Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Neil Reagan, UCLA Oral History Program, 19811

  RONALD WILSON REAGAN WAS BORN AT HOME ON FEBRUARY 6, 1911, IN

  Tampico, Illinois, the son of John Edward Reagan, a shoe salesman everyone called Jack, and Nelle Wilson Reagan, a housewife who sometimes took in sewing. The Reagans lived in a five-room apartment over a row of stores on the town’s one-block-long Main Street. Heated by three coal-burning stoves, the apartment, like most homes in Tampico at that time, did not have running water or an indoor toilet. Nelle’s labor was extremely difficult and went on for twenty-four hours. Jack became so worried that he went out in a blizzard to get a doctor, who delivered the ten-pound boy at 4:16 in the morning and told Nelle she could not have any more children.2

  In his 1965 autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me? , written as he was preparing to run for governor of California, Ronald Reagan painted the scene of his birth in patriotic colors: “My face was blue from screaming, my bottom was red from whacking, and my father claimed afterward that 1 5

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House he was white when he said shakily, ‘For such a little bit of a fat Dutchman, he makes a hell of a lot of noise, doesn’t he?’ ‘I think he’s perfectly wonderful,’ said my mother weakly. . . . Those were their first opinions of me.

  As far as I know, they never changed during their lifetimes. As for myself, ever since my birth my nickname has been ‘Dutch’ and I have been particularly fond of the colors that were exhibited—red, white, and blue.”3

  His brother, Neil, born in September 1908, recalled the event in less glowing terms. “[T]hey came to me—I’d been sent to the neighbors for a couple of days—[and said,] ‘Now you can go home and see your baby brother,’ and I wanted to go in the opposite direction. I went home, and 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 how early in life I determined not to be queer. I was strictly a girl man.”4

  Neil Reagan also said, “Ronald is my mother’s boy and I’m my father’s boy.” One way to illustrate what he meant is to compare how the two brothers remembered their youth. “We were poor, and I mean poor,” Neil said.5 “We were poor,” Ronald said, “but we didn’t know we were poor.”6

  Another way to put it: the first son drank, the second didn’t.

  Reagan’s biographers, following his lead, have presented Nelle and Jack Reagan as a case of opposites attracting. He was Irish Catholic; she was Scots-English Protestant. He could be moody, cynical, and stubborn; she was determined to be sunny, idealistic, and understanding. He was a charmer, a storyteller, a chain-smoker, a binge drinker. She was a do-gooder, a Bible-thumper, a teetotaler. He was a bit of a clown; she was a bit of a saint.

  But they also had a lot in common, starting with their immigrant rural roots and their mutual desire to transcend those roots and make something of themselves. Both Jack and Nelle were amateur actors, autodidacts, and stylish dressers who stood out in the series of small Midwestern towns where Jack went from job to job and Nelle fixed up rented home after rented home. Both felt a need to be different, which expressed itself in Nelle’s poetry writing and elocution recitals and in Jack’s political views—he was an outspoken Democrat in solidly Republican rural Illinois. There was a whiff of bohemianism in their insisting that their sons call them Nelle and Jack, not Mother and Father. Both loved an audience; Jack’s preferred venue was Early Ronnie: 1911–1932

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  the saloon, Nelle’s the church. Jack liked to joke: “Jesus walked barefoot . . .

  but then, He didn’t have to deal with our Illinois winters, now did He?”7

  One of Nelle’s mottos was “To higher, nobler things my mind is bent.”8

  The Reagans were strivers, joiners, dreamers—they wanted more out of life for themselves and their sons. Her bourgeois yearnings were matched by his “burning ambition to succeed,” to use his son’s phrasing.9

  In this they were hardly alone in early twentieth-century Main Street America, where Horatio Alger heroes were lining up for membership in newly constructed country clubs. Upward mobility has always been the great American motif; the self-made man and his social-climbing wife are all-American archetypes; the house on the hill is still the American dream.

  But Jack and Nelle never made it. They never even owned a house until their son bought them one in Hollywood. As the Great Depression descended upon the Farm Belt in the late 1920s, and Jack’s drinking became more and more of a problem, the Reagans were reduced to taking in boarders, and Nelle retreated further into religion. There would be good years in business and happy days at home, but Jack would never achieve his dream of financial independence and respectable status. As a family friend candidly put it, “Jack always wanted to be ‘cut-glass Irish’; at best he was ‘lace-curtain,’ but that never had a way of registering with him.”10

  The O’Regans came from Ballyporeen, County Tipperary, Ireland. Jack’s grandfather, a poor potato farmer, left home during the famine of the 1840s and lived in London for a few years, where he worked as a soap-maker and Anglicized the family name before crossing the Atlantic. Nelle’s grandfather, a Wilson from Renfrewshire, Scotland, fought against the British in Canada during the Mackenzie Rebellion in the 1830s. Both families settled in the flat, fertile farm country of northwestern Illinois sometime before the Civil War. Illinois was on the frontier then—the last Indians had been driven out of the state only in 1832, after the Black Hawk War—and it was still possible to stake a claim to undeveloped land and homestead it. That is what both the Reagans and Wilsons did near the small Mississippi River port of Fulton in Whiteside County, about one hundred miles west of Chicago.11 During this time Illinois came to be known as the Prairie State, and by 1860 it led the nation in wheat and corn production. But neither the Wilsons nor the Reagans prospered.

  Jack Reagan was born in Fulton on July 13, 1883, and lived in a two-room farmhouse until he was orphaned at the age of six, after both his 1 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House parents died of tuberculosis. He was raised by an aunt and uncle who had opened a general store in the new railroad town of Bennett, Iowa. He left school after the sixth grade to help out in his uncle’s store during the depression of the 1890s. Around 1899 he returned to Fulton to work as a general clerk at J. W. Broadhead’s Dry Goods Store.12 According to Anne Edwards in Early Reagan, “Shoes became [his] specialty. He liked children, and particularly admired the graceful turn of a lady’s ankle. He talked about someday traveling west to pioneer. . . . But he remained at Broadhead’s for eight years, gaining a reputation as a young man a bit too fond of alcohol, a fact that made the parents of most eligible Fulton women (who were entranced by his beguiling manner and dark good looks) wary.”13 And then he met Nelle, who was earning her living as a milliner in Fulton.

  Nelle Wilson, who was born on July 18, 1882,14 also spent her early years on a farm. Her mother, Mary Anne Elsey, had been born in England and immigrated to Illinois to work as a domestic servant. When Nelle was seven, her father left the family and moved to Chicago for reasons unknown. Like Jack, Nelle left school after the sixth grade. Her mother died when she was seventeen. Although Nelle had been brought up as a Presbyterian,15 and her father disapproved of Jack, probably because he was a Catholic, they were married in Fulton’s Catholic church on November 8, 1904.16

  It was said that Nelle didn’t mind Jack’s weekend benders at first, but when his older brother, William, was jailed for six months for drunk and disorderly conduct, she apparently had had enough. In February 1906, eighteen months after they married, the Reagans moved to Tampico, a country town with a population of about eight hundred, where the local Law and Order League prevailed and liquor licensing was banned twelve years before national Prohibition.17 They were in their early twenties, full of hope, good-looking, and smart, even sophisticate
d by Tampico standards. Nelle was blue-eyed with auburn hair, petite and full-bosomed.

  Jack was almost six feet tall, well built and handsome, with wavy black hair rakishly parted in the middle, and always impeccably turned out for work in a freshly starched white shirt, a tie, and highly polished shoes.18

  Jack and Nelle spent the next eight years in Tampico, the first five in the apartment on Main Street where Neil and Ronald were born. Three months after Ronald’s birth, they moved up to a two-story frame house with modern plumbing that faced a small park with a Civil War monument and, just beyond that, the railroad tracks and a pair of tall grain elevators. Jack did well Early Ronnie: 1911–1932

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  at H. C. Pitney’s General Store. He was in charge of the shoes and clothing department and made occasional buying trips to Chicago. Energetic and outgoing, he was a natural leader, serving during the years in Tampico as a councilman, an assistant fire chief, a baseball manager, and, though not much of a churchgoer, finance chairman of Saint Mary’s Catholic Church.19

  Neil was baptized at Saint Mary’s, although Nelle had to be prodded by the priest to keep her marital promise to raise their children as Catholics.

  Neil’s godfather, A. C. Burden, owned Burden’s Opera House, located above the bank on Main Street. Nelle and Jack were soon appearing in plays put on there by the town’s amateur dramatic group, for audiences of a hundred or so, seated on folding chairs. Neil recalled rehearsals at his parents’ house. “When the rehearsal wound up at the end of the evening, they’d all sit down and have a bowl of oyster stew and crackers,” he said.

  “Ronald and I’d sneak down the stairs partway and look . . . at all the goings-on down there.”20

  The most significant event of the Reagan family’s years in Tampico was Nelle’s conversion to the Disciples of Christ, a breakaway sect of Presbyterianism. On Easter Sunday, March 27, 1910, she was baptized by total immersion in the Hennepin Canal outside town. When Ronald was born the following year, she refused to have him baptized as a Catholic, and from then on she raised both sons as Disciples of Christ, taking them with her to prayer meetings on Sunday and Wednesday nights and to Sunday school, which she taught. She became a “visiting disciple,” helping the poor and the sick, sometimes wrote the weekly church notes in the Tampico Tornado, and was elected president of the Missionary Society.21

  The Disciples of Christ had emerged out of the great religious upheaval that swept the American frontier in the early nineteenth century, as the new nation spawned new churches, including the Unitarians and the Mormons.

  It was formally organized as a distinct denomination in 1832, and by 1900

  had more than 1.2 million members. It was especially strong in the rural parts of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The Disciples called themselves “simple Christians” and their church “the Christian Church.” Unlike most other Protestant denominations, the Disciples made communion open to anyone who accepted Christ as the son of God and the New Testa-ment as the means to salvation. They rejected the Calvinism of the old Presbyterians, with its emphasis on predestination and the depravity of man.

  Instead, they stressed individual responsibility, the work ethic, education, good works, and Protestant unity.22

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Like many nativist churches, the Disciples had an anti-Catholic streak, seeing Roman Catholics as foreign and morally lax, particularly with regard to alcohol, so Nelle’s choice of this church was something of a slap in the face to her husband. The Disciples of Christ were fanatically opposed to drinking, “the driest of the dries.” They were closely aligned with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. One of the most famous Disciples was Carry Nation, who, in the 1890s, led a crusade of hymn-singing, hatchet-wielding women through the saloons of Kansas, smashing bottles and furniture. The Disciples used grape juice, not wine, in their communion service.23

  In the summer of 1913, the Reagan family’s peaceful life was turned upside down, literally and figuratively. Five years after Henry Ford brought out America’s first affordable car, Jack bought a Model T and within a month had managed to overturn it, with his wife and two sons inside, by crashing into a stump. When it was repaired, it not only widened the family’s hori-zons, making it easier for Nelle to visit her sisters in Morrison and Quincy, but also stimulated Jack’s restlessness. His buying—and drinking—trips to Chicago and other “wet” towns became more frequent.24

  In comparison to his brother William’s alcoholism, which was so severe that Jack tried to have him committed in 1914, Jack’s drinking seemed under control. He tended to binge on holidays and when things were going well, but otherwise he would remain sober for long stretches of time.

  Still, by the age of thirty-one he had apparently had enough of the small-ness—and dryness—of Tampico.

  The Reagans would move five times in the next five years. Their first stop was Chicago, where they spent a miserable eight months living in a cold-water flat. Jack hated being one of three hundred employees at the Fair Store, which billed itself as the largest department store in the world, and was fired after being arrested for public drunkenness.25 Then came three years in Galesburg, home of the country’s largest horse and mule market, where Jack lost another job because of his drinking. (In Galesburg he tried to enlist for service in World War I, but as a father of two was turned down.) A year in Monmouth, a pleasant county seat best known as the birthplace of Wyatt Earp, followed. Finally, in 1919, Jack’s former boss, H. C. Pitney, who was going blind, lured him back to Tampico with an offer of higher pay and the chance to become a partner. The Reagans moved into an apartment above the Pitney store, right across the street Early Ronnie: 1911–1932

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  from the apartment where the boys had been born. After five years of wandering in an attempt to move up in the world, they had come full circle.26

  Yet young Ronald thrived. Buoyed by his mother’s faith and love, he was reading newspapers before he entered school, he earned a 95 average in first grade in Galesburg, and he skipped a grade in Monmouth. His teachers noted his nearly photographic memory, which he may have developed to compensate for his extreme nearsightedness, which was not diagnosed until he was thirteen. Although he was the perpetual new boy in town, he made friends easily. At the same time, he was also already learning to keep part of himself in reserve; he liked to draw, daydream, and wander in the woods. A girl in his third-grade class remembered him thus:

  “He was startling to look at (not only good-looking but he had this air about 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?’ ”27 At nine he made his theatrical debut in the Tampico Christian Church with a recitation entitled “About Mother.”28

  Reagan later called the move back to Tampico “the most fortunate shift of my life. My existence turned into one of those rare Huck Finn–Tom Sawyer idylls.There were woods and mysteries, life and death among the small creatures, hunting and fishing; those were the days when I learned the real riches of rags.”29 He liked playing tag in the town’s stockyard pens and having food fights with the refuse in the alleys behind the stores on Main Street, swimming in the “deep and treacherous” Hennepin Canal—he was the best swimmer among his friends—and learning to play football in the Civil War park. In the summer the Reagan boys picked strawberries for pay.

  In the fall they helped the school janitor rake leaves and were rewarded with a marshmallow roast. They carried coal to the Opera House in exchange for free admission to the silent movies shown there. Both boys loved the Westerns; Ronald’s favorite stars were Tom Mix and William S. Hart.30

  Most nights Nelle sat Neil and Ronald down at one end of the kitchen table and read aloud to them from such books as The Three Musketeers and King Arthur and the Round Table, while Jack read his newspaper at the other end of the table.31 Ronald’s grades were so good
in the fourth grade—he got As in reading, arithmetic, and deportment—that he was one of five students in a class of twenty-two to be cited for excellence.32 He was the kind of boy that grown-ups liked—scrappy but polite. He became particularly close to Jim and Emma Greenman, who owned Greenman’s Jewelry Store next to 2 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Pitney’s and lived above it. One might even say they were the first rich people to take up Ronald Reagan.

  “An elderly childless couple, they took a special fancy to me,” the future president recalled. “I had no grandparents and this sort of spoiling was delightful. The jeweler’s wife gave me ten cents a week as an allowance (a magnificent sum in those days) plus cookies and chocolate every afternoon. The best part was that I was allowed to dream. Many the day I spent deep in a huge rocker in the mystic atmosphere of Aunt Emma’s living room with its horsehair-stuffed gargoyles of furniture, its shawls and anti-macassars, globes of glass over birds and flowers, books and strange odors; many the day I remained hidden in a corner downstairs in Uncle Jim’s jewelry shop with its curious relics, faint lights from gold and silver and bronze, lulled by the erratic ticking of a dozen clocks and the drone of the customers who came in.”33

  The one member of the Reagan family who wasn’t thrilled to be back in Tampico was Jack, especially after its single tavern closed when Prohibition went into effect on January 16, 1920. Nelle’s church celebrated the event with a midnight service.

  When Ronald was almost ten, his parents moved to Dixon, another county seat in northwestern Illinois, and there they stayed for the next seventeen years. They did, however, move five times within Dixon, always to a smaller place. Reagan considered Dixon, where he completed grade school and high school and spent his college summers, his hometown. “All of us have to have a place we go back to,” he wrote. “Dixon is that place for me.”34 Dixon was where his commitment to the Disciples of Christ took hold, where his political views started to form, where his love of sports and his attraction to the stage began, and where his winning personality emerged—the cheerful determination that made his ambition seem more like helpfulness than selfishness.