Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  There was plenty for them to do in Des Moines. Movies galore—all the new releases played in a city lousy with theaters: She Done Him Wrong, Dinner at Eight, 42nd Street, Duck Soup, and the enormous, literally enormous, crowd-pleaser King Kong. They had their pick of pictures now considered classics and went to as many openings as they could manage. In the evenings, they met for dinner at the chichi Fort Des Moines Hotel, across the street from WHO, or at the Hotel Kirkwood, managed by Paul McGinn, Dutch’s swimming partner at Camp Dodge.

  Things turned more serious for them early in 1934, after Dutch got a Dear John letter from Mugs. She’d met another man, a foreign-service officer, aboard a cruise ship in Europe, and they were engaged. Engaged! Dutch had to read the letter again to absorb it. They planned to marry. He was “shattered.”

  Mildred wasn’t Mugs, but she was a suitable stand-in. They got on famously, and Dutch liked her family, particularly her father, who enjoyed talking football with WHO’s chief sportscaster. Things might have gone further between them, but Mildred made it clear she didn’t intend to marry anyone other than a Catholic, effectively shutting the door on Dutch.

  He shook it off by throwing himself even more deeply into work. His plate was overflowing at the station in 1935, with sportscasts as well as more straight-ahead work: interviews with celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, cowboy crooner Gene Autry, Hollywood star Leslie Howard, and boxer Max Baer, who accidentally knocked out WHO’s mailroom clerk while demonstrating his championship form.

  Even that didn’t compare with the punch of the ’35 Drake Relays, which Dutch called live from the college’s Memorial Stadium press box. The competition was world-caliber, the action tense and thrilling. There were the usual photo-finish dashes and relays, the nerve-racking marathons and decathlons. But the highlights were provided by an Ohio State sophomore named Jesse Owens, who set a record in the 100-yard dash minutes before being called to participate in the broad jump. Before he’d even caught his breath, Owens raced down the gravel runway and soared an improbable twenty-six feet in the air—a record that was instantly shattered when officials noticed he took off nine inches before the starting board, which was yet another eight inches wide.

  That summer, Dutch broadcast 160 baseball games, refining his bravura patter with the benefit of an actual sponsor, General Mills, intent on targeting mothers and children to buy Wheaties, their “breakfast of champions.” Bent over the black-and-silver microphone, a brown fedora tipped rakishly over a brow, unlit pipe in hand, he lit into vivid replays of Sox and Cubs games, oblivious to the claque of faithful fans who collected in front of WHO’s glass partition to watch him perform. The White Sox tanked early in the season, headed for a dismal fifth-place finish, but the Cubs won an astounding hundred games and the National League pennant. Dutch had a colorful cast of characters to work with: the power-hitting second baseman Billy Herman; “assistant manager” Gabby Hartnett, one of the greatest catchers in baseball history; and Charlie “Jolly Cholly” Grimm, the team’s banjo-playing manager; as well as opposing greats such as Lou Gehrig, Mel Ott, Lefty Gomez, Carl Hubbell, and Jimmie Foxx.

  The most memorable moment came in the middle of the season. It was a story Ronald Reagan would recount—often fantastically, and with different players involved—for the rest of his life. It was the ninth inning of a scoreless game between the Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals. The great Dizzy Dean was on the mound for the Cards, and the batter was Augie Galan—though in some accounts it was Billy Jurges. Harold Norem, Reagan’s control-booth engineer, whom he affectionately called Curly, slipped him a note that said “The wire has gone dead.” For the next six minutes, without a peep from Western Union, Dutch had the batter foul off balls, while he invented action in and around the field—a kid in the stands snagging a souvenir, a near-miss at the foul pole, the manager coming to the mound to check on his pitcher—anything he could think of to kill time. He couldn’t admit the glitch in the studio transmission; it would have destroyed the illusion he’d worked so hard to create. When the teletype finally clicked back into gear, he learned the batter had flied out on the first pitch.

  * * *

  —

  Four years into the job, Ronald Reagan had hit his stride. He made a comfortable living; he was a well-known radio personality, a local celebrity. A wall-sized photo of Dutch hovering over the WHO microphone hung behind the bar at the Moonlight Inn. His much-sought-after presence as a speaker at civic functions and events reflected his gift to deliver an entertaining off-the-cuff address in a throaty vibrato that would serve him for the rest of his life. When a Sporting News poll rated the best baseball announcers in America, Dutch’s name was fourth on the list, ahead of future legend Red Barber. The Des Moines Dispatch summed up his achievement in various columns. An early post noted: “To millions of sports fans in at least seven or eight midwestern states, the voice of Dutch Reagan is a daily source of baseball dope.” Another, in 1936, praised his studly man-about-town image: “He is over six feet tall with the proverbial Greek-god physique: broad-shouldered, slim-waisted and a face that would make Venus look twice before running to her man Zeus!”

  His charms were not lost on the young women of Des Moines. For a while, he dated Lou Mauget, an attractive clerk in WHO’s accounting department, and Ann McGuire, who sang in a musical revue, and model Gretchen Schnelle. His attraction to Jeanne Tesdell, a hazel-eyed Drake senior, seemed to be different, deeper. She was tall and sophisticated, and another accomplished equestrian, who sat a horse with particular poise—and a knockout. According to one of Dutch’s friends, “She was one of the best-looking gals in town.” For almost all of 1936, Dutch and Jeanne were Des Moines’s “it” couple. He seemed to have found a replacement for Margaret Cleaver.

  But as they saw each other more frequently, Jeanne began to feel that something important was missing. Dutch was personable, a wonderful storyteller, and a perfect gentleman. But the more they went out, the more she sensed she played second fiddle to his ambition. “I always had the feeling that I was with him but he wasn’t with me,” she said. At Club Belvedere, where they often took in the floor show, a change came over him. He shifted into celebrity mode, playing to the room. Jeanne couldn’t help noticing how “he was always looking over his shoulder, scanning the crowd.” He was too much of “a people-pleaser” for her tastes.

  Was there more beneath the surface of this glad-handing careerist? If there was, he wasn’t revealing it to her. Ultimately she decided there was no future in that kind of “bittersweet” relationship, and she broke things off with Dutch.

  Neil Reagan fared better. Soon after he began working at WOC, he fell hard for a soft-spoken Drake coed named Bessie Hoffman and, two weeks after meeting her, proposed. News of their impending marriage unsettled Dutch, who viewed it as happening “way too fast,” even for his impetuous brother. It seems unlikely, however, that Dutch discussed his disapproval with Moon; the Reagan brothers avoided such intimacy. Nor did he rise to object during the ceremony. He might have been more disturbed by his father’s appearance. There was little evidence of the old Jack Reagan in the man who sat next to him in the church pew that day. The last vestiges of the cocky Irish leprechaun, the “practical joker,” had been dispatched by a recent heart attack, which left Jack withered and unsteady. His left arm dangled at an unnatural angle, its nerves damaged irreparably; his face, once ruddy, looked ashen. Dutch realized that his father’s working days were over.

  In any event, the groom, his brother, and his father avoided any argument, including a political one, which was a challenge considering the circumstances. It was an election year in 1936, and while Roosevelt was enormously popular, not everyone was an FDR flagbearer. In the Reagan family, Moon stood alone as a fierce opponent to the New Deal’s magic formulas. It was a lonely position against rabid believers of the Democratic ethos like Jack and Dutch. “We used to have some great go-arounds,” Moon recalled. Moon believed “the De
mocratic party was going to make a welfare state out of the country,” and he wasn’t afraid to say so. In fact, he relished saying it if only to see the fur fly.

  Jack no longer had the energy to engage, but Dutch unfailingly took the bait. He had his own doubts about long-term relief, though he had confidence that the New Deal would stabilize the economy. And he idolized Roosevelt. He’d actually seen his hero on FDR’s swing through Des Moines, when the president’s limousine passed under the station’s windows and Dutch grinned and waved back at the familiar figure “with his cigarette and his head held high.” On the radio, he couldn’t hide his enthusiasm for the president, putting in a few good words for him wherever possible. Off the air, he’d mastered an admiring impression of FDR, which he performed for friends and colleagues any chance he got.

  One co-worker who wasn’t that amused was H. R. “Hal” Gross, a highly-regarded journalist who had joined WHO’s staff in 1935. Gross, who would go on to become a thirteen-term congressman from Iowa’s Third District, hosted the enormously popular Tomorrow’s News Tonight, sponsored by Kentucky Club and introduced nightly by Dutch Reagan. The two pros clicked beautifully on the air, but once the studio’s red light went off, politics often intervened, and they would go at it like snapping dogs. Gross was a fiscal penny-pincher (later he would be the only member of Congress to vote against funding the eternal flame at JFK’s gravesite, calling it a waste of money), someone one admirer termed “a classic small-picture conservative . . . whose life was about embarrassing liberals.” Dutch staunchly defended the liberal cause.

  Politics had become a staple of Dutch’s daily diet, but baseball was still his main fare. To prepare for the 1936 season, Dutch persuaded his station chief, Joe Maland, to send him to the Cubs spring-training facility on Catalina Island, twenty miles off the California coast. The trip would expand his familiarity with the team, Dutch argued, but deep down he knew it was nothing but a boondoggle—the chance to get away at the company’s expense, to see what the West Coast looked like, spend several weeks in the sun, and maybe pick up a few extra dollars writing freelance articles for the newspapers back home. He’d never been west of Iowa. It would be a new experience, a way to expand his horizons.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “ANOTHER ROBERT TAYLOR”

  “Nothing endures but change.”

  —HERACLITUS

  If nothing else, the train trip out west was an eye-opener.

  Dutch joined the Cubs on the Santa Fe Special, a caravan of wood-and-brass-appointed Pullman cars, in Kansas City, where it stopped to pick up Charlie Grimm and other team members from the Plains states. The three-day excursion had an anything-goes atmosphere. There was no escape from the all-day dominoes, dice, and card games, and the epic drinking jags. Rookies were victims of regular practical jokes. Veterans were notorious for planting items in rookies’ berths—enormous iron train wheels or crates of garlic, or furry creatures smuggled on board especially for the occasion, or giving an unsuspecting player a hotfoot, or worse. Shortstop Woody English made an art of lighting a newspaper while someone was reading it. “His escape is made during the smoldering state,” Dutch recounted in a column he wrote, “and he is innocently dozing when the reader finds himself possessed of a flaming torch.”

  For Dutch, the scenery whizzing by the picture-frame window was another kind of education. It offered a snapshot of America he’d only read about in books. Nebraska first: mile after mile of treeless prairie pimpled with herds of cattle grazing on its vast grassy carpet. In Wyoming and Utah, he got his first look at the massive snow-capped Rocky Mountains, where streams gouged into the gnarled rockface raced down the dramatic slopes like skiers on a doomsday run. No humanity anywhere in sight—nothing, just dense coverage of juniper and ponderosa pine. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, Ogden, and beyond it Salt Lake City nestled in the décolletage of mountains and canyons. There was a lot of beautiful country out there.

  When the train finally pulled into Central Station in Los Angeles, Dutch stepped off into a plume of midsummer heat. There was much to love about the balmy weather after months in the frigid Midwestern tundra. The air was refreshing, even savory, with its distinctive notes of flora and sea salt. You could actually feel your skin awaken, as if it had emerged out of a deep freeze. The dry climate, the clear blue sky, the radiant sunshine were tonics that went straight to the soul of a weary traveler. Dutch had come prepared. His valise was stocked with an appropriate wardrobe: linen suits, a white sport coat, white bucks, a pair of swim trunks.

  The entourage was whisked off to the port a few blocks away, where they boarded the SS Catalina, a converted Great Lakes cruiser, for a two-hour trip to the island. It was anything but a pleasure cruise. The team veterans knew what was in store: this annual voyage across the choppy San Pedro Channel was a nonstop roller-coaster ride that left even the most able-bodied ballplayers doubled over the railing, gasping and vomiting. Legendary catcher and future Hall of Famer Gabby Hartnett was usually the first player each spring to throw up.

  But Catalina was worth the grief. It was an island gem, with a picture-postcard harbor, a country club and world-class golf course, tennis courts, a bird sanctuary, a dance hall, a 1,200-seat theater, resort hotels, and a baseball stadium framed with fragrant eucalyptus trees. A number of public figures kept homes in the hills, among them Zane Grey, Betty Grable, and a sixteen-year-old military wife named Norma Jeane Dougherty, who later became Marilyn Monroe. The Wrigleys had bought the island sight unseen in 1919 and developed it into an exclusive travel destination. Once they shook off the seasickness, the Cubs loved Catalina. The weather was semitropical; the players got the same royal treatment as glamorous celebrities. And for three weeks, they could unwind, really unwind. But once they took the field, the Cubs—as well as their media retinue—got down to business.

  Dutch had his daily routine. He arrived at Wrigley Field early each morning to claim a prime spot between the first-base line and the grandstand for a bird’s-eye view of the action. Because he was reporting for the Des Moines Dispatch as well as WHO, he spread out across several chairs. This didn’t sit well with the old-school beat reporters, who bore grudges against the new wave of radio interlopers. One evening, shortly after his arrival, Jimmy Corcoran of the Chicago American sought Dutch out at the White Cap, a local bar, and exchanged words, words Dutch didn’t like. A lot of “Oh yeah?” and “Sez who?” passed between the two. Jimmy the Cork eventually threw a punch, but Dutch saw it coming and ducked, deflecting it squarely into the stomach of the Chicago Tribune’s Ed Burns. Such were the burdens of a spring-training rookie.

  Perhaps Corcoran resented seeing WHO’s sportscaster taking batting practice with the Cubs. Dutch had never fully shaken off the dreams of playing ball, even if the ball wasn’t his beloved pigskin. Charlie Grimm allowed Dutch to occasionally suit up for an afternoon workout, with batting instruction from first baseman Phil Cavarretta. At twenty-five, Dutch still had the form and physical dexterity, even though Cavy decried his “slow bat.” He couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn or field a pop-up without his glasses.

  Dutch adored his spring-training getaway and was quick to reenlist for duty in 1937. The terms were the same: he sacrificed paid vacation in exchange for the three-week excursion, and the Dispatch picked up his option for a series of articles. This year, however, he had an ulterior motive.

  In January, Dutch had spent some time chatting with members of Al Clauser and His Oklahoma Outlaws during a live broadcast of the Saturday-night National Barn Dance. The Outlaws were a popular act throughout the Midwest and regulars on WHO. Now they were moving on. They had been signed to appear in Rootin’ Tootin’ Rhythm, a Gene Autry movie shooting at Republic Studios in Hollywood.

  Dutch had never lost the acting bug. He had the talent and the looks, and he certainly had the desire. His four years on the radio had given him a taste. Announcing, after all, was a form of acting. He entertained an audience six
days a week; it earned him local stardom. Movies seemed like the next logical step. A Des Moines theater owner had even broached the subject of an audition, alerting him to a screen test being offered in town. Now the Outlaws had rekindled his interest. Like him, they were headed west and told him to visit if the opportunity arose.

  Hollywood. Surely he could play hooky from spring training for a day or two.

  It was pouring when the Santa Fe Special arrived in L.A., so he told the Cubs he’d meet them later that night in Catalina. Instead, he hopped a trolley that took him over the Cahuenga Pass into the San Fernando Valley, where Republic Studios was situated among pepper trees at the foot of the Hollywood Hills.

  Republic was originally Mack Sennett’s studio but had evolved into a low-budget factory, churning out a slate of mostly cowboy films—good cowboy films, better than the major picture companies were making. Republic’s biggest star was John Wayne, who had made his mark in a series known as The Three Mesquiteers and even sang in an early feature or two. Tom Mix, Lash LaRue, and Roy Rogers were also on the lot. In 1937, by the time Dutch arrived, the studio’s rising star was Gene Autry, “the singing cowboy,” with his newly minted sidekicks, the Oklahoma Outlaws.