Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  Dutch projected that his summer savings would not be more than two hundred dollars. How was he to return to Eureka with such a meager amount? He talked about finding work in Dixon. Margaret politely hinted that there was more to life than Dixon could offer a young man. Unless it was in sports, Dutch was not convinced that was the case. But her esteem meant a great deal to him. If he could not return to Eureka, then he had to find some alternative, or he feared he might lose Margaret. “He was always a leader,” Margaret Cleaver says. “Still I didn’t think he’d end up accomplishing anything.”

  She thought he lacked ambition, a sense of adventure, a cultural curiosity. Yet, while she was in his presence, she found herself inextricably drawn to him. She greatly admired his appearance. His 155 pounds were well distributed on his towering frame and held taut by the enormous amount of swimming that he did. The smooth copper of his summer tan made his blue eyes brighter. The sun had tipped his chestnut hair with glints of red and the light growth of it on his arms and the backs of his hands gave him a real he-man aura. He looked you straight in the eye when he spoke, a flattering attention. A touch of Irish melody edged his voice and his laugh. Yet, a curious self-discipline kept him always in control. He never laughed too hard or gave full vent to his emotions, and these were virtues in Margaret’s eyes.

  In the last week before the fall term Dutch grew desperate. Lowell Park would close down at that time as well. Then a land surveyor whom he had met at the park offered him a job as rod-man, also promising that he would help him get a rowing scholarship with his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, if Dutch worked for him for a year. Dutch agreed.

  Margaret and he had “a last sad date” two nights before her departure for Eureka, with Margaret failing to convince him that he should apply again for a scholarship and see if this time he could get a student loan. The next morning, an unexpected rain engulfed Dixon. There would be no work, for surveyors could not conduct their job in such wet conditions. The rain seemed a sign from a higher hand, and Dutch changed his mind about returning to school. Nothing could have pleased Nelle more unless it was that Moon was going to Eureka with his brother. Once the idea hit Nelle, she could not let it go. Dutch promised he would speak to McKinzie and the board. But Moon refused to be swayed. The next morning, he left for work before Dutch was up. Dutch and Margaret departed for Eureka a short time later. “God bless little schools,” he wrote. “In twenty minutes I was offered a job washing dishes in the girls’ dormitory, the college volunteered to defer their half of the tuition until after graduation (my first experience with credit) and I made a call home to tell them I was going to college.”

  In his opinion, Moon did not seem a candidate for a “mellow, small-town ivy-covered” campus like Eureka. The two brothers had gone separate ways in more than their religion. Moon was a serious drinker, a bit of a ladies’ man and fairly careless with money. Dutch was worried about all these undisciplined elements in Moon’s personality, but the last bothered him the most because “he’d never paid me back any small loan in his life, and I didn’t like to think he might some day treat Eureka the same way.” Yet, the very fact that Nelle wanted Moon to have the chance of an education was enough to send Dutch to Ralph McKinzie, seeking help. He claims he “laid it on the line” with McKinzie. Moon had been out of school for three years, but he had been a tough end on his high school’s football team and had helped them win the county high school championship; he was an all-around good athlete and he wanted an education badly. McKinzie agreed to Moon being given a partial athletic scholarship, and the board deferred the remainder of his tuition. Next, Dutch talked the school into giving Moon a job “hashing in the kitchen of the girls’ dorm.” All Moon needed to raise was ten dollars a month for his room at the TEKE House. Moon claims he came home for supper that night and found his brother’s trunk set in the middle of the kitchen. ‘“Nelle, I thought Dutch was going back to school today,’ I says [sic], and with a tear in her eye she said, ‘He did and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. He left the trunk, thinking you’d change your mind.’

  “I went out to work the next morning, and Mr. Kennedy, who was superintendent of the plant and my boss—and before I went into my desk, why I told him this very funny story [that his brother had left his trunk so he could add his clothes to it and join him at school], and I was not aware that he wasn’t laughing. About ten o’clock, his secretary came in and said, ‘Here’s your paycheck, Mr. Reagan.’ I looked at the calendar and says, ‘Paycheck? It’s not payday.’ And she said, ‘It is for you.’ And I said, ‘Well, do you mean I’m fired?’ And she says, ‘Call it what you want to. Mr. Kennedy says if you’re not smart enough to take the good thing your brother has fixed up for you, you’re not smart enough to work for him.’“ Moon was in college by the afternoon of the next day, and with his arrival, life at Eureka changed considerably for Dutch.

  The rivalry that existed between Dutch and Moon remained, for the most part, deeply buried, surfacing only when the older brother mocked the youth and inexperience of his younger sibling—on the football field, with women, in hard drinking—and in a brand of locker-room humor. With a cocky smile on his broad Irish face, Moon, in a combination of bully and joker, would rib Dutch. Usually an older brother feels protective toward his younger sibling. But for all his prowess in what he considered manly endeavors, Moon was more immature than Dutch, less settled. He did not involve himself in campus politics or many activities other than those requiring physical aptitude. He managed to find places on the road to Peoria that sold bootleg beer and never seemed to concern himself with finances. He had come to Eureka with some money from his job in Dixon—not a lot, but it never took much for Moon to enjoy himself.

  Yet, with all his easy charm, his dark good looks and bruising body, his catwalk strut and his persuasive manner, Moon remained in Dutch’s shadow at Eureka. He was referred to most frequently as “Dutch Reagan’s brother.” Decades later, several of their fellow classmates could not recall a close kinship between Moon and Dutch. “I sort of had the feeling,” one said, “that Dutch endured his brother being at the same school with him. Sort of like a penance, you know?” Nonetheless, Moon’s proximity brought gratification to Dutch’s campus life. By virtue of his one year head start in college, Dutch had become the “older” brother and held rank over Moon, who claimed that as a TEKE pledge, “Anytime I heard the shout ‘Assume the position, Reagan’ and grabbed my ankles, I knew the whack [from a paddle with one-inch holes all over it to raise blood blisters] I got from him [Dutch] was gonna be worse than the others because he felt he had to, otherwise they’d [the TEKEs] accuse him of showing partisanship.” But there were times when Moon induced Dutch into silly, irreverent acts. Dutch went along with some escapades so that he could keep his eye on Moon, but he did manage to loosen up, even to the point of drinking bootleg alcohol “out of a bottle that tasted like gasoline on the fraternity back porch in a parked car.”

  In his autobiography, Reagan takes great glee in describing a watermelon hunt at the beginning of his sophomore year staged to make some lowly freshmen believe they had been witness to a shooting. “We tiptoed through the [watermelon] patch to build up suspense and at a prearranged location, the place exploded with light. A shotgun blast went off. An upper classman near me collapsed with a scream, gripping his chest, red fluid flowing slowly between his fingers. T’m shot,’ he screamed, ‘My God, I am shot!’ The freshmen were sent on foot eight miles back to town to fetch a doctor. Of course, the ‘injured party’ had hot-footed it back to town by the time the doctor arrived at the scene of the ‘shooting’ with the freshmen as guides.” Reagan makes a studied point of explaining that he was just a bystander in this affair. Still, of all the college and fraternity pranks he might have engaged in, he recalls this one with greatest fondness. The fact that each fraternity member paid the doctor ten dollars without protest apparently minimized the immaturity and thoughtlessness of raising an elderly doctor out of bed in the middle of
the night to drive eight miles one way and eight miles return for a college prank.

  Mac was not unhappy to have Moon on the team, although he left him, along with Dutch, on the second string until the end of the year, despite the grim fact that school dropouts had reduced the Golden Tornadoes to twenty-seven players. Mac did not believe in pushing a player before he was ready. “Moon was a natural player,” McKinzie says, “fast, quick-eyed, tough to avoid. I knew he had varsity in him. I held him back so he could season. Dutch did better once Moon was on the team. Seemed he had to prove himself more. I made him guard on second string by the end of second year. But I still didn’t think he had it to move up.”

  The man who helped him finally get off the bench was not Moon or Mac, but another sophomore, Enos (“Bud”) Cole. Cole had played his freshman year at Northwestern, then had dropped out to play three years of pro ball. Mac put him in the quarterback position, but when an old knee injury flared up, Mac wisely took him off the field and engaged him to privately coach some of his weaker players.

  Reagan recalls of these sessions: “Bud made the decisions and I became a purely physical means to the end he dictated.… He would whisper, ‘Knife in—they are going the other way.’ Doing as he ordered, I was on the ball carrier three plays in a row. ‘Now,’ he hissed, ‘go straight across—they’ll try to reverse to suck you in.’ Of course he was right…”

  Most of the action Dutch saw in his sophomore year was in games between the first and second teams. His vision, as he admits, “was limited to one square yard of turf—the one occupied by the right guard on the first team.” This was Captain Pebe Leitch, a senior and a fraternity brother. Leitch was definitely the Big Man on Campus, and Dutch held him in great esteem. “I’m a sucker for hero worship to this day [1964],” he admitted, “and teaming with Pebe in mayhem… was my dream of Valhalla.”

  “Eureka opened the season at Wheaton with a drive that netted a 13—7 victory… ‘Bud’ Cole scored in the first quarter after a steady march from midfield… ‘Bud’ turned in some classy running… Miller battered the line… Leitch played in an aggressive style…” Moon leaped right into the front line of the Golden Tornadoes during a singularly tough game at Carthage. In the last two minutes of play with the score 7-0 against them, Moon had “nabbed a twenty yard pass and galloped sixty yards to the goal line. Bud Cole stepped back and booted the ball squarely between the goal posts to make the score board read 7-7.” This did not ease the brothers’ rivalry. Nor did Dutch turn to Moon as an idol, even though his brother’s action was the stuff of which football heroes are made.

  He wore his gold and red suit and the enormous E on his sweater with tremendous pride, but Dutch knew he had not made the golden circle of the Tornadoes and it hurt. His interest in theater was just as avid and he and Margaret appeared in many plays performed by Epsilon Sigma, the drama society. Moon had tried out and had been accepted (ten out of thirty-three audi-tioners were taken).

  Dutch and Margaret were still going steady. They had dates in a graveyard nearby (accompanied by other couples), where they could huddle together against an old gravestone. They bought cherry phosphates at the drug counter (only two cents each). They talked a lot about Hoover “and his calm statements on prosperity,” and Franklin D. Roosevelt “who was beginning to criticize Hoover from New York [where he had replaced Al Smith as governor].” Margaret was top of her class and honored in the chapel for her grades. She did not share Dutch’s interest in politics, but she understood people and their needs. They attended dances together, including a Halloween party at Camp Lantz on the Mackinaw River where everyone wore “country fashions—and square dances were executed with some fancy footwork, a continuous ghost story was created by the guests and the evening reached a climax when everyone got a horn or a rattle and proceeded to make some racket.” A few weeks later, they attended a Harvest Moon dance. “Subdued lights and the rosy glow of the fireplace created an appropriate atmosphere. Each guest as he entered was given a tiny moon containing the name of his partner for the first dance. During the third dance under the light of the harvest moon each man discovered his partner for the evening.” A great deal of trading around was done at this time and Margaret and Dutch managed to end up together. New Year’s Eve, Margaret was Dutch’s guest at the traditional TEKE New Year’s party and they dined at a candlelit table of four decorated in pink and green (Pebe Leitch and his girlfriend were the other couple).

  For schools like Eureka that existed on the edge of bankruptcy with a student body whose families had been fighting poverty and foreclosure for several years, the Crash did not have the element of surprise that it had for the rest of the country. In his sophomore year, Dutch kept body and soul together not only by waiting tables but by working with Heinie in the school’s steam plant, raking leaves and thawing out water pipes with a blow torch. He and Moon did not go home too often for they could afford neither the fare nor the time away from odd jobs.

  In Dixon, Nelle and Jack were feeling the pinch. With both boys being away at school, no extra income was forthcoming to supplement Jack’s salary (Moon had previously contributed to the household). Nonetheless, Nelle would not consider her sons quitting college. Moon’s decision to attend Eureka had been a great relief to her. “She always said Dutch would have succeeded if he had gone to college or not, but Moon was another matter,” an old friend remarked.

  By now Nelle enjoyed something of a reputation as a faith healer. Mrs. Neer recalled, “When our little daughter [Elonwy] was about four years old, she developed what seemed to be tonsillitis. The doctor said it was that and prescribed medicine… we returned to him several times for a couple of weeks, and he prescribed other medicines, but they did no good. Finally, an abscess developed on her neck, which swelled to twice… normal size. She became so ill she could neither eat nor sleep.… On Sunday morning my husband said to me, ‘Why don’t you go to church? It will do you good.… [The pastor] spoke on how we as Christians should accept death. I could hardly take the sermon because we did not know whether our daughter was going to live. When the service was dismissed, I couldn’t leave my seat. At last, everybody had left except Mrs. Reagan who was on the platform gathering up the music that the choir members had left.

  “I thought, ‘If only I could talk to Mrs. Reagan,’ and went up to her.… I told her about our daughter, and she said, ‘Let’s go into the back room.’… We did. Then Mrs. Reagan said, ‘Let’s get down on our knees and pray about it.’ She made a wonderful prayer and when [we stood] I felt the prayer was answered.… I went home.… Pretty soon there was a knock on the door. It was Mrs. Reagan.… She spent the whole afternoon [in prayer] with us.… She left about six o’clock.… Moments later the abscess burst.… The next morning the doctor said, ‘I don’t need to lance this.’ God had heard Nelle Reagan’s prayer and answered it.”

  Nelle also gave Bible readings to various groups and was in great demand. “Many of us believed Nelle Reagan had the gift to heal,” one contemporary admitted. “She never laid on the hands or anything like that. It was the way she prayed, down on her knees, eyes raised up and speaking like she knew God personally, like she had had lots of dealings with him before. If someone had real troubles or was sick, Nelle would come to their house and kneel and pray. Maybe she didn’t always pray herself a miracle but folks could bear things a lot better after she left.”

  Perhaps the one physical attribute Dutch inherited from Nelle was his voice (he did not resemble either of his parents too closely), a distinctive, mellow voice, tinged with a hopeful cadence—a voice that had a timbre to it that impressed people with the honesty of the words he spoke. Because he believed in himself and his voice so conveyed this confidence, others picked up on it. Yet, it never seemed to occur to him that his leadership qualities had anything to do with natural assurance. Instead, he attributed his popularity to his minor achievements on the football field and his major ones as a swimmer. He had a likability, a modesty and a posture that made him seem at o
nce proud and humble and perfectly matched his vocal qualities. From Nelle he also learned what to do with his voice. When trying to be persuasive, he would lower the volume, speaking “barely above a whisper” to win a confidential intimacy, and he instinctively knew just the right moments to raise that volume and lower the pitch for intensity. Unlike the more evangelistic, booming speech of the Reverend Cleaver, which instilled awe and could both mesmerize and intimidate, Dutch’s voice had the humility and passion of a true believer, a manly, ingratiating voice made for promises.

  As 1930 ripened into spring, the Depression hit the South and the Midwest hardest. Wheat that had sold in 1929 for $1.35 a bushel now sold for 76 cents. Bread lines had formed in Chicago’s windy streets. In Iowa City, where five banks had closed and people had to go to Cedar Rapids to cash a check, eggs were 6 cents a dozen. Factory employment was down 20 percent and payrolls were cut 29 percent, and something like 80 banks a month were closing, most of them the small, family-owned building-and-loan variety that had helped the farmer and the small businessman for decades. People turned to church and religion more and more. A great many weary, bewildered midwesterners tuned in their radios on Sunday afternoons (with no chicken cooking in their pot for dinner) to station WJR, Detroit (a CBS affiliate), to listen to the heartwarming, emotional Irish cadences of Father Charles E. Coughlin. For four years Father Coughlin had broadcast Sunday sermons to children. His simple, clear approach and the richness of his voice appealed to adults to an even greater extent. Coughlin was a Catholic priest from Royal Oak, Michigan, but his paternal quality and the needs of the radio public in 1930 transcended religious and regional boundaries.

  During his years on radio, Father Coughlin had so won over his unseen listeners with his ability to bring warmth and a sense of caring and hope into people’s homes that his audience had complete faith in the truth of his message. Therefore, when one Sunday afternoon, October 30, 1930, he addressed political issues for the first time, there was a memorable reaction. Thousands upon thousands had been listening when Coughlin complained that “the international bankers have wrecked the country, and the Communists are trying to take it over.” His audience let him know they agreed by sending him nearly fifty thousand letters. Coughlin had hit upon the fears of the nation’s poor when “he denounced the bankers and the industrialists who had ruled and ruined the country, the greedy politicians and the money changers in the temple.”