to their state’s favorite son, Abraham Lincoln, who in 1832 had joined a group of Sangamon County men and volunteered for military service against the Blackhawk Indian uprisings in the North. As captain of his company, on Sunday, May 12, 1832, Lincoln led his men into the frontier community of Dixon’s Ferry and there saw his only military service, succeeding in helping to drive the Blackhawks farther north. “This was a success,” he wrote in 1859, “which gave me more pleasure than any I have had since.”
Lincoln returned to Dixon on July 17, 1856, to deliver a two-hour speech from the lawn of the new county courthouse at Second and Ottaway avenues, just a few streets away from the Reagans’ future house on Hennepin Avenue. A plaque was placed on the site inscribed with “Lincoln stood here while delivering his Great Speech, July 17, 1856.” In it he urged the election of John C. Freemont, then a candidate for president, to help ward off the impending crisis that he foresaw spreading throughout the nation over the slavery issue.
Lincoln was to visit “Governor” Alexander Charters’s estate, Hazelwood, several times (actually, Charters was never governor of anything but his own acreage). Hazelwood had been built on a six-hundred-acre tract three miles out of town and could claim to be Dixon’s only grand and elegant house. Charters had modeled his mansion after his former home in Ireland. He had come to Dixon’s Ferry to parlay his fortune into an even larger one by investing in the lead mines in Galena. When the mines were abandoned, he simply led the life of a landed gentleman, obviously not having lost his entire fortune. After his death in 1878, his son-in-law took over Hazelwood, but shortly after his death the estate became idle. Storms lashed down some of the great trees, and finally, in 1905, Hazelwood burned down. But the townspeople drove the old roads on a Sunday afternoon to see the brooding trees that encircled the charred ground where the mansion had once stood. To them, Hazelwood had been Dixon’s Camelot. The only vestige of the grand life that Charters had led in Dixon centered now around the country club. Although it did not have a restaurant and was not the scene of garden parties and social affairs, the low, grass-blanketed slopes represented Dixon’s one link with the gentleman’s life.
Dixon did have an especially large group of women golfers. The Lincoln Highway and Northern Illinois golf tournaments were often held at the country club. Dutch worked as a caddy there the second and third summers he was in Dixon. He collected bird eggs as a hobby. Jack got him an old display case from the store and they put it up in the hayloft of the barn. Dutch lined the floor of the case with cotton batting. “[He] would punch a hole in both ends and blow the eggs out [from the shell],” Neil recalled. “He was always climbing trees to get them.” Moon kept pigeons and rabbits in the barn and developed “a little business. Come Friday night if there were squabs up there, I’d get the squabs and
a bucket of boiling water, and I’d snap their heads off and clean them. I’d kill four or five young rabbits, skin them and clean them. Then I’d take a market basket and go out the next day beating on doors, and I never failed to sell all the squabs and rabbits I had in the basket.” Dutch could not bring himself to become part of this enterprise.
“The pool hall [in Dixon] was downstairs under a store where your folks couldn’t see you if they happened to walk by,” Neil remembered. “[Dutch] would never do anything like that. He would rather be up there gazing at his bird eggs.”
The brothers never threw punches, but they stuck up for each other when necessary. “When someone started taking picks at me [Moon], he’d [Dutch] stick in, and if somebody started taking picks on him, I’d stick in. But on the other hand, if you were a casual observer, you’d say, ‘Well, those two brothers don’t have any association at all, do they?’… I knew when he had down moments, but I never said anything to him. There was no such thought of, you know, putting my arm around his shoulder and saying, ‘Let’s talk this over,’ or anything like that.… I always operate on the theory that [Dutch] doesn’t even know I’m breathing—but that’s the way it’s always been with my dad, [Dutch] and myself. Not my mother. She was not that way at all. I guess all three of us were cut from the same bolt on the male end.”
Times were tough for the Reagans. Neil says, “My mother was a charger. [She] was the one where come rent day and my dad would say, ‘Nellie the rent is due day after tomorrow.’ My mother would just look at him and say, ‘Don’t worry, the Lord will provide.’“ Most times, Nelle gave the Lord a hand and took in a roomer and sewing to make the money. She had joined the Christian Church of Dixon by letter even before the move from Tampico. By 1921, religion had become a burning issue “in the cloistered calm of rich seminaries and the dusty streets of poor mill villages alike.” Dixon’s working-class population was under the same strain. To counteract the trend toward doubters and agnosticism, a back-to-basics movement gained tremendous momentum. Called Fundamentalism, this religious revival had as much an impact on the twenties as Prohibition did. Industrialization had pushed hundreds of thousands of simple country people into noisome factories at the same time as it made honest, age-old craftsmen obsolete. “Damned on Saturday night, they were desperate for Salvation on Sunday.” Jack’s drinking propelled Nelle deeper into religion, where she hoped to find answers and prayer that she could take home to him.
