Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  Summer of 1920 passed and the Reagans were still in Tampico. “Evenings Neil and Dutch sat on their downstairs steps with a bowl of popcorn, giving handfuls to friends passing by,” recalls Vernon Denison, a Tampico school chum. “Dutch entered the fifth grade with me in September. School work centered mainly on the 3 R’s—reading, ‘rithmetic and the Palmer method of ‘riting large curves. And there was history,” Denison remembers, “American history. We brought our own books and traded or sold them to grades behind us. But in front of the class there also stood a little bookcase from which we could ‘checkout’ books. Dutch was an ‘A’ student because he had such a good memory for dates.”

  Tampico’s youth was divided into two factions by Main Street. Dutch led the “West Side Alley Gang,” Harold “Monkey” Winchell the “East Side Alley Gang.” The Winchells lived almost directly across the street from the Reagans, above their family shoe store. Vernon Denison was a member of Dutch’s gang and recalls “racing across the pens of the town stockyards, swinging from pen to pen, jumping from gate to gate, opening and shutting the gates to block Monkey and his gang from catching up with us.” If anyone was caught, no violence occurred, but it did mean a loss of face.

  The two gangs also engaged in food fights. From the garbage cans of the alley they compiled an arsenal of rotten fruit and tomatoes. “What’s the difference?” Denison says. “We didn’t shoot people or smoke pot—except a few corn silk cigarettes maybe [six-inch corn silk stogies wrapped in newspaper].”

  Most of the time Dutch managed to stay out of trouble, or at least to avoid being caught. Once, Monkey Winchell recalls, “His dad had been on a hunting trip, but he only had a single-shot gun that you had to reload. My dad had a five-shot gun, so we had to go across the street to see it. We stood it up. I don’t think we could have gotten shot with it because we weren’t higher than a barrel—and we clicked it once. It just clicked.

  “We had to pump it and click it again. The next time it [the shot] went through the ceiling.” Monkey rolled on the floor, too scared to cry. Bits of mortar and lath showered down onto them.

  Reagan later recalled hearing “the thunder of feet on the stairs, the yells of alarm coming rapidly nearer.” When Jack and Nelle entered the room, Monkey and Dutch sat huddled together on the couch in a cloud of smoke, “frantically reading our Sunday School quarterly.”

  Jack administered a licking that his younger son was never to forget, despite Nelle’s pleading that the rod be spared in this instance because the good Lord had seen fit to save the boy Himself. “My worst experience as a boy was not the licking I got for that,” Reagan insisted later. “My father bought a carload of secondhand potatoes for a personal speculation. My brother and I were ordered to the siding to sort the good potatoes from the bad.… [We] sat in a stinking boxcar during hot summer… gingerly gripping tubers that dissolve [d] in the fingers with a dripping squish, emitting an odor worse than that of a decaying corpse… for days. At last we got so queasy at the very look of spuds that we simply lied about the rest and dumped them all good or bad. My father made a little money on the proposition. We got a near permanent dislike for potatoes in any form.”

  At Tampico Grade School Dutch fell under the stern but kind direction of Miss Nellie Darby. His best chum was Denison (whom he called Newt), and they attended all the silent Westerns, gaining free admission by carrying coal to the Opera House where they were shown.

  “[On Sundays] we wore knee pants and black stockings,” Denison confessed, “and when our shoes wore out we put cardboard in the bottoms and when we got holes in our stockings we painted in shoe polish to cover ‘em up. We stole a few grapes and some apples.… We had this janitor at the school. In the fall we’d all come down and help him rake up all the leaves and we’d stay for a big marshmallow roast. We didn’t play ball on Sunday.… We had to go to church and then have the family dinner and not much rough play.”

  Monkey Winchell recalled how they all used to go swimming north of town where the county ditches merged. Dutch was by far the best swimmer and would lead the way barefoot via the railroad cinder path to the deeper, more dangerous Hennepin Canal. “We was poor folks,” Winchell admitted, “but [Dutch] and Neil were always dressed clean, not raggedy… I was always envious. They had a bicycle [a secondhand model belonging to Neil] and there wasn’t too many bicycles in town. When we got a chance to ride it, that was really something.” It sat out front near a hitching post when Neil wasn’t riding it. At noon, when Jack came home for lunch, Dutch would get up into the seat and Jack would push him around “in the street for a few exhilarating circles.”

  Next door to Pitney’s was Greenman Jewelry Store (Dutch called the Greenmans Aunt Emma and Uncle Jim). They had a special fondness for the youngest Reagan, giving him ten cents a week as an allowance and welcoming him with cookies and chocolate any time he came to visit—which was daily. In his autobiography, Reagan recalled spending many days in an old rocker in the “mystic atmosphere” of the Greenman living room, furnished with “its horsehair-stuffed gargoyles of furniture, its shawls and antimacassars, globes of glass over birds and flowers, books and strange odors.” Other times he would remain hidden in a downstairs corner of the jewelry store “with its curious relics, faint lights from gold and silver and bronze, lulled by the erratic ticking of a dozen clocks and the drone [of the voices] of the customers who came in.” Greenman’s was not quite so exotic as recalled, for it also carried veterinarian supplies and patent medicines.

  At Christmastime the Reagans took the train to visit members of the Wilson family who had a farm near Morrison, Illinois. From the station, they rode through the deep winter snow in a sleigh with hot bricks at their feet, buffalo robes as lap blankets and with bells jingling. Dutch loved such adventures. It brought him in touch with ways of life other than his own. He talked about being a cowboy and living out West.

  The Reagans did not own a crystal set, but the Wilsons did, and Dutch listened “with breathless attention, a pair of earphones attached tightly to my head, scratching a crystal with a wire. I was listening to raspy recorded music and faint voices saying, ‘This is KDKA, Pittsburgh, KDKA, Pittsburgh.’“ When the sound faded, he got up in the room of a dozen or so people and imitated the announcer. Everyone laughed and he repeated the performance.

  The boy was developing into a dreamer, and he found escape in worlds other than the drab flat on Main Street. Nelle was a good homemaker, but Jack’s drinking cut severely into her housekeeping money. The flat came with some simple sturdy furniture and its rent was deductible from Jack’s earnings. With all their moving around and having always to make do, Nelle had never been able to own much in the way of her own furnishings and decorations. She dreamed of one day possessing two things—a sewing machine and a kitchen cabinet in which to keep and display the set of dishes she had received as a wedding gift. She did some sales work and alterations at Pitney’s and liked the chance to talk to people. Church duties continued to take up a large portion of her time. For relaxation she would go around the countryside giving dramatic readings with “the zest of a frustrated actress.” Dutch would sometimes accompany her, watching with fascination as “she recited classic speeches in tragic tones, wept as she flung herself into… such melodramas as East Lyme, and poured out poetry by the yard.”

  She shared a closer affinity with her younger son. Jean Kinney, a friend to Neil throughout his life, observed, “Neil seemed always to be defying his mother. I had the feeling he really disliked her and preferred to think he was like his father.” A sense of their Irish heritage drew him to Jack, along with shared interests and personalities. Both had a touch of the promoter and a good shake of Irish brash. Jack represented good times and much laughter; Nelle, somber prayer and high standards. And whereas Neil was well built, a good natural athlete, Dutch was “scrawny,” a dreamer, somewhat precocious. He had what the family thought was a nervous habit of blinking a bit too much. No one gave much thought to his favorite reading position—
flat on his stomach on the floor where his eyes were only inches from a book—or the fact that he insisted on sitting in the front row at the movies. Tom Mix was his favorite movie actor. His private idol was the local taxidermist who had a collection of fierce-looking fish and antlered deer mounted on the walls of his shop. He got along better with women than Neil did because he had a sincere need to please them—Nelle, Aunt Emma, his teacher, the mothers of his friends—and they all adored him. He had an innate politeness—his hat came off as soon as he entered a room, he sat only after the ladies had done so and he was quick to offer his assistance in toting packages. Still, there was not a scrap of sissiness about him.

  In fact, skinny as he was, myopic as he would soon be found to be, Dutch Reagan was a leader and a scrappy opponent on any field of sport. The summer of 1920, when he was nine and a half, he played football for the first time. “There was no field, no lines, no goal. Simply grass, the ball, and a mob of excited youngsters,” he later recalled. “We chose up sides, backed up to the limits of the field, and one of us kicked off. Then, screaming and waving our arms we descended on the unlucky kid who caught it. Everyone piled on top of him. [“I got a wild exhilaration out of jumping feet first into a pile up,” he said another time of this experience.] I worshipped the wild charge down the field and the final melee—but being underneath it all… I got frightened to the point of hysteria in the darkness under the mass of writhing, shouting bodies.”

  Jack’s drinking grew in proportion to his dissatisfaction at Pitney’s. Somehow, he managed to pull himself together during working hours. Saturday nights were the worst times. Remembering back, Ronald Reagan would recall, “My mother would pray constantly for him. She was on her knees several times a day. And she just refused to give up, no matter how dark things looked.” Her lack of success in helping Jack exorcise his drinking demon did not inhibit her from proselytizing to others. The Christian Church was adamantly against alcohol, as they were against the thriving abortion clinics* that operated in major cities like New York and Chicago. Nelle never condemned any woman for illegitimately carrying a child, but she did all in her power to convince such local “misfortunates” to have their babies.

  On the night of January 15-16, the eve of Prohibition, the Christian Church held a midnight service. At 12:01 A.M., when the Volstead Act came into effect, bells pealed in the dark, moonless night, proclaiming a great victory. Tampico’s one tavern was closed. But Jack’s liquor problem was far from settled. One could still obtain a beverage called near beer—a beer that had the alcohol drawn off. However, with a few grains of medicinal alcohol needled into it, its former state was practically restored. The demise of Tampico’s saloon hit Jack even harder than the loss of easy access to good whiskey. The tavern had been the only place he could go when he needed the company of other men with whom he could exchange stories and momentarily escape into another world.

  Sixteen months after the Reagans had returned to Tampico, Pitney finally sold the store. He gave his former manager a percentage, not of the sale (as Jack had expected and been promised) but of another business he owned, the Fashion Boot Shop, twenty-six miles away in Dixon. The country had great hopes of new prosperity. Warren G. Harding, the Republican presidential candidate, had just won the election over Governor James M. Cox of Ohio, who had thirty-eight-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt (not yet crippled from polio) as his running mate. Harding had a special kinship with the press. One cold December night, as he took a walk in the company of some reporters, he confessed, “I can’t hope to be the best President this country’s ever had, but if I can I’d like to be the best-loved.”

  On December 6, 1920, the Reagans left Tampico for Dixon. After posing for a neighborhood picture, they crowded into their first car, a secondhand model that had once belonged to Mr. Pitney. Dutch’s cat, Guinevere, had had kittens, duly named King Arthur, Sir Galahad and Buster. Jack said they would have to be left behind, but Nelle snuck them into a covered basket and placed it on the floor of the rear seat under the boys’ feet. Piled high around them and tied to the roof of the car were most of the Reagans’ possessions. Neil and Dutch could hardly contain themselves. Jack had been telling them stories for a week about Dixon (“a big city”)—how the circus came there and about the yard they would have at their new house.

  * Patrick Mulcahy’s three brothers had all been imprisoned for long periods of their lives. Two had been jailed for manslaughter, which occurred during a drunken brawl in a public house. According to old newspaper accounts, the third brother, James Mulcahy, was sentenced in 1828 for six years after he was found guilty of stealing fifty pounds of wool, committing a further act of “barbarity and atrocity” by ripping the wool off the backs of living sheep, “dragging pieces of skin with it.”

  * Jack Reagan was listed in the 1900 Bennett census as John Regan, nephew in the household of Orson G. Baldwin.

  * Bennett Buzzings reported in 1898, “We think [saloons] are coming in a little too thick…” The mayor ordered the saloons to remove their blinds “so there won’t be any shenanigans going on inside.” Tavern brawls were not unusual.

  * Catherine Reagan died in April 1908 in Fulton.

  † Nelle Wilson Reagan’s siblings were: Emily T. (1867-1962), John C. (1870-1942), Sarah Jane (Jennie) (1872-1920), Thomas A. (Alex) (1874-1952), George O. (Lug) (1876-1952), Lavina (Mary) (1879-1951).

  * Reagan took the presidential oath of office twice on this Bible, opened to Nelle’s favorite passage, Chronicles 7:14 (“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land”). Written in his hand on the side of this page are the words, “A most wonderful verse for the healing of the nation.”

  * Alexander, Daniel and Charles Blue would have been Reagan’s great-great-uncles on his maternal side.

  * Mary Anne Elsey’s parents were Robert Elsey (1812-50), a house painter, and Mary Baker Elsey (1819-51). Both were from an area in West Sussex, England.

  * Pronounced with the accent on the first syllable and meaning swampy land in the dialect of the Indians who once lived there.

  * The structure was then known as the Graham Building.

  * The Reagans were married by the Reverend J. L. Moloney.

  † Also called Disciples of Christ and Campbellites. In 1906, the Christian Church had separated into two factions because of a dispute over instrumental music being incorporated into the church service. The progressive group, which allowed it, became known as the Disciples of Christ. This was the church into which Nelle Reagan was received. For the purposes of this book, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) will be referred to hereafter as simply the Christian Church although the author acknowledges that the latter is not the full and correct title.

  * In 1919, after William Reagan seriously injured himself with broken glass from a smashed empty whiskey bottle, Jack Reagan signed a second petition to commit William. This time the court approved. William died in 1925 in the mental institution to which he had been committed.

  * Ironically, Loyal Davis, a member of one of the older families in Galesburg, attended Knox College in his hometown before going on to Northwestern Medical School. Dr. Davis was to become Reagan’s father-in-law when his adopted stepdaughter, Nancy, took her vows as Reagan’s second wife.

  * Gertrude Crockett added, “Maureen Reagan [Reagan’s daughter], when she was in Monmouth, told me [Nelle] was a ‘tiger.’“

  * Goeffrey Perrett in America in the Twenties wrote: “In the country as a whole it was estimated that up to 1 million women a year [1920] were criminally aborted. There was abortion by knitting needle, coat hanger, and buttonhook. Desperate women swallowed poisonous concoctions in an attempt to induce a miscarriage. Criminal abortion killed as many as 50,000 women a year. Yet it was absolutely against the law to disseminate birth control information and devices under Section 211 of the U.S. Penal code.�
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  “DIXON WAS ALWAYS A SMALL TOWN, IT ALWAYS has been and it always will be,” Dixon historian George Lamb boasted. With no large nearby metropolitan centers, people were generally born, educated and married there. “Folks had dreams [to move away and become successful]… but most never realized them.… The real center was downtown; it was a Saturday night town.”

  Nearly one half of Dixon’s population was employed in industry: Brown Shoe Company, the Reynolds Wire Company, Medusa Cement, J. I. Case, which made plows and farm implements, Clipper Lawn Mower Company, and several feed-and-grain companies. The area around Dixon was farm country. The dairy farms supplied the Borden Milk Company, and farmers grew wheat and corn to market. Both the Illinois Central and Northwestern railroads came through, enabling farmers to transport their produce to Chicago, Omaha and the South. Predominantly blue-collar and lower middle class, Dixon prided itself on being “the backbone of the country. Nothing much,” Mr. Lamb says, “could shake those foundations.”

  Dixon first saw life as a way-stop for those seeking their fortune elsewhere. The winding, treacherously swift currents of the Rock River, which snaked through the area, had to be forded if the riches of the lead-mining town of Galena were to be reached. By 1828, a French-Canadian trader named Joseph Ogee had opened a ferry to transport heavy wagons and draft animals across the river. He built, and for two years operated, both a ferry and a tavern, and then sold the enterprise, along with a small cabin, to pioneer John Dixon, whom the peaceful local Rock River Indians referred to as “Nada-chu-ra-sak” (white-haired Father) due to his long, flowing, silver hair. For the same reason, the industrious settlers who remained in Dixon because of the rich farmland and the power to be harnessed from the river were to call him “Father.”