Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  It was a triumphant moment. And the triumph—something he took as a personal triumph—was a revelation. He was exhilarated. He’d discovered the power of performance, how his words could spark action. It was a defining moment in Ronald Reagan’s life. As the students straggled back to dorms just after two in the morning, he came to terms with the realization that the poor boy from Dixon, the modest scholar, the fifth-string athlete, the cocky SOB, was blessed with a talent.

  * * *

  —

  That Thanksgiving weekend delivered further revelations. Dutch arrived home, back in Dixon, to a rash of heavy storms and a family in the throes of transition. Jack was still out of work, and Moon’s job had changed. His monthly $125 salary at the Medusa Portland Cement Company had been keeping the Reagans afloat, but casework evaporated. His new position paid a pittance. There was barely enough to keep the family fed and warm. And Jack was back on the prowl, sneaking out at night to indulge his craving for bootlegger booze, filling Nelle with resentment and despair. “Neighbors and relatives suggested she get a divorce,” a friend recalled, “but this was absolutely against her beliefs.” As dark as things had grown, she and Jack had kept their marriage together. He didn’t repeat the sins of men in previous generations of Nelle’s family who abandoned home when wanderlust struck. And she was determined to continue as a family, however fractured. But there was a streak of tension that ran through the house, which Dutch did his best to avoid.

  When the Cleavers invited him to attend a play with them in Rockford, he jumped at the chance. There was a touring-company production of Journey’s End, the sensational R. C. Sherriff antiwar drama that had thrilled London audiences and was set to open on Broadway months later in New York. This was a first for Dutch. Up to now, the sum total of his theater experience was church skits and amateur school productions. He had never seen a professional play. He was overwhelmed by the performances, the way the actors used silence as well as words to convey emotion, how they modulated their voices and moved their bodies as instruments of storytelling. “In some strange way,” he recalled, “I was also on stage.” Margaret had already joined Eureka’s Dramatic Club. Now Dutch was eager to get involved.

  But when they returned to school following the holiday break, the drama on campus took precedence over the arts. The Eureka students were effectively on strike. Academics had ground to a halt. Sympathetic professors who faced empty classrooms marked everyone present.

  A committee of student leaders was busy negotiating with the trustees and alumni for a resolution to end the strike. The sticking point was President Bert Wilson’s tenure. The students refused to entertain any outcome that left him in place; the board opposed dismissing him under pressure. They were willing to accept Wilson’s resignation so long as the same fate befell several administration and faculty members sympathetic to the strike (including Sam Harrod, Dutch’s financial benefactor), as well as its ringleaders.

  In the end, the students prevailed and Bert Wilson resigned, although the number of departments at Eureka was greatly reduced and the school remained on the verge of insolvency. Everything else went on as before.

  For Dutch, the memory of the strike would always be bathed in a golden glow. He was recused from the nitty-gritty, the long hours of arduous negotiations that ultimately deposed a school president. He let others do the complex work of bringing the dispute to an end. Instead, he concentrated on the spirit of the strike, on increased campus morale and solidarity. For him, the highlight would always be that night in the chapel, that moment in front of the student body when he discovered what it felt like to be at the front of a just cause, and to be heard and acclaimed. Once the spring semester began, Dutch beat a path to the Dramatic Club, where a new young teacher, Ellen Marie Johnson, was making her name as someone who knew how to teach the fundamentals of stagecraft with contemporary flair. Up until her arrival, the club’s productions were fusty retreads of Victorian-era melodramas or Gilbert and Sullivan light opera. But Miss Johnson edged into vaudeville and farce.

  She immediately recruited Dutch for The Brat, a domestic comedy with a role that seemed almost too close to home. He played an alcoholic, the dissolute son of a well-to-do family who is reformed by a witty street urchin who charms him into marriage. For a novice actor experimenting with character, there was plenty of personal history for Dutch to draw on. A rousing dance number served to lighten the mood.

  That play was like catnip to Dutch. He’d gotten a taste of the spotlight during the strike, but this was a completely different type of performance. The rush he felt from acting was visceral. The opportunity to get under the skin of a character, to put his own stamp on it, to hear the feedback and the applause—there was nothing like it. He was sold from the moment the curtain went up.

  If the Dramatic Club helped carry him through the rest of the semester, his academic pursuits certainly didn’t. Dutch’s grades were a mix of C’s and D’s. He barely maintained a grade-point average high enough to remain eligible to play sports. Not that he seemed any closer to playing on the football team. Coach seemed even less inclined to start him in his sophomore year, and Dutch was convinced it was personal. “I’d tolerated Mac McKinzie’s lack of appreciation for my gridiron skills long enough,” he decided. It was humiliating. What’s more, he was broke. Freshman year had effectively wiped out his savings. The ordeal of raising enough money to return to college seemed insurmountable. He wasn’t even certain he wanted to go back.

  Things weren’t much rosier in Dixon. The best one could say of the Reagan family was that they were coexisting, holding things together. Jack had a part-time job at the sanatorium where his brother Will had died, and Nelle was working downtown as a seamstress at the Marilyn Shop, for $14 a week. All warmth had gone out of their marriage. Dutch’s return to his old job on the lifeguard chair in Lowell Park provided an escape as much as it did a wage. It was liberating to be out of the family crucible during daylight hours. At the water’s edge, elevated above the crowd, he was a local hero again. When he wasn’t in action, he relaxed in the shade, arguing politics with his boss, Ed Graybill, whom his wife described as a “strong Republican.”

  That summer isolated Dutch from the big decisions in his life. But when the park closed down at the end of August, his irresolution about college was stronger than ever. His financial situation was pitiful. He’d made only $200, not enough to cover his share of tuition. It didn’t seem worth the effort to go begging again. An old high school buddy who worked as a rodman for a local surveyor confided that he was quitting his job and suggested that Dutch step into the vacancy. It seemed like a reasonable solution. He could earn some real money for a change, contribute to the family. As extra incentive, the surveyor made him “an offer too good to refuse.” If he worked for a year, his boss would help him get a full-ride athletic scholarship to his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin.

  That sealed it. His days at Eureka were over. It meant a separation from Mugs, whom he loved more than ever, but they could spend weekends and holidays together. And acting would just have to wait. Perhaps his presence might help stabilize things at home. In any case, he had made up his mind. The road crew he joined was involved in some work around Lowell Park, but the work was wholly dependent on the weather. As it happened, Dutch’s first day on the job was rained out, owing to a typical fall Midwestern rainstorm. To pass the time, he decided to accompany Mugs, whose parents were driving her back to college. He could help move her into the dorm, then stop in to see old friends, if only to provide some closure.

  Once he hit campus his heart started to beat fast. The place felt like home. The grounds looked lovely. The TKE house beckoned. He even paid a visit to the fieldhouse, where Coach Mac was finalizing plans for the new football season while complaining that the team would be a couple of men short. Dutch felt his defenses breaking down.

  Before he knew what was happening, Mac was on the phone to Dean Harrod, arranging
for another Needy Student Scholarship, along with part-time work to help cover expenses. The rest of Dutch’s tuition could be deferred until after graduation, and he could board at the TKE house.

  Dutch called his mother and gave her the news, along with a sweetener: he’d also arranged a football scholarship for Moon, who could take over Dutch’s old job waiting tables at the TKE house.

  Moon recalled how he scoffed at the offer and made light of it the next day, when he recounted the story to Mr. Kennedy, his boss at the cement plant. An hour or two later, Kennedy sent his secretary to see Moon, along with a paycheck and a reproach: “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 stopped at the bank to cash the check, then went home to pack his bags.

  Dutch moved right into the TKE house. “It was about three-quarters of a mile from campus,” according to a professor, “way out in the boonies surrounded by pasture.” Twenty-three brothers slept stacked in bunk beds in the uninsulated third-floor attic. “If it was twenty below outside,” a neighbor noted, “it was twenty below upstairs. You put on a sweatsuit, wool cap and stockings, and went to bed.” Dutch spent most of the evenings in the second-floor study with his bunkmate, Elmer Fisher, cracking the books—or at least making a show of it—in an effort to maintain an acceptable scholastic average. Otherwise, he gravitated to the cemetery, where he and Mugs renewed their “stargazing” on a blanket sprawled across one of the plots.

  Dutch cruised through his sophomore year with few ripples. His academic performance remained mediocre at best. Easy as the coursework was, it was hard for Dutch. He had no gift for French, pas du tout; despite being tutored by Mugs, who spoke it beautifully, the best he could pull was a D. Religion was also a slog, as was American lit. Daddy Gray’s econ courses, while fascinating, required a good deal of analytical thinking, and Dutch wasn’t wired that way. For one thing, it meant plowing through chapter after chapter of a tedious textbook and digging into details. Moon, who shared some of the same econ classes, recalled how “Ronald very seldom cracked a book.” Instead, when it came time for a test, he spent “a quick hour” flipping through the pages and relied instead on his photographic memory. Daddy Gray wasn’t fooled one bit, but it exasperated him. He grumbled about Dutch’s lack of applying himself to coursework, complaining, “And yet I have to give him a grade.”

  Dutch was too caught up with sports and acting to focus on schoolwork. Football occupied most of his attention. Mostly he continued to warm the bench while his brother blossomed into the Golden Tornadoes’ star. Halfway through the season, Dutch got the nod to replace an injured teammate at right end and performed in a game without embarrassing himself. And during a scrimmage, he stood out for a brutal hit on a more experienced man Mac had pitted against him. Gradually he wore Coach down, working his way into the starting lineup.

  Secretly, Mac admired Dutch’s determination, the way he hung in there, biding his time. He was “a good plugger,” in Mac’s eyes, and “a pretty good leader” on and off the field. He brought a sense of camaraderie to the locker room. Mac appreciated how Dutch “used to take an old broom from the locker room and pretend it was a microphone and ‘announce’ the game play-by-play afterward.” The photographic memory helped: “Never forgot a play either!”

  Sportscasting—he was an aficionado. If he had a favorite pastime it was imitating announcers. “He’d sit in front of a radio and listen to sports-casters by the hour,” Moon recalled. There was a boxy Westinghouse Radiola on the second floor of the TKE house, which pulled in games from across the state and beyond. Dutch parked himself in front of it night after night, dialing in broadcasts of Michigan and Ohio State games. There was Red Grange, the “Galloping Ghost” of Illinois, Knute Rockne at Notre Dame. On the weekends, he listened to Chicago Cardinals and Bears games. Maybe a Jack Dempsey or Joe Louis bout. It was the sportscasters who intrigued him most, with their colorful phraseology, a language all their own. This was a dialect that Dutch could master.

  When football went on hiatus, the Reagan brothers doubled as the college’s sole basketball cheerleaders. Dressed in matching white sweaters and khakis, Dutch and Moon patrolled the home-crowd sideline, drumming up pep with a half dozen wacky chants.

  O, we’ll whoop ’em up for Eureka, Eureka,

  Eu Re,

  We’ll whoop ’em up for Eureka,

  A jolly bunch are we

  When their voices gave out, they performed “the Skyrocket.” “They ran down the floor,” recalled a spectator, “they lit a fuse—‘SISSS . . . ,’ jumped in the air, ‘BOOM’ and landed—‘BAH.’ EUREKA!”

  When basketball season ended, Dutch joined Eureka’s swim team. In fact, he was the swim team.

  There had never been a great deal of interest in competitive swimming. It was never considered a major sport, certainly not in the same league as football, not even tennis, but the landscape began to gradually change after the 1928 Summer Olympics. The Games, held in Amsterdam that year, were broadcast for the very first time, and Americans sat around their radios in parlors and kitchens, listening as Johnny Weissmuller put on an aquatics show, winning two gold medals with his incredible skill. That was all Dutch needed to get a “team” going on campus, even though the resources for it were slim. No one else tried out, and even if they had, it would have been difficult for more than one person at a time to train. There was a pool below Pritchard Gym, but it wasn’t conducive to competition—five feet at the deepest end and only twenty-five feet long. Dutch made the most of it, knifing through the water and doing flip turns to simulate regulation-sized lanes. He was already in top shape from lapping across the Rock River all summer, giving him an edge against schools with more accomplished programs.

  In the 1929–30 season, Dutch swam for Eureka against other colleges in the Little 19 Conference—much larger schools for the most part, such as Bradley, Illinois Wesleyan, Millikin, Springfield, and Northern Illinois. He wasn’t a giant-killer, not yet, pulling down respectable fourth-place finishes in two events in the spring meet at Saint Victor, but there was plenty of upside to his effort, which became evident the following year, when he placed first in the state meets, setting a record of fifty-one seconds in the 100-yard freestyle.

  Otherwise, Dutch devoted the spring semester to sharpening his acting skills. There was a warm-up show, The Dover Road, which was staged for the Mononk Women’s Club. Then Miss Johnson entered her untested Eureka Players troupe in the Annual Theater Tournament held each April at Northwestern University. This was considered a big-time event, drawing colleges, as well as audiences and critics, from across the Midwest. Most participants had theater departments that rivaled a professional stock company. Was little, nearly bankrupt Eureka up to the challenge? The play they took on was Aria da Capo, a blank-verse one-act by Edna St. Vincent Millay that dealt with human greed, moral decay, and the futility of war. Dutch led the cast as a Greek shepherd opposite his football teammate Bud Cole, with Mugs in a supporting role as a flighty socialite.

  By all accounts, there was real power in Dutch’s performance, his deft alternation between low comedy and barbed sarcasm, his stage presence. The Eureka Players were awarded the third-place trophy, and Dutch was named one of the six best actors in the tournament. It was quite an honor, considering his meager experience on the stage, and it intensified the pull toward acting.

  But to what end? “In those days, in the middle of Illinois,” he acknowledged, “you didn’t run around and say, ‘I want to be an actor.’” It was preposterous. “They’d throw a net over you.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MARGARET”

  “Love knows nothing of order.”

  —ST. JEROME

  Dutch wasn’t acting when it came to courting Margaret Cleaver. He was as committed to her as he had ever been, and throughout the school year of 1929–1930 th
e two were rarely apart.

  They took advantage of the intimacy that a small, cozy campus provided, walking to classes together, huddling close over lunch, running lines of plays they were rehearsing, kegging any chance they got. In March, they were inducted side by side into Alpha Epsilon Sigma, Eureka’s exclusive drama society, and coordinated their outfits with its somber black and blue pledge colors. On weekends, they snuggled in seats at the Jewel Theater, a late convert to talkies, where they delighted in the Marx Brothers in The Cocoanuts, Ronald Colman in Bulldog Drummond, and Gary Cooper in The Virginian.

  They were a golden couple, in demand for a profusion of social engagements—the Tau Kappa Epsilon dinner-dance at the Jefferson Hotel, the annual TKE Halloween getaway at Camp Lantz on the Mackinaw River, Delta Zeta’s Harvest Moon dance, the Christmas party at Professor Jones’s home, the TKE New Year’s bash just before winter break. Every week seemed to spin them into another gala affair. If there was any downside, it wasn’t yet evident. Even their differences complemented—Mugs’s quiet intensity, Dutch’s big personality; Mugs’s intellect, Dutch’s intuitive nature; Mugs’s stoicism, Dutch’s exuberance. If there was a strain, it was in the way they viewed their futures. Mugs had a plan mapped out. After college, there was a student-teacher position awaiting her in Cropsey, Illinois. Dutch, on the other hand, was undecided. Reverend Cleaver had often talked to him about a role in the ministry. He had all the right qualities: leadership, compassion, unshakable faith—character. But college had awakened Dutch’s curiosity. There were other opportunities beyond the conventional, beyond Dixon. What about sportscasting—and acting? It seemed like a wildly attractive alternative to a more traditional profession. He’d never considered going that route, but now he was keeping an open mind, especially after Dutch’s bravura performance at Northwestern, when the director of its School of Speech, Garret Leverton, took him aside and suggested he give strong consideration to an acting career.