Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  “closer to home” that attracted him—radio, which was then largely centered in Chicago. He went back to Altschuler and told him, “Way down deep inside, what I’d really like to be is a radio sports announcer.”8

  “Radio had created a new profession,” he later wrote. “Broadcasting play-by-play reports of football games, people like Graham McNamee and Ted Husing had become as famous as some Hollywood stars and often they were more famous than the athletes they reported on.” Parentheti-cally, he made an even more telling remark: “I’d seen several movies in which sports announcers played themselves and thought there was a remote possibility the job might lead me into the movies.”9 Reagan’s recounting of the thought process involved in his decision reveals a clever willingness to move stealthily and incrementally toward a seemingly unat-tainable goal, as well as an ability to make compromises along the way.

  The goal, it is clear, was stardom.

  Altschuler had no connections in radio, but he approved of Dutch’s choice, because radio was one of the few growing industries during the Depression, and he urged him to “take any kind of job, even sweeping Iowa: 1933–1937

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  floors, just to get in.”10 In early September, Dutch went to Chicago. He didn’t make it past the receptionists at the big networks, though he did have a stroke of luck. On his second attempt to see the program director at NBC, a secretary came out and sat with him. “This is the big time,” he recalled her telling him. “No one in the city wants to take a chance on in-experience. Go out in what we call the sticks—we shouldn’t but we do—

  and try some of the smaller stations. They can’t afford to compete with us for experienced talent, so they are often willing to give a newcomer a chance. I think you will make it—come back and see me after you have some experience.”11

  He was only too happy to flee the big city: “I couldn’t afford cabs and I was afraid of the damn buses—as a matter of fact, the city itself scared the bejesus out of me. Everybody seemed to know where they were going and what they were doing, and I could get lost just looking for a men’s room.”12 He hitchhiked back to Dixon in the rain, borrowed his father’s

  “third-hand Oldsmobile,”13 and headed for Iowa.

  His first stop was sixty-five miles west: WOC in Davenport, a small city sitting on a hill just across the Mississippi from Rock Island, Illinois. The station’s call letters stood for World of Chiropractic; it was owned and operated by the Palmer School of Chiropractic and located on the school’s campus. He auditioned for the program director, a tough old Scotsman named Peter MacArthur, who was impressed enough by his delivery—Dutch recreated the fourth quarter of a football game in which he had played for Eureka the previous fall—to offer him $5 and bus fare to announce a University of Iowa game the following week. Three more trial games followed that fall, but as the holidays approached Dutch still did not have a full-time job.14 In November he voted for the first time—for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who carried forty-two of forty-eight states, including Illinois. (Herbert Hoover was so despised by 1932 that in Detroit his campaign train was greeted by chants of “Hang Hoover! Hang Hoover!,” and in many other cities his limousine was pelted with eggs and tomatoes.)15

  Finally, just after the New Year, MacArthur called from Davenport to say that a position as staff announcer had opened up at WOC. The starting salary was $100 a month, which Dutch would apportion as follows: $32 for a room in a boardinghouse, $16.60 for meals at the Palmer School cafeteria, $20 for Nelle and Jack back in Dixon. After receiving approval from a Disciples of Christ minister, he also decided to send $10 a month to Neil, who was in his last year at Eureka, in lieu of his tithes to the church.16

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House The remainder—$21.40—was his to spend or save as he liked. (“You could get a made-to-measure suit with two pairs of pants for $18.50,” he wrote in his autobiography.)17

  Ronald Reagan officially became a radio announcer on February 10, 1933.

  A month later, on March 12, President Roosevelt gave the first of his Fireside Chats, reassuring Americans that it was “safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress”—thus launching the first radio presidency. Like Adolf Hitler (who also took office in 1933), FDR was quick to recognize the power of radio to sway a mass audience, to connect a country’s leader with its citizens in their living rooms, a possibility that had never existed before. One of the new President’s most avid listeners was young Dutch. “I soon idolized FDR,” he would later write. “During his Fireside Chats, his strong, gentle, confident voice resonated across the nation with an eloquence that brought comfort and resilience to a nation caught up in a storm and reassured us that we could lick any problem.”18

  Reagan would later criticize Roosevelt’s “alphabet soup of federal agencies” as the first step toward “a form of veiled socialism [in] America.”19 In June 1933, however, he was grateful that his father’s efforts on behalf of the Democrats were rewarded with a job in the Dixon office of the newly created Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). That November, five months after graduating from Eureka, Neil Reagan was appointed district representative of the Federal Reemployment Bureau (FRB).20 Neither Neil nor Ronald mentioned this government job in their later accounts of this period, and Ronald would often cite his father’s supposedly frustrating experience with the federal bureaucracy as his first insight into why big government doesn’t work. Neil often said that he had registered as a Republican “six months after Roosevelt’s first inauguration”—perhaps he was frustrated by his New Deal experience. According to some sources, Jack considered Neil’s defection to the party of the rich a personal betrayal.21 In any case, his younger son was loyally defending FDR and the New Deal in heated arguments with Republican friends and colleagues in Iowa.22

  Dutch did not get off to a good start at WOC, where his staff job involved “many hours of playing phonograph records, interspersed with the reading of commercials,” as well as announcing the news, weather, and sports scores, from early morning until the midnight sign-off: “This is station WOC, owned and operated by the Palmer School of Chiropractic, the Chiropractic Fountainhead, Davenport, Iowa, where the West begins Iowa: 1933–1937

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  and in the state where the tall corn grows.” Advertisers complained about the novice announcer’s wooden readings, and after he neglected to plug the sponsor of a romantic organ music program, Runge Mortuary, he was fired. “It was the end of the world,” Reagan recalled feeling. Fortunately, his replacement, a local schoolteacher, demanded a contract, and, as Reagan put it, “WOC was not in the habit of giving contracts.” The teacher quit, and Reagan was rehired temporarily until a new replacement could be found. “I was mad, didn’t give a damn,” he recalled, and so he read his next commercial “freely, easily and with a pretty good punch. There was no more talk of a replacement.”23

  Advertising was gospel at WOC, which was run by “Colonel” B. J.

  Palmer, the son of D. D. Palmer, the mesmerist turned chiropractor who had founded the Palmer School at the turn of the century and the radio station in 1922.24 One of the Colonel’s favorite mottoes was “Early to bed, early to rise; Work like hell—and advertise.” Another was “Only mints can make money without advertising.”25 He was also fond of proclaiming, in lectures on salesmanship he gave throughout the Midwest, “Get the big idea and all else follows,” “Sell yourself in all your business approaches,” and

  “Smile your voice!” The Palmers lived in a mansion next to the school; their

  “world famous collection of spines” was housed on the third floor. The small garden between the buildings was called “A Little Bit O’ Heaven.”26 Reagan leaves B. J. Palmer out of his books, probably because he considered him too weird: he had a full beard and long flowing hair, which he washed once a year; he slept with his head pointed toward the North Pole; and his late Saint Bernard, Big Ben, which had been stuffed, was kept under the piano
.27

  Nonetheless, one can’t help but think that the Colonel’s assortment of peppy slogans, which were hung in the hallways of the school and radio station, had their effect on the future actor and politician.

  Two years before Reagan went to WOC, Palmer had bought WHO, a larger station affiliated with NBC, in Des Moines, the state capital. He spent close to $250,000 upgrading its technical capabilities, making it one of only fifteen stations in the country with a 50,000-watt transmitter.

  WHO’s 532-foot antenna tower was the tallest structure in Iowa, and its broadcasts could be heard throughout the Midwest.28 In April 1933, MacArthur sent Dutch to Des Moines to broadcast the Drake Relays, a major national amateur track event held annually at Drake College. (Like Eureka, Drake was a Disciples of Christ institution, but eight times larger.)29

  The following month MacArthur was transferred to WHO, and he took 6 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Dutch with him as chief sports announcer. MacArthur would become the younger man’s Iowa mentor, following in the line of Reverend Cleaver and Sid Altschuler. According to Reagan, MacArthur had come to America from Scotland with the celebrated Harry Lauder’s vaudeville troupe; he eventually found his way to the Palmer School of Chiropractic, where he sought relief from his crippling arthritis, and was taken on as one of WOC’s first announcers. (His strong Highland burr became his on-air trademark.) By the time Reagan met him, he was walking with two canes, and would soon be on crutches.30

  At WHO, Dutch’s salary was doubled to $200 a month; a year later it was raised to $300. He was now making enough money to marry Margaret Cleaver, but it was not to be. After graduating from Eureka, Margaret had taught high school for a year in a nearby town, then, to Dutch’s dismay, decided to spend a year in Paris, where her sister was living.31 In the summer of 1934 she wrote to say that she had fallen in love with an American diplomat named James Waddell Gordon Jr., and she enclosed Dutch’s fraternity pin and engagement ring in her letter.32 Reagan later reflected stoically, “As our lives traveled into diverging paths, we would find that it was true that before and after age twenty-one, people are often different. At any rate, our lovely and wholesome relationship did not survive growing up.”33 However hurt he may have been at the time, his feelings didn’t stop from him buying his first car, a brand-new metallic-beige Nash Lafayette two-seater convertible, from Margaret’s brother-in-law, who had a dealership in Illinois.34

  Dutch asked Neil to drive the car to Des Moines. His brother was out of work again, so he introduced him to MacArthur, who guaranteed Neil $30 a week for announcing football scores and reading laxative commercials.35 Neil moved into Dutch’s apartment in a subdivided mansion in an old neighborhood near the radio station for a few months, before being sent to WOC in Davenport as a full-time sports announcer. In 1936, he was promoted to program director at WOC.

  That same year he married Bess Hoffman, a Drake College graduate from Des Moines, two weeks after meeting her. Dutch urged him to wait, but Neil ignored his advice.36 Meanwhile Jack, still chain-smoking, had suffered the first of his heart attacks and could no longer work.

  Dutch started sending his parents $100 a month. “I had the satisfac-tion,” Reagan later wrote, “of being able to send a monthly check that removed all his economic problems for the first time in his life . . . it never entered his mind that he could apply for public assistance.”37 Nelle Iowa: 1933–1937

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  gave up her job at the dress shop in Dixon and frequently visited her son in Des Moines.

  Dutch’s official title at WHO was sports director. He announced football games, swimming meets, track meets, and car races. By 1934 he had his own show, The Teaberry Sports Review, which aired twice a day. He also interviewed visiting sports stars, most notably the world heavyweight champion Max Baer (in Reagan’s words, “as beautiful a piece of physical machinery as ever stepped into the fight ring”).38 Occasionally he was asked to interview celebrities from other fields, including the movie star Leslie Howard (“I was so stage-struck that I forgot his name as I stepped up to the microphone”) and the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, whose flam-boyant style and dramatic voice so mesmerized him that he let her run away with the interview.39

  He became best known for “covering” baseball games from Chicago’s Wrigley Field without ever stepping out of WHO’s studio in Des Moines.

  “To millions of sports fans in at least seven or eight middlewestern states,”

  the Des Moines Dispatch reported on August 3, 1934, “the voice of Dutch Reagan is a daily source of baseball dope. Every afternoon at 2:00 o’clock,

  ‘Dutch’ goes on the air with his rapid-fire, play-by-play visualization of the home games of Chicago’s major league baseball teams, the Cubs and the Sox.”40 Reagan called this technique “the magic of radio.” A telegraph operator sitting in the stadium press box tapped out the game’s plays in Morse code to an operator sitting in the radio studio opposite Dutch at his microphone. From these brief flashes he constructed the entire scene in the baseball park—the pitcher’s form, the batter’s gestures, the fans’ reactions, even changes in the weather—out of his imagination. (He had visited Wrigley Field only once, when it was empty, to get a sense of what it looked like.)

  “You just couldn’t believe that you were not actually there,” remembered a WHO colleague of Reagan’s decades later. In his four years at the station, Dutch made some six hundred baseball games come alive this way.41

  Reagan lived in Des Moines between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six—an attractive, enthusiastic, unattached young man, a local celebrity making good money in the middle of the Depression, a big fish in the small pond that was the capital of the Hawkeye State. Bland, drab Des Moines, with a population of 145,000 and the home offices of innumerable insurance companies, was the largest city Reagan had lived in, and he found it exciting. Civic organizations asked him to give speeches at their 6 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House banquets, the Dispatch made him its sports columnist, he dated prairie beauties with names like Jeanne Tesdell and Gretchen Schnelle. Cy’s Moonlight Inn, a former speakeasy on the edge of town, and Club Belvedere, the capital’s only real nightclub, with chorus girls and a casino, were his regular hangouts. But he never gambled and was always careful not to drink excessively. He was most comfortable, it seemed, with the friends he made at Drake University, some of whom belonged to his fraternity (Tau Kappa Epsilon), many of whom were fellow Disciples of Christ. On fall weekends he was field announcer at Drake’s football games, and for a year he shared an apartment with an assistant coach at Drake. When Nelle came to town, he and his Drake friends took her out with them. It was all very wholesome: Dutch and his buddies had formed a barbershop quartet and often sang at Cy’s on Saturday nights.42

  Reagan took up riding in Des Moines and, according to his memoir, it was there that he first heard the saying that would become a lifetime motto: “Nothing is so good for the inside of a man as the outside of a horse.”43 In order to ride the horses at Fort Des Moines, he joined the cavalry reserve, but he had to cheat on his eye test to earn his commission as a second lieutenant in the 14th Cavalry Regiment.44 For a while he dated a blue-ribbon equestrienne he had met while emceeing a horse show; as the romance became more serious, however, their religious differences—

  she was a devout Catholic—became a problem.45

  He kept in excellent physical condition by swimming regularly in the pool at Camp Dodge, another major military installation just outside the city. In Des Moines, too, he apparently developed his predilection for the brown suits that would raise eyebrows when he was president. He liked tooling around the Iowa capital in his beige convertible in tawny tweed jackets, puffing on a briar pipe, evidently aware of his snappy, color-coordinated image.46

  On September 4, 1936, his hero came to town. FDR had been nominated for a second term that summer; in his acceptance speech he declared, “This generation has a rendezvous w
ith destiny,” a phrase Reagan would use twenty-eight years later in his famous speech for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. During the campaign Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune claimed Roosevelt was the candidate of Moscow, and as election day approached the paper constantly reminded its readers of how many days remained “to save your country.”

  (McCormick ordered his switchboard operators to repeat this message to Iowa: 1933–1937

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  all callers.) McCormick wasn’t alone: across the country, from Beacon Hill to Nob Hill, America’s rich were angrily telling one another that Roosevelt was “a traitor to his class.” FDR counterattacked on the radio. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he told his listeners. “They are united in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”47

  Between broadcasts at WHO, Dutch entertained his colleagues, of both parties, with his affectionately mischievous imitations of the Fireside Chats. He also plugged his candidate whenever he could on his radio shows.48 And it was with a mixture of awe and excitement that he watched FDR drive by the WHO building in his open limousine, waving to the crowds, on his way to the Great Plains Drought Committee conference with Midwestern governors.49 Two months later, Roosevelt carried every state except Maine and Vermont as he trounced one of those governors, Alf Landon of Kansas.

  As the fish grew bigger, the pond seemed smaller, and the Iowa winters seemed colder and longer. So in February 1936, Dutch Reagan, star broadcaster, came up with a way to get WHO to give him “an all-expense paid holiday under the California sun.” Every winter the Chicago Cubs trained on Catalina Island; if the radio station let him accompany them there, he would agree to count the trip as vacation time. It was more than the weather that impelled him toward Los Angeles. He may have put off his dream of movie stardom, but he hadn’t abandoned it. An interview he did shortly before that trip made him realize that Des Moines was not, after all, that far away from Hollywood.