by Bob Spitz
CHAPTER EIGHT
“A PEOPLE-PLEASER”
“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”
—GRAHAM GREENE, The Power and the Glory
Just days before clearing out of the TKE house in May 1932, Ronald Reagan made a declaration to the other departing brothers. “If I’m not making $5,000 a year in five years,” he said, “I’ll consider these years here wasted.”
It was an extravagant sum in the heart of the Depression. In 1932, more than thirteen million Americans remained out of work, a shocking 25 percent of the labor force, up from 3 percent in 1929 and less than 8 percent in 1930. No one had ever experienced anything like this. Farms were being foreclosed on at a rate of 20,000 per month. More than 5,500 banks had already closed. Herbert Hoover continued his administration’s tone-deaf policy of not directly intervening in the economy. “We cannot squander ourselves into prosperity,” he declared. Worse than his sins of omission were his sins of commission, including his move against the Bonus Army—43,000 marchers, World War I veterans and their families, many now unemployed, who squatted in Washington, D.C., demanding payment in cash of promised service “bonuses.” On July 28, Hoover sent federal troops, led by General Douglas MacArthur, to run them off their campsites, burning their shelters and belongings in the process. It was an outrage, an American black eye, certainly in the partisan Reagan household.
The Reagans were already caught up in the drama of the forthcoming election. That June the Democrats had nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Jack canvassed for Democratic support in Dixon. The Dixon Evening Telegraph was solidly behind Hoover, as were almost all Jack’s friends and neighbors—even Moon. Roosevelt’s victory was greeted with joy in the Reagan home, even if his “new deal for the American people” wouldn’t come soon enough to help Dutch’s employment prospects.
Dutch needed a job. Since graduation, he had been biding his time on the lifeguard chair at Lowell Park, but it was strictly a summer position. He discussed his situation with a visitor he’d befriended, a Kansas City businessman named Sid Altschuler, whose two daughters had taken swimming lessons from Dutch. In years past, Altschuler had promised to help him find work when he was ready. But when Dutch laid out his plans to become a radio broadcaster, Altschuler balked.
“Well, you’ve picked a line in which I have no connections,” he said. All he could offer was advice—knock on doors, take any entry-level job, “take your chances on moving up,” don’t get discouraged, all the usual tips from empty-handed benefactors.
In the meantime, Jack had heard about an opening at the Dixon branch of Montgomery Ward, a job in the company’s sporting goods section. It paid $12.50 a week, not bad for a rookie in the current economy, but it entailed a full six-day shift that included Saturday nights with a couple of random weekday nights thrown into the mix. It would have to suffice until something better came along. Dutch felt compelled to contribute to the family pot. Moon was headed back to Eureka. It seemed like the least Dutch could do, a son’s obligation. He agreed with a heavy heart to sit for the department-store interview. “Believe you me,” he told Mugs’s friend Dorothy Bovey, “I am never going to be satisfied with a $12.50 a week job.” His old high school mentor, Bernard Frazer, encountered him sometime toward the end of that summer and recalled a boy whose spirit was filled with dejection. “Aren’t you going to have a shot at communications, the field in which you have so much talent?” Frazer wondered. But Dutch seemed resigned to his fate.
By a stroke of luck, George Joyce, a Dixon high school basketball star, was up for the same job. It came down to the two of them, and Joyce won out. Even though it came as “quite a blow,” there was no shame in rejection for Dutch. Quite the opposite: it provided him with the excuse and freedom to look for other work—the kind of work he’d dreamed of for himself.
The next day, he swung into action. Moon was heading back to Eureka for the start of his senior year. Dutch went with him, ostensibly to spend a few hours with Mugs, who was preparing to leave for her teaching assignment, and to sort out the strategy for his coming job search. He had decided that his best chances of breaking into broadcasting lay in Chicago, the Midwestern media mecca; a Eureka grad attending medical school there would give him a bed for a few nights. Every national network had an affiliate there, and a number of independents. He’d knock on doors, the way Sid Altschuler recommended. After an inauspicious farewell with Margaret, Ronald Reagan hit the road.
* * *
—
Not many doors would open in Chicago. The effects of the Depression were starkly visible. Droves of the downtrodden and desperate wandered aimlessly in the streets. Factories were shuttered, their smokestacks eerily idle across the horizon. Long lines snaked down sidewalks outside soup kitchens. It was a humbling scene.
Yet Dutch pressed on, clutching a page torn out from the city telephone directory and using it to make the rounds. In a two-day span he hit the CBS affiliate WBBM; the Tribune Company’s WGN; WLS, which broadcast the wildly popular National Barn Dance; WJBT; WCFL; WENR; WSBC—on and on. In every place, he couldn’t get past the front desk no matter how much he laid on the charm. The only ripple in the sea of futility came at his visit to the Merchandise Mart, where NBC’s WMAQ was quartered. The station’s program director refused to see Dutch, but a sympathetic assistant offered a piece of advice. He was going about this job hunt the wrong way, she told him. Chicago was the big leagues. If you wanted to break into radio, you started in the minors—out in the sticks, at one of the smaller stations. “You’ll find someone who will take you on and give you experience; then you can come [back] to Chicago.”
The trip back to Dixon was more humbling than ever. Dutch hitchhiked the hundred miles, with long waits between rides, intermittent rain, and creepy characters behind the wheels. Returning home without a job was a crushing disappointment. There was nothing in Dixon for him, and Mugs had been cool when discussing their future. She had made it clear they shouldn’t marry without financial stability—not just a job, but a responsible job, which she couldn’t envision in radio. Dutch must have also mentioned acting as a possibility, because Margaret later said, “Hollywood was never my cup of tea.”
Discouraged but not defeated, he asked Jack to borrow the car in order to return to Eureka, though that was never his destination. “This is the one time I deceived my father,” Dutch later admitted. Instead, he drove south and west along Route 34. His plan had been to tour the backroads, visiting farm-town radio stations to inquire about work, but first he stopped in Kewanee to visit friends. Five Eureka buddies lived there—Udell “Lump” Watts, Bill Jenkins, and George Kleist, former football teammates, along with Fred Mursener and Elmer Fisher.
No evidence exists as to whether Dutch tried his luck at WKEI in Kewanee, but he soon obtained another position in town. Kewanee might have been small potatoes as a media market, slightly smaller than Dixon, but it had a vibrant newspaper in the Star Courier, with a circulation upward of thirteen thousand. In those days, when the locals wanted news in the afternoon and evenings, they would walk up to the Star Courier plant on Tremont Street, where big sheets of newsprint were hung on a wire in the window. Baseball scores, however, were a different matter. They came through on the AP wire service at night, after the last edition had already published. To satisfy his readers’ interest, Phil Adler, the Star Courier’s publisher, hired Dutch to walk out on the paper’s second-floor balcony with a small megaphone and announce the scores to Cubs fans standing in the street. It wasn’t broadcasting, exactly, but it was a start.
No sooner had he landed at the Star Courier than he began pestering Phil Adler about helping him to move on. Adler had influential contacts across all of Iowa. Before coming to Kewanee, he had run the Daily Iowan in Iowa City, and his father, E.P., oversaw the Daily Times in Davenport. Of more use, perhaps, was one of Phil Adler’s closest friends, a man named Dave Palmer
, whom he’d grown up with in Davenport and who was the heir to Palmer Broadcasting, where he acted as business manager at its flagship radio station, WOC, and hosted a show, Dave’s Barn, featuring a twelve-piece band. After much cajoling, Dutch persuaded Adler to call Dave Palmer on his behalf. As Lloyd Schermer, Adler’s son-in-law, describes the exchange, Phil said, “I have this young guy here who you might be interested in for the radio station.” Dave Palmer agreed to meet him.
* * *
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Davenport must have seemed strangely familiar to Ronald Reagan as he crossed the bridge from Illinois into Iowa. The city was more than three times the size of Dixon, but it lay at a confluence of rivers—the Rock and the Mississippi—with a skyline that mimicked his much cozier hometown. It was part of the so-called Tri-Cities, along with neighboring Rock Island and East Moline. The mighty John Deere Company was headquartered to the north, in Moline, but Davenport’s industrial muscle designated it the metropolitan center. “It was about as strong a blue-collar town as there was in America,” says James Leach, a former U.S. congressman from the area. Alcoa opened the largest aluminum rolling plant in the Riverdale suburb, and a local entrepreneur named Judge French founded a company there that built undercarriages and wheels for virtually every railroad car in the country.
For news and entertainment, Davenport tuned in to WOC, at 1420 on the radio dial. Dutch had listened to the station with regularity growing up. Its 5,000-watt signal served as a beacon across the heartland: “Where the West begins and in the state where the tall corn grows.” WOC’s owner, a wily character named Bartlett Joshua Palmer—Dave Palmer’s father—claimed, with typical excess, that it “held the world’s record for long-distance transmission . . . heard in Stockholm, Paris, Rome, and Manila.”
B. J. Palmer was one of the most prominent men in Davenport. He ran a printing press, a dance hall, a roller rink, an insane asylum, several restaurants, and a private garden—A Little Bit O’Heaven—featuring Greek statues, a Buddhist shrine, a Japanese temple gate, and alligators, real alligators, that snapped around the heels of visitors who paid to gape at the grounds. His broadcasting empire stretched across the Midwest, but his primary business was the Palmer School of Chiropractic, a private college dedicated to the alternative therapy—invented by Daniel David Palmer, B.J.’s father—that relies on the manipulation of the spine.
Mainstream physicians shunned chiropractic, calling it nonsense, even a “scientific cult.” But its popularity had spread from Davenport throughout the Midwest and beyond. Allegedly, D. D. Palmer had stumbled on the procedure while making a deposit at the Davenport Bank & Trust. D.D. routinely used the side entrance of the cathedral-like building, where a platoon of shoeshine men was stationed by the door. His bootblack on that fateful day complained about nagging hearing loss caused by an accident. “I bent over,” he explained, “and as I was picking something up my head hit the back of a boot.” D.D. ordered him to turn around, grabbed the nape of the man’s neck, and gave it a yank. His hearing returned, and chiropractic was born.
Like Rumpelstiltskin, B.J. spun the story into gold. He was a promoter at heart, an extraordinary raconteur, who traveled the country lecturing on alternatives to surgery and drugs. He was a fast-moving, tightly wound, theatrical man. He glorified something he called “Innate,” a spirit power that guided him to every important decision in his life, including what to eat as well as how to remodel his home, which had a “world famous” collection of spines. “Innate” was the “internal natural intelligence,” he claimed, “which knows when to sneeze, blow your nose, urinate, or defecate, blink your eyes, how to heal a cut or mend a fractured bone,” among other things. “Innate” directed him to sleep with his head toward the north pole so the earth’s currents would flow through him unimpeded, just as “Innate” led him to attach the radio station’s ground wires to the city water main, which emptied into the Mississippi River, thus providing an “antenna” that flowed to the outer world. No matter, “Innate” in the guise of WOC gave B. J. Palmer a pipeline to sell chiropractic. By 1924, there were 25,000 chiropractors practicing in the United States, and by 1930 it was the largest alternative healing profession in the country.
When Dutch first noticed that WOC (whose call letters stood for World of Chiropractic) was connected to B.J.’s college remains unknown. It would have been hard for him to miss the portrait of Krishna discharging waves of enlightenment above the entrance on the fourth floor or the pithy aphorisms scrawled across its walls or the network of loudspeakers blasting announcements to the classrooms below. The broadcasting studio control room was a sight to behold, with teak-log furniture, a brass birdcage on a pedestal, and beams from which taxidermied animal parts—B.J.’s hunting trophies—dangled. Across the hall, in a larger studio, stood a white lacquered Chickering piano and, seemingly sleeping underneath it, a Saint Bernard—Big Ben, the beloved family pet, which B.J. had stuffed after its untimely demise and placed there for posterity.
Almost as strange as Big Ben was the awesome figure who emerged to greet Dutch. Peter MacArthur, WOC’s crusty longtime announcer, who doubled as the station’s program director, dragged himself down the hall with the help of two canes. MacArthur was a tall, imposing Scot whose once-strapping body was racked with crippling arthritis. After brief introductions, MacArthur explained that Dutch was too late. “Don’t ye listen to the radio?” he asked in a “Scottish burr you could cut with a knife.” Apparently, WOC had waged a lengthy on-air campaign to hire a new announcer; a few days earlier, the position was filled.
Dutch was crestfallen. Fuming at his lousy timing, he turned on his heels and pressed the call button for the elevator. “How the hell do you get to be a sports announcer if you can’t ever get a job at a radio station?” he muttered under his breath.
“Hold up, you big bastard!” Dutch turned to find MacArthur bearing down on him. “What was that you said about sports announcing?” Dutch explained his ultimate broadcasting goal—and the seemingly elusive break-through job necessary to attain it. “Come with me,” MacArthur said, leading him into the studio.
To Dutch, the room must have looked like the Great Oz’s hideout, with its heavy blue drapes and wall of electronic gizmos. MacArthur stood him in front of a microphone boom and, without fuss, no rehearsal, instructed him to begin describing an imaginary football game when he saw the red light go on. “Make me see it,” he said. “I’ll be in another room listening.”
Other prospects might have been daunted by such an assignment, but not Ronald Reagan. He’d been improvising games for as long as he could remember; it came as second nature to him. Drawing on his senior year on the Eureka football squad, he launched into a vivid play-by-play of the game against Western State University, climaxing in a breathless game-winning last-second touchdown. As soon as the hero crossed the goal line, MacArthur reappeared and told Dutch to come back on Saturday. On October 1, 1932, Reagan would be announcing the Iowa–Bradley game. He’d earn five dollars for the afternoon, with a promise that if he clicked on the air, more games would follow.
It was the breakthrough he’d been hoping for.
Dutch called the game with confidence, filling the halftime break with an insider’s grasp of x’s and o’s and an explanation of each coach’s strategy. Afterward, MacArthur delivered on his promise. The remaining three games now belonged to Dutch, along with a five-dollar-a-week raise plus bus fare to and from Dixon. And he was good at this job: in Davenport, after Iowa’s final game against Minnesota, the Democrat and Leader reviewed Dutch’s performance, calling him “a grand footballer and letter man.” It went on to say, “His crisp account of the muddy struggle sounded like a carefully written story . . . and his quick tongue seemed to be as fast as the plays.”
The end of the season ended Dutch’s engagement with the radio station—for the time being. Pete MacArthur assured him that if he hung on, they’d call him as soon as something opened up. Dutch went back t
o Dixon to wait for the phone to ring. The first week in January, it did: he was offered a full-time announcer’s job with WOC, spinning records and reading commercials. He’d start February 10, at a hundred dollars a month.
The new year was off to a promising start. Ronald Reagan was finally on his way—out of Dixon and inching west.
* * *
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West—and west again, from Davenport to Des Moines, where the Palmers owned a new sister station, WHO. In May 1933, Dutch and Peter MacArthur were transferred to the new facility, with an enormous 50,000-watt transmitter capable of reaching not quite Stockholm, but the westernmost parts of America. The three months he spent in Davenport were filled with change—for the Reagans and the country in general. Dutch’s salary gave the family a small financial cushion. A hundred dollars wasn’t exactly a windfall, but it was enough to get by: a room in the Vale Apartments came cheap; a meal ticket at the Palmer college cafeteria was $3.65 a week; a few dollars went to the Strong Foundation to pay off his Eureka loan; Jack and Nelle got a sizable chunk; and, of course, the tithing—ten dollars, which he sent to needy Moon as a hedge against his college costs.
At WOC, Reagan performed any odd job assigned to the lowest staff member on the totem pole—sportscasting, spinning records, reading commercials, announcing local events. He read hope into the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, who had taken office only a month or so earlier but was already reversing the country’s downward spiral. At the time of FDR’s inauguration, on March 3, 1933, less than a month into Dutch’s residency, 25 percent of Americans were still out of work, the stock market had plunged 85 percent from its high in 1929, businesses were running out of cash, and bank depositors who remained invested were losing their life’s savings. The day afterward, on March 4, the president declared a national bank holiday, closing all banks to prevent the further collapse of the country’s financial system.
