Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Compared with Tampico, Dixon, which had a population of 8,191 in 1920, seemed like a city to young Ronald. In most ways it was typical of the small towns in rural Illinois—farmers brought their wheat and corn to market for shipment to Chicago, Omaha, and cities in the South on the Illinois Central and Northwestern railroads; dairy farmers supplied the Borden Milk Company’s condensing plant; there was one hotel, and Lincoln had stayed there. But nearly half its wage earners were employed by manufacturing firms—the Grand Detour Plow Company, the Clipper Lawnmower Early Ronnie: 1911–1932

  2 3

  Company, the Medusa Cement Company, the Reynolds Wire Company, the Brown Shoe Company—and there was a large Irish Catholic minority among these lower-middle-class, blue-collar workers, many of whom were Democrats.35

  That was part of Dixon’s attraction for Jack Reagan—the speakeasies of Bootlegger’s Knob on the South Side were perhaps another.36 He had persuaded H. C. Pitney to sell his general store in Tampico and back him in a shoe store in downtown Dixon. The deal was that Jack’s commissions would be deducted from his debt to Pitney, and when that was paid off, he would own half the business.37 Jack now called himself a “graduate practi-pedist,” because somewhere along the way he had taken a correspondence course from the American School of Practipedics—the newfangled, quasi-scientific study of the bones of the foot. There were already four shoe stores in Dixon, but Reagan’s Fashion Boot Shop, as Jack named the store, was the first to use an X-ray machine for fitting shoes.38 Despite the modern gimmicks, the shop did not get off to a good start, mainly because wholesale farm prices fell by nearly 50 percent between 1920 and 1921, and would not recover until 1926.39

  The Reagans rented an old two-story frame house with a barn on South Hennepin Avenue, a few blocks from Jack’s store. The boys shared a bedroom and a bed, and Nelle used the third bedroom for the sewing she took in when ends didn’t meet. Years later, Neil recalled: The downstairs part of the barn had just been made into a garage for a car, but there were still a couple of stalls there. Upstairs was just an empty hayloft. To this day, I can’t remember what brought it about, but in some way I got interested in pigeons. I said something to my dad about it, and my dad brought home a pair of fancy pigeons, pouters, and said, “Now, build a little nest in a couple of boxes and put them into the haymow, keep the haymow door closed for three or four days. Feed them and keep them watered, but don’t let them out for three or four days. That way, when you do open the mow door, they’ll go out in the morning and they might stay all day, but they’ll come back at night, because now this is their nest.”

  Well, over a short period of time, why, he bought two or three other pairs of different kinds of fancy pigeons; and, of course, as pigeons do, before long, when they came back at night, a thousand others would come back with them. The first thing you know I had practically the whole mow up there covered with boxes nailed to the walls and had pigeons up to our neck.

  2 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Dutch got interested in birds’ eggs, collecting birds’ eggs, and my dad got him an old glass display case from a store. . . . Then they put cotton batting on the floor of it, and that’s where Ronald kept his bird egg collection. He’d punch a hole in both ends and blow the eggs, and he was climbing trees to get them out. This kind of stuff didn’t interest me.

  Then I got to raising rabbits and built quite a hutch out back of the barn. . . . Come Friday night, after the pigeons came in, 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. I built up a little business.40

  In March 1923 the Reagans moved to a smaller house on the North Side, where the brothers had to sleep on an enclosed porch but could attend the academically superior North Dixon High School.41 The Rock River divided Dixon socially as well as geographically. Downtown was on the South Side, as were the factories and the working-class Irish Catholic neighborhoods. The North Side was a little leafier, a little wealthier, more Protestant—“the sissies’ part of town,” as Neil put it. He refused to switch from South Dixon High School, at which he had started the previous fall, preferring to trek across the bridge every morning and afternoon.42 From then on, the Rock River also came to symbolize the division in the Reagan family.

  On one side were Jack and Neil, on the other Nelle and Ronald. In talking about his father with a Saturday Evening Post writer in 1974, Ronald Reagan said, “There was never any buddy-buddy relationship, because of either fear or self-consciousness.”43 While Neil frequented Red Vail’s pool hall on the South Side with his friends, the sons of firemen and factory workers, Ronald was home taking elocution lessons from Nelle.

  “We just sort of went our separate ways,” explained Neil.44 On March 25, 1924, the Dixon Telegraph reported, “Neil Reagan was taken into Justice A. H. Hanneken’s court yesterday afternoon on a warrant charging him with disturbing the peace, he being taken as the second party in Saturday night’s fistic encounter staged near the corner of North Galena avenue and Boyd street, when police responded to a riot call.”45

  As a Dixon schoolmate put it, “Neil was all boy, Ronald was a momma’s boy.”46 Perhaps young Ronald was aware of this perception of him, for he Early Ronnie: 1911–1932

  2 5

  began to insist on being called Dutch, saying he hated the prissy-sounding Ronald.47 Neil’s South Side gang gave him his nickname, Moon, because he parted his thick head of hair down the middle like the popular comic strip character Moon Mullins.48

  In the winter of 1922, coming home from playing basketball at the YMCA after school, Ronald found his father passed out drunk in the snow outside the South Hennepin Avenue house. He didn’t tell his mother, but that spring he asked to be baptized into her church. On June 21, 1922, Ronald became a member of the First Christian Church of Dixon. At eleven, he was somewhat young to enter the Disciples of Christ, who rejected pe-dobaptism and believed that choosing the faith should be a rational adult decision. But Ronald’s fervor was such that he even persuaded Neil to be baptized with him. There is some evidence that this happened behind their Catholic father’s back.49 In any case, Neil would return to his father’s side of the religious divide and reconvert to Catholicism when he turned eighteen, in 1926.

  Nelle’s whole life had come to revolve around her church. She believed in tithing but could seldom afford to part with 10 percent of their income, so she made up for it in good works. She taught the True Blue Class in Bible study to a women’s group every Sunday. She was song director of the choir and president of the Women’s Missionary Society, and she raised funds to build a parsonage for the new minister, Reverend Ben Hill Cleaver. According to Neil, she regularly visited prisoners in the county jail, where she would “get all the inmates singing and drive the sheriff nuts.” It wasn’t unusual for her to have inmates released into her custody; she would put them up in her sewing room until they found a place to live. “Blacks, whites, we never thought about color,” Neil said. “She would hear of a case and just know that person wasn’t guilty and go to work on the state authorities who, I suspect, finally just gave up and paroled the person because it was too much trouble otherwise.”50

  In a compilation made by local historian Ron Marlow of references to the First Christian Church congregation published in the Dixon Telegraph between 1920 and 1928, Nelle’s name appears 136 times, Ronald’s name sixty-six, and Neil’s sixty. On November 24, 1923, for example, the Telegraph described a piano recital at the church in nearby Prairieville, at which

  “Mrs. J. E. Reagan . . . gave a number of delightful readings. . . . [She] captivated her audience, reading ‘The Italian’s Story of the Rose,’ an exception-2 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House ally beautiful selection, and ‘On the Othe
r Train,’ another pleasing number.

  . . . Mrs. Reagan is most versatile, and is equally happy in tragic, comic or descriptive readings. Every number on the program was heartily applauded.

  After the program the ladies of the Prairieville Social Circle served refresh-ments, clearing $19.45. Those taking part in the program were served free of charge, a compliment from the Circle and much appreciated.”51

  Once a month, Nelle and Ronald entertained the patients at Dixon State Hospital with banjo playing and recitations. She also wrote poems, essays, and plays with moralistic messages and, to quote her younger son, became “the dean of dramatic recitals for the countryside.”52 A typical Nelle verse, titled “On the Sunnyside”:

  As you journey on the road of life

  Observe as you push your way

  Some faces moodish, sullen, sad.

  Others with smile so gay.

  These last ones are on the sunnyside

  They see the best in life

  Think lovely thoughts, ennobling the soul

  Keeping them from strife. . . .

  The sunnyside’s the only side

  Full of graces divine

  Sometimes too bright for us to scan

  I’d seek to make them mine.53

  A temperance play Nelle wrote for the Dixon church contained the telling line “I love you, Daddy, except when you have that old bottle.”54

  Nelle’s attitude toward Jack’s drinking was complicated. On one hand she was a fervent temperance advocate; on the other, she told her boys that alcoholism was a sickness their father could not control. “She asked us to help him and love him,” Ronald Reagan later recalled.55 As he explained in a 1989 letter to the photographer Pat York, “Nelle drilled into us that if something went wrong, something that made us unhappy, we should take it in stride and not let it get us down. She promised that down the line something good would happen and we’d find ourselves realizing it wouldn’t have happened had that other unhappy thing not taken place.”56

  Although they belonged to different churches, Jack and Nelle shared a strong belief in religious and racial tolerance. While the Disciples of Christ had an anti-Catholic slant, the “brotherhood of man” was very much part Early Ronnie: 1911–1932

  2 7

  of their creed. Jack once slept in his car rather than stay in a hotel that did not accept Jews. He would not let Neil and Ronald see D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation when it came to town in a revival, because, as he put it,

  “it deals with the Ku Klux Klan against the colored folks, and I’m damned if anyone in this family will go see it. The Klan’s the Klan, and a sheet’s a sheet, and any man who wears one over his head is a bum.”57

  Dixon had twelve black families. They were not allowed in the town’s hotel, beauty salons, or barbershops, but they could eat at its luncheon-ettes and go to the movie theater, though they had to sit in the balcony.

  Neil would sit in the balcony with two of his black high school friends, and Nelle thought nothing of having them over for dinner. Yet this was a town where the Ku Klux Klan had staged parades and burned crosses,58

  and where Ronald remembered a race riot that began when, as he put it,

  “a Negro bum slashed a white bum.” As Reagan biographer Lou Cannon tells it, “The whites who ostensibly had been living in peace with the Negro community in Dixon now advanced on Negro homes and terrorized the inhabitants. Reagan recalls whites hurling Negro children onto freight-train boxcars and the screaming youngsters being carried hundreds of miles away in fear and panic.”59

  Still, no historic figure was more venerated in this Illinois town than the man who freed the slaves. On June 28, 1924, the Telegraph announced:

  “The life of Abraham Lincoln will be acted on the Dixon Athletic ground by 600 people for four nights starting July 9th. Besides the actors there will be 100 horses and two bands in the spectacle. The pageant is being given by Dixon Post No. 12, American Legion. . . . The vast epic of Lincoln’s life will be unfolded in 24 memorable scenes [with] large groups of dancers for the six beautiful ballets that are part of the spectacle. But it is not a ‘high brow’ affair. There is nothing that a child cannot grasp and fully enjoy. The story is as simple as the life of the backwoods boy who got to be president. ” Neil and Ronald played Union soldiers.60

  At dawn on Easter Sunday, 1926, fifteen-year-old Ronald led his church’s annual Sunrise Prayer Meeting on the Hennepin Avenue Bridge. By then he was already teaching Sunday school in the morning and occasionally leading the Christian Endeavor prayer meetings on Sunday nights. He was a sophomore at North Dixon High and had fallen in love with his classmate Margaret Cleaver, one of Reverend Cleaver’s three very proper daughters.

  Margaret insisted on keeping things on a just-friends basis until their senior 2 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House year. The popular minister became something of a surrogate father for the teenage Ronald and even taught him how to drive.

  Reagan later noted that Margaret was like his mother, “short, pretty, auburn-haired and intelligent.” She was the brightest girl in their class, down-to-earth, sure of herself, and rather serious. She terrified Neil, who said she “spat tacks.”61 Ronald tried to hide his father’s drinking problem from her, but, as he later wrote in his post-presidential memoir, An American Life, “one day when I was out with Margaret, she brought up Jack’s drinking; it was during one of the times when he had gone off the wagon, and somebody had given her a vivid account of his behavior. Coming from a very religious, strict family, she was quite upset. . . . I tried to tell her what Nelle had told us about Jack’s problem, that it was a sickness, but she’d never heard anything like that before and didn’t buy it. My heart was just about broken. I thought I was going to lose her. When I went home, I told my mother about it and said that if I did lose Margaret because of Jack, I didn’t know what I’d do, but I’d probably disown him and never speak to him again. Nelle felt terrible for me but asked me again to be patient with Jack. In the end, Margaret decided that she was willing to accept Jack’s drinking rather than break up our romance.”62

  From their freshman year, both Ronald and Margaret were in the Dramatic Club, which was run by the school’s English teacher, B. J. Frazer, who was quick to recognize Reagan’s talent. Under Frazer’s direction they co-starred in productions of contemporary Broadway plays. In his senior year, Ronald was elected president of the club. He was also president of the student body (Margaret was president of the senior class), art director of the yearbook, and—what he considered the greatest accomplishment of his high school career—tackle on the varsity football team. In addition he found time to serve as vice president in charge of entertainment for the YMCA’s Hi-Y Club, which was dedicated to “Clean Speech, Clean Sports, Clean Living, and Clean Scholarship.” His job was to invite local businessmen to give inspirational talks to the group. Only his grades suffered: he graduated in June 1928 with a B average.63

  That month the Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover to succeed Calvin Coolidge, who had presided over the greatest economic boom the country had ever known, and the Democrats nominated New York governor Alfred E. Smith, the first Catholic to run for the presidency. Smith, who had been born on the Lower East Side, spoke with a heavy New York accent, played up his Irish background, and opposed Prohibition. The Re-Early Ronnie: 1911–1932

  2 9

  publicans portrayed him as a lush and spread rumors that the Pope was going to move to Washington if Smith won. Jack hung Smith banners on his car, and was deeply disappointed when his candidate lost by a landslide in November.64

  One wonders what Nelle, who apparently was also a Democrat, thought about the wet Al Smith. According to Garry Wills in Reagan’s America, one of the men in her church used to kid her by saying, “I could really take a liking to you if you weren’t such a Democrat.”65 Jack’s sons shared his enthusiasm for the party of the people. Neil became part of the blue-collar working class when he took a job at the
Medusa Cement Company after graduating from high school in 1926. Ronald’s summer jobs, on the other hand—first as a caddie at Plum Hollow Country Club, then as a lifeguard at Lowell Park—brought him into direct contact with the opposition: wealthy Republicans.

  He started caddieing in junior high school and continued on and off all through high school. One of the men he caddied for regularly was Charles Walgreen, America’s first drugstore tycoon. Walgreen, who had started with one store on Chicago’s South Side in 1901 and built a national chain of 110 stores by 1927, had grown up in Dixon and often returned to his hometown. In the late 1920s he bought a six-hundred-acre estate overlooking the Rock River. In her memoir, his wife, Myrtle Walgreen, remembered that the young Reagan “came to one of the picnics which we gave for the caddies each year and I brought him his plate of food while he lay in the hammock. That was his idea of being king.”66

  In 1926, when he was fifteen, Ronald spent the summer as a construction worker, which he liked because it helped him build up his skinny body.

  “I was hired at 35 cents an hour—10 hours a day, six days a week,” he wrote in a 1984 article for UPI. “First tools handed me were pick and shovel. . . .

  Before the summer was over I’d graduated to laying hardwood floor, shingling roof and painting the exterior.”67 The following summer, between his junior and senior years, he was hired as a lifeguard, a job he loved—perhaps because it allowed him to be narcissistic and altruistic at the same time.

  From Memorial Day to Labor Day, he worked seven days a week, from ten in the morning till ten at night. Three miles north of town, Lowell Park was a 320-acre heavily forested preserve with a beach on the Rock River and a posh hotel called the Lodge, where well-to-do Midwestern families, mostly from Chicago, spent their summers. Here he found another mentor in Sid Altschuler, a Kansas City businessman married to a Dixon girl, whose 3 0