by Anne Edwards
Eureka had been having trouble replacing their last big star, Garland Waggoner. Dutch pointed out that he had played on Dixon’s varsity football team his senior year, as had Waggoner, adding a bit more to his accomplishments than they actually were. Harrod sent him to speak to Eureka’s coach, Ralph McKinzie. The young man’s bravado did not greatly impress him. High school players were given a lot of scrutiny by colleges scouting talent. McKinzie knew Dutch Reagan had not been a star performer. But he did like his enthusiasm and obviously considered his potential good, for he convinced the school board to grant him an athletic scholarship for one half of the $180 tuition. Harrod then secured for him a job washing dishes in the TEKE House for his meals. His room at the fraternity would cost $270 for the freshman year, which he had to pay himself. It did not take a degree in economics to add $270 plus $90 (the other half of his tuition) plus the $5 enrollment fee and see that with only $35 left of the $400 he had saved, he would be broke for most of the year. But he would at least be near Margaret.
His freshman schedule included rhetoric (the study of the effective use of language), French, history, English literature, math, physical education, football and swimming.
The TEKE House, built in the 1870s, was a solid, buff-colored, brick three-story building with a vast front porch. The third floor was a converted attic. Dutch’s room was at the top with a dormer window that offered a panoramic view of the campus. (He was to retain this room throughout his college years.) He settled in quickly, adjusting more easily to his new environment than he had ever been able to do before. A good part of this had to do with the segregated nature of the student body, all of whom were of the same faith and similar socio-economic background. American campuses at this time were at the center of a revolt in manners and morals. College students, disdainful of social conventions, were labeled “flaming youth” and were quoted as calling themselves “disenchanted” (a favorite word of the era). This seldom took the form of political or militant action. Students rebelled by exhibiting some eyebrow-raising behavior. They bought contraband alcohol and went on binges. Party crashing was an accepted part of college life, as were petting, raccoon coats and bobbed hair. Compulsory chapel attendance had been abolished in most nonreligious campuses across the nation. At some schools, smoking had been legalized for women, dress codes abandoned, and wild “hooch” parties overlooked by the faculties.
Life at Eureka bore no resemblance to what was happening on other American campuses. Eureka was a small rural college with strict standards of student behavior. The dress code for female students directed that their skirts be of such a length as not to expose the calf of the leg. Slips were to be worn under summer-weight dresses and flesh-colored or see-through stockings were not permitted.
Dancing, which was the college rage across the country, was also not allowed. In fact, Eureka’s rules about this had grown even more restrictive the previous year. Until then, an annual back-to-school social affair called The Grind had been held, at which an orchestra played as concentric circles of boys and girls moved in opposite directions and the members of the two sexes introduced themselves to one another and shook hands. Then they all sat down and listened to speeches and ate ice cream and cookies. This had now been discontinued. One of the first speeches Dutch heard at Eureka was to be the “annual dancing speech,” given by Eureka’s puritanical president, Bert Wilson. Wilson was trying to divest the school of its debts by obtaining a church endowment. It did not seem to President Wilson that abandoning “a tradition [no dancing] which was held since the first days of the college could in any way help Eureka win the approval needed for their petition for aid [from the Central Church] when the Disciples of Christ Church does not sanction dancing.”
A small rebellion was taking place. Sorority and fraternity parties held off campus were essentially dinners, but after the scheduled programs, students would go off to the garden or some remote room in the house to dance. The town also had a small ballroom called Legion Hall (known as “Damnation Hall” by the elders), and although dancing there was unacceptable behavior, students did so. One night a stool pigeon took down the names of all his classmates who were going into Damnation Hall as he stood hidden behind a bush. He was caught and gleefully tossed into a water tank.
President Wilson responded to the desire of the student body to have a more relaxed code of behavior by tightening restrictions further and recommending discipline (extra work and longer hours) for offenders. The approach was wrong. Rural Illinois, which is where most of Eureka’s students were from, was suffering harsh financial problems. Twice in 1928, farm aid had been cut back. High school graduates were finding it difficult to finance their educations. Eureka had suffered a crippling drop of eighty students in one term as young people returned home to help out their parents. Very few of the ones who remained were paying full tuition.
Reagan recalled, “We had a special spirit at Eureka that bound us all together, much as a poverty-stricken family is bound.” Eureka’s tuition fees were too low to cover the school’s operating costs. Even before the Depression, Eureka was “perpetually broke.” When times grew bad, professors would go for months without pay and the small-town merchants would grudgingly extend credit “for the necessities of life.” The college often had to pay its bills with produce from a farm that was part of the endowment, and which the students helped to run.
Having to do without was no strange philosophy to Dutch, or to most others on the campus. An editorial in the school paper, The Pegasus (upon which Dutch immediately became a reporter), on September 24, 1928, addressed new students: “If you notice among your associates a personal interest in another’s welfare, if you notice the utter lack of snobbishness on our campus, if you notice an appreciation of any kind of honest endeavor and if you discover a willingness of individuals to sacrifice for the good of the whole, we say you have found our Eureka Spirit.”
Eureka was proving to be, in many ways, an extension of Dutch’s life at home and in Dixon. Once again he did not feel poor because everyone else was in the same boat. Racial discrimination was virtually unheard of. The Bible was a daily and vital part of his life. He made friends quickly with his peers and the faculty. He had a particular fondness and respect for Henry (“Heinie”) Brubaker, the school’s engineer and bell ringer (the chapel bell signaled the beginning and end of classes). Heinie could always be counted on to champion the students in any controversy with the faculty. A man with a salty tongue, he was dubbed “Professor of Profane Language” by the student body. Since few of Dutch’s classmates were exempt from some form of physical labor to defray their expenses, washing dishes did not have a stigma attached to it. Students ran the laundry, cleaned toilets, shoveled snow and mowed lawns. Pocket money was scarce. A fifteen-cent peach sundae (Dutch’s favorite) at the drugstore soda fountain was an extravagance. Eureka had a large music department, and so there was always a recital to attend on weekends, but Dutch was not keen on classical music. Any extra time he managed away from his duties and his studies and Margaret (who was considered his steady girlfriend from the first day at school) was devoted to sports. Compared to life on most American campuses in the twenties, Eureka seems to have been existing in a time warp. Outsiders thought of it as being “old-timey,” “out of step,” “a Bible school, after all.”
Oklahoman Ralph McKinzie had been the athletic director and coach at Eureka College since 1921, which had been his own senior term. During his four years as an undergraduate at Eureka, he had built for himself an athletic record that had placed Eureka’s football and basketball teams at their zenith. By graduation, Mac had won the halfback position on the Midwest All-Time Football Team and was a star basketball player on the All-Conference team as well, bringing Eureka glory and himself the esteem of faculty and student body. Mac was young, tough, high-spirited and feisty. His athletic prowess was achieved not only by talent but by tremendous grit and tenacity. Only five feet eight, a trim 145 pounds, he had to hold his own and more on a fo
otball field of bruisers; and on a basketball court, where a man several inches taller was considered average height, he was nothing short of phenomenal. In a basketball play-off between Eureka and Bradley College, Mac had scored every one of Eureka’s fifty-two points himself, and the Peoria newspaper had proclaimed in a two-inch headline: MCKINZIE BEATS BRADLEY. Mac’s teams revered and loved him—if not at first, then by the end of a season.
(At ninety-one years of age [in 1985] and having long ago retired from coaching, Mac remained in Eureka, living alone, still a guiding spirit to the athletes on campus. The toughness of the man was intact and his intense love of sports and the men and women who achieved any small measure of success in the field had not dimmed. With immense effort he pushed himself up from a chair to a standing position, ignoring the canes and walker beside him. “Just because the doctor says I’m disabled doesn’t mean I am!” He grinned, blue-gray eyes still flinty. He wanted a scrap-book across the room and insisted on getting it himself. It contained press clippings of Eureka games, photographs of his former team members and of his family, and letters from both, Reagan included.) “Dutch—I put him at end on the fifth string [Eureka actually had four backup strings—nobody who wanted to play football was excluded]. Later he switched to tackle. But the first year I never let him on the field to play a [competitive] game. Guess he hated me for it. But I had a team to consider. He was nearsighted, you know. Couldn’t see worth a damn. Ended up at the bottom of the heap every time and missed the play because he couldn’t see the man or the ball moving on him. Gotta say he was regular at practice. And took his knocks. When practice was over, I’d say, ‘Do the duck waddle.’ All the kids hated that. But he’d start across the field almost dragging one knee on the ground. Then when they got to the goal line, I’d say, ‘Turn around and go back.’ He never quit. Others did. But not Dutch.… He was very skinny at the time, and not quite as fast as the other fellows.… He was a plugger but Eureka wasn’t in a position to gamble because we were not a top team even in the local area. I kept him off the field so that other young men who were a little more aggressive playing football could carry the ball.”
“It’s tough to go… from first string end [at North Dixon High] to the end of the bench before the whistle blows for the first game,” Reagan wrote in his autobiography. “I managed to accomplish this all by myself. But in my mind I had help—heaven forbid I should take the blame! I told everyone who would listen that the coach didn’t like me. I was the victim of unreasoning prejudice. I needed a damn good kick in the keister, but how can you kick something that’s permanently planted on a bench?” He had also assumed he would play basketball at Eureka. “I went to the first practice, looked through the door, adjusted my glasses, looked again, turned and walked away. I saw fellows doing things with a basketball that I just didn’t believe.”
“Swimming? Well…” “Little Mac,” as his teams privately called him, remembered, “I don’t believe he ever swam in a pool before. Took some time, but when he got the oil off his wings nothing could hold him back. Don’t know why he persisted at football. He had this dream I guess of becoming a big football star. He liked being close to the field even when he wasn’t playing a game. Used to take an old broom from the locker room and pretend it was a microphone and ‘announce’ the game play by play afterwards. Never forgot a play either! He understood football—and baseball for that matter, too, better than most of the teams combined. Just couldn’t execute what he knew on the playing field. But he never gave up trying.”
Both Dutch and Margaret joined the Dramatic Club. (“I always let on that my only interest in the Dramatic Club was that it was such fun going to rehearsals and walking home with the leading lady afterward,” he said ten years later. “Secretly I really thought I was communing with the Arts.”) As in Dixon, he filled his life with constant school activity. Margaret recalled, “He was an indifferent student.” She worried about it, but he always managed to get by. Margaret soared to the top of her class. She was a member of Delta Zeta, as was her sister, Helen. The Reverend and Mrs. Cleaver visited Eureka frequently that autumn. According to the Eureka Pegasus, the Cleavers were in town the first and the eighth of October. Margaret went home to Dixon on October 15 and her parents returned to Eureka on the twenty-second; an unusual flurry of back and forth, due perhaps to consultations the Reverend was having with the school concerning the possibility of his taking over the pulpit in the near future.
Ruth and Ed Graybill came to visit Dutch on Thursday, October 27, bringing unsettling news about his family. The Fashion Boot Shop was in a very bad way and Moon had lost his job as a cost accountant and was now working for a substandard wage. The Depression that would not hit the nation for a year had already begun to roll across the corn belt. Herbert Hoover had won the election in a landslide. “A chicken in every pot” had been his campaign slogan. But the farm belt was having problems feeding the chickens.
Things were getting even tighter at Eureka. The school had not received the financial aid it had sought. President Wilson had countered by dropping several courses, including art and home economics, from the curriculum. Students were alerted to the possibility that sports would be next. (Wilson had tried to get the school board to agree to such a plan two years earlier with no success.) The president was of the opinion that football and basketball were demeaning enterprises for a religious school. The students’ unrest over the ban of dancing now came to the surface, and these combined issues agitated them and many members of the faculty. At an open meeting in the chapel on Thursday, November 22, Wilson tendered his resignation. At the same time, he went on to make a statement that was a serious tactical error. He spoke in such a disparaging way about the morals of the school and the town (not churchgoing enough for him) that the student body and the townspeople banded together in defense.
“Affiliated churches,” he said, “are not supporting Eureka the way they should either with students or money, and these are the reasons: Eureka is too small a town to provide enough jobs for students. There is no daily newspaper to give the school the constant publicity it needs, although,” he added sardonically, “the press is doing very well now [referring to nearby Peoria’s coverage of this particular meeting]. People are moving away from rural areas like Eureka and into the big cities. Students seem to prefer larger schools. The real question is, Can Eureka College, a small church college in a small town, survive at all in the face of the present trend of education and civilization?”
Directly after this speech, a statement was issued by an Alumni Committee that it would be a forward step if Wilson’s resignation was accepted by the trustees. The Pegasus printed an editorial saying: “By questioning Eureka’s fitness for ‘riding the storm,’ he has, in the minds of everyone, lost mastery and control of the situation.”
The following Tuesday, November 27, the trustees were to meet to consider Wilson’s resignation, just before the season’s big game against Illinois. All talk on campus centered on who would replace Wilson. The students were due to go home for Thanksgiving break after the game. Dutch was on the bench, “as usual.” Reagan recalled that it was one of those “if-anybody-makes-a-mis-take-that’s-it games. Lump Watts, a [black] classmate of mine… who had been all-state full back at Kewanee [Illinois] High—set a conference record by punting one that carried over eighty yards in the air. Late in the fourth quarter he won the game with a drop kick of better than fifty yards. Through some technical error regarding registering the feat, this kick has been kept out of the national records, but he did it for three points.
“In the second half, newsboys hit the stands with extras [the Peoria Press] headlining the fact that our petition to the board had been denied [Wilson’s resignation had not been accepted]. Looking back from the bench was like looking at a card stunt. Everyone was hidden by a newspaper.”
The win over Illinois was diminished by the decision of the board. The students were in a fury. The greatest unrest was among the members of the TEKE House, wh
ere the feeling was that the student body had been sold out. Leslie Pierce, the president of the fraternity and a varsity player on Mac’s Golden Tornadoes, became the student leader in a move to oust Wilson from the presidency despite the trustees’ vote. By evening, very few people on campus had left for their holiday as they had planned. Groups huddled together in fraternities and sororities discussing the crisis. Pierce and some of the other student leaders “flew into action,” going from one group to another stirring up their emotions. At 11:45 P.M., feeling the time was right, the leaders banged on the old college bell for fifteen minutes straight. Running through the streets from all directions came students, teachers, townspeople—many still with nightclothes under their overcoats—thinking there must be a fire. Pierce had set up a meeting in the chapel, which filled quickly to capacity. People were standing in the aisles and in the doorways and looking through the windows to see what was going to happen next.
“When the bell rang everyone went to the meeting,” another student recalled. “It didn’t matter whether you agreed with the movement or not, or whether you even knew what it was all about. Goodness. It was so exciting!”
Pierce and the other leaders had decided that a freshman should put forth the charges against Wilson because that class would have more years at stake. A quick vote in the TEKE House elected Dutch to this task. He was, they all agreed, the best and most enthusiastic speaker they had, and they needed someone whose impassioned words could stir up the student body into demanding Wilson’s resignation. The Golden Tornadoes stood guard at the doors of the chapel to counter any possible violence. A professor of music sang spirituals to entertain the crowd while Pierce and his co-leaders were priming Dutch on what he should say. The plan was that he should sell the student body on the idea that they stay away from classes. After their return one week from Thanksgiving break, the strike was to begin, and they hoped it would lead to Wilson’s departure.
