Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  The members of the Christian Church of Dixon saw themselves as liberal Fundamentalists.* The Reverend Harvey Waggoner, a powerful and dogmatic speaker, led the congregation for the first two years of Nelle’s attendance. The church, whose meetings were held in the basement of the YMCA, was vigorously raising funds to obtain a building of its own. Tithing was considered desirable, although not mandatory, for its members. No matter how difficult her struggle to keep her family afloat, Nelle insisted that one tenth of their income (including what the boys earned) go to the support of the church. Nelle countered Jack’s grumbling complaints with assurances that “the Lord [will] make your ninety percent twice as big if you [make] sure He [gets] his tenth.”†

  Jack’s earnings were a disappointment. He took a correspondence course to learn about the bones of the feet, believing that if he knew more he could sell shoes better. In the 1920s salesmanship was considered one of the greatest of the performing arts. Bruce Barton, the son of a poor Tennessee preacher, who had become a supersalesman and a huge success, in 1924 wrote the best seller The Man Nobody Knows. In it, Barton compared the art of selling anything with the art of selling religion. (“Jesus hated prosy dullness… all the greatest things in human life are one-syllable things—love, joy, hope, home, child, wife, trust, faith, God…”)

  “Jesus walked barefoot,” Jack was known to say, “but then, he didn’t have to deal with our Illinois winters, now did he?” Another favorite was, “I’m glad you chose that pair, they can walk to church and dance a jig on the way home.” Even his gift for selling did not help greatly. The money was simply not there to be made at the Fashion Boot Shop. “People in Dixon were careful. Shoes got handed down from one child to another in a family, and folks seldom had more than two pairs—dress and work—and they took both to the shoemaker to repair worn out parts many, many times before they considered buying a new pair.” Reagan was to say that he wore his brother’s shoes and outgrown clothes until he was in college.

  Despite the disappointing performance of his business venture, Jack would have been a better provider for his family if not for his “weakness.” Reagan often told stories of his father’s drunkenness. “I was eleven years old,” he wrote in his autobiography, “the first time I came home to find my father flat on his back on the front porch and no one there to lend a hand but me. He was drunk, dead to the world. I stood over him for a minute or two. I wanted to let myself in the house and go to bed and pretend he wasn’t there. Oh, I wasn’t ignorant of his weakness. I don’t know at what age I knew what the occasional absences or the loud voices in the night meant, but up till now my mother or my brother handled the situation and I was a child in bed with the privilege of pretending sleep.… I felt myself fill with grief for my father at the same time as I was feeling sorry for myself. Seeing his arms spread out as if they were crucified—as indeed he was—his hair soaked with melting snow, snoring as he breathed… I bent over him, smelling the sharp odor from the speakeasy. I got a fistful of his overcoat. Opening the door, I managed to drag him inside and get him to bed.”

  Nelle taught the boys tolerance, even of their father’s “bouts with the dark demon in the bottle.” Alcoholism, she insisted, was a sickness and one should never condemn a man or woman for something beyond his or her control. Jack never understood Nelle’s dedication to her church, her obsessive ministering or her interest in theater any more than she could explain his drinking. Jack’s cynicism, his frustration, his violent anger at the men behind big business, his growing inclination toward week-long benders, his “lusty, vulgar humor” and his feistiness never seemed to undermine Nelle’s optimism. Reagan said, “If [Jack] was occasionally vulgar [Nelle] tried to raise the tone of the family.”

  Dutch and Moon were the first to be baptized in the new Christian Church at 123 Hennepin (completed only three days earlier) on June 21, 1922. The sacrament of baptism was a personal confession of faith—a symbol of death, burial and resurrection of Christ, and a commitment to the way of Christ. With the immersion the old life is buried, new life is born, and sins are forgiven. The Reverend Waggoner had died only a few days before of a sudden blood disease and it is unclear who officiated at the brothers’ baptism (a fire destroyed the church’s records in 1928), although it is considered most likely that it would have been Harry H. Peters, state secretary for the Christian Church who functioned as minister until a replacement for the Reverend Waggoner could be found (a matter of only a few weeks). After his immersion before the congregation, as he rose from the waters, Reagan remembered hearing the minister say, “Arise and walk in newness of faith,” or, in other words, in a new born-again state.*

  So intense was Nelle’s faith as opposed to her husband’s that Neil claims he did not know until he was eighteen years old that Jack was Catholic. “We [Dutch and Moon] were brought up in the Christian Church, which meant Sunday School Sunday mornings, church Sunday morning, Christian Endeavor Sunday evening, church after Christian Endeavor, and prayer meeting on Wednesdays.” But if Moon’s compliance in the baptism was meant only to appease or please his mother, Dutch’s was a more deliberate act. Both boys had a sense of religion, but Dutch’s faith was a more active part of his life. (Reagan told Reverend Adrian Rogers, president of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1980, that he had felt “called” at the time of his baptism, adding, “I had a personal experience when I invited Christ into my life.” The Reverend Rogers asked him if he knew the Lord Jesus or just knew about him. Reagan replied, “I KNOW him!”)

  “My Sunday School class is getting paid for janitor work [in a nearby building] and we are using the money to plaster our S[un-day] S[chool] classroom,” Dutch, at thirteen, wrote a church member who had moved away. Two years later, he taught his own “Sunday School class” for young boys at the church and was a leader of several of the prayer meetings. Class members say he made examples of current sports figures as young men with Christian principle. The congregation was much taken with his voice and delivery, which they believed owed a great deal to the private elocution lessons Nelle gave him. Parishioners of the church like to recount how Dutch could make the Bible seem personal, like a “phrase might just have been written.”

  “Everybody loved Nelle Reagan and looked up to her as a leader,” Mrs. Mildred Neer, the wife of Dutch’s Sunday School teacher, said, the expression on her face glowing as she added, “She was always there when anyone needed her. God always heard Nelle Reagan’s prayers and answered them.” Questioned as to whether she had ever asked [her now deceased husband] what Dutch was like in Sunday School, she replied, “Just a live wire. A real all-American boy.”

  In discussions about Dutch during the 1920s with Dixonites who shared those years with him, that phrase crops up frequently. All-American boy. What exactly does that mean? “Well, a kid who believes in the Lord’s word, respects his elders and still has enough spit in him to get into trouble once in a while,” confessed one gentleman who knew Dutch. What kind of trouble? “Puttin’ a buck rabbit into the cage of the female rabbits when we weren’t supposed to. Although I think it was Ed O’Malley who done that. Dutch weren’t afraid of a rough fight. Never saw him back down. His dad would tan his hide if he didn’t win though.”

  Nelle Reagan’s personal ministry grew to extend beyond members of her family and church. “If Nelle had had the education, I think she would have mounted the pulpit,” a contemporary commented.* She regularly visited patients at Katherine Shaw Bethea and the state mental hospitals, and scheduled weekly visits to prisoners in the local jail as well. Dixon did not have much of a crime problem. Petty theft and drunk-and-disorderly conduct were the causes of most arrests. Nelle ate a Spartan lunch of soda crackers on jail-visiting days, but always brought apples or cookies to the inmates along with her Bible. She would read from it and then give the prisoners the Book to hold in their hands.

  “She had a way of givin’ out her religion that wasn’t offensive. She was an elocutionist—dramatic readings is what it is called nowadays
,” Dixonite Louis Sindlinger explained. “She was very good at that and she entertained the prisoners with them as well.” Some of them were released in her custody and slept in Nelle’s sewing room until they found another situation.

  “She was thin—a real tiny, little thing,” Isabelle Newman recalled. “Pleasing voice. She started and headed a True Blue Class.” (This refers to a group of about twenty-five women who met either at the Christian Church or at Nelle’s to read and study the Bible and exchange stories of how the Book had helped them through various crises in their lives.) When the class was held at the Reagan house, Dutch would join in the readings. The Christian Church had a new minister, “an old-time pastor with much rhetoric, Reverend Ben H. Cleaver. He often stopped by to visit Nelle at home… rather homely, Abe Lincoln type.” Cleaver soon became Dutch’s listening ear.

  In the summer Nelle dragged Dutch with her to Chautauqua, to listen to the religious lectures and Bible readings that were intermingled with theatrical entertainment. An announcement dated August 12, 1923, reads:

  Mrs. Catherine Sherer Cronk, in the interest of the Inter-Church World Movement, will appear on August 12. Her subject will be Lilliputian Heresy.

  And one dated August 19, 1923, announces:

  Andreas Bard, the Man with a Message—he hails from Kansas City, he interests, he captivates, he persuades, he is clear in his thinking and he abounds in his humor, his diction is graphic, his pictures are real, he is well-known and loved in his own city. You must hear him.

  And appearing in the Dixon Evening Telegraph on the same day was a photograph of an ample gentleman with a handlebar moustache standing before a machine that looked like a stage prop from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Beneath the photograph was the caption:

  Electrical entertainer, Louis Williams. The demonstration consists of experiments with the latest developments of wireless telegraphy, an experiment with currents and high frequency, in x-ray, luminous wires, lighting vacuum tubes, etc. Many of the demonstrations are really startling in their nature.

  Dutch and Nelle (Moon preferred playing football on the school grounds) would take the streetcar out to the picnic area of Chautauqua and lunch on apples and crackers before attending the shows. Mother and son were close, but since Nelle spent so much time in the pursuit of her vocation, she was away from home a lot. Afternoons such as those spent with Nelle at Chautauqua were special occasions for Dutch that gave him a window on an extraordinary life. They had pretty much ended by summer 1925, for Dutch now held full-time summer jobs. His first, when he was fourteen (1925), was with a construction contractor who paid him thirty-five cents an hour for working ten hours a day, six days a week (twenty-one dollars a week, just slightly under the average weekly Dixon paycheck at the time). He was put to work digging the foundation for the future St. Anne’s Catholic Church in heavy clay soil. One day Jack came by to pick him up at lunch hour. Dutch had just raised his pick ready to strike a blow when the noon whistle blew. He did not bother to lower it to the ground, but let it drop behind him. The sharp steel implement struck earth inches from the toes of the contractor, who yelled at Jack, “This kid of yours [is so lazy he] can get less dirt on a shovel than any human being that’s human!” But he did not fire him, and by the end of the summer Dutch had saved two hundred dollars, which he hoped to put away for college. He still had four years of high school to attend. Many of Dixon’s young people quit school at the eighth grade; but Nelle, determined that her boys would have an education, encouraged all of her sons’ thoughts of college.

  The rent on South Hennepin Avenue became too steep for Jack to pay. By the end of the summer of 1923, he moved his family to a smaller and less expensive house at 338 West Everett on the north side. Dutch and Moon slept on the enclosed porch, which was fine in summer but nippy in winter. Gone were the rabbits, the pigeons, the glass case for the bird eggs and the club house, the small “elegance” and luxury that the house on Hennepin Avenue had represented. Jack considered the move temporary. “No need to put up curtains here,” he told Nelle. “We won’t be staying that long.” (“Jack always wanted to be ‘cut-glass Irish’; at best he was ‘lace-curtain,’ but that never had a way of registering with him,” one old friend remarked.)

  Dixon had two high schools.* Dutch entered North Dixon High School, while Moon remained at South Dixon where he was starting his junior year. (“I took the long trips across the bridge morning and night,” Neil recalls. “Cold, winter weather—oh—the wind [blew] down that river.”) Neil claims the south side was rougher than the north side. This might have been because the north side was newer and the families who resided there were more progressive and affluent. With the boys attending schools of different values (sports were stressed at South Dixon, culture at North Dixon), a schism began to bisect the Reagan family as surely as the Rock River divided Dixon. Increasingly, it became Nelle and Dutch, Jack and Moon. The two boys were polarized in their personalities as well. “We [South Dixon] considered them [North Dixon] sissies.… I don’t think he [Dutch] ever saw the inside of a poolroom!” Neil scoffs, apparently meaning he and his friends from South Dixon ventured into Demon Town to play the evil game.

  Moon was an extrovert, a great promoter and salesman for whatever he wanted. The jobs he held in his early youth were more sales pitch than physical. Nelle said Moon possessed brass-iness. Dutch was introspective. He read late at night, tried his hand at writing, was earnest about his religion and was more reserved at home than in public. He basked in the acceptance of outsiders and always gave that “extra something”—a special boyish smile, blue-gray eyes “looking straight at you.”

  “As a kid I lived in a world of pretend,” he said later. “But by the time I was [eight or nine] I felt self-conscious about it. People made fun of me… ‘What are you doing, kid? Talking to yourself?’ Enough people make enough cracks like that, and a sensitive boy… begins to feel a little silly.… So from then on he doesn’t pretend openly.… That was the way it was with me anyway. I had a great imagination… and I used to love to make up plays and act in them myself… but I soon got self-conscious.”

  Still scrawny for his age, he remained on the bench during his first two years on the Dixon football team. (Finally in his third year he made the second string.) Wink McReynolds was on the senior varsity team and Dutch greatly respected him.* What free time he had apart from school and church was devoted to memorizing strategy he was not asked to execute on the football field and practicing baton twirling with a broomstick or the top of his and Moon’s old brass bedpost. The latter paid off for him when he became drum major of the YMCA band. He tells the story of one St. Patrick’s Day parade when he pranced ahead of the band, eyes front, baton twirling, so caught up in his performance that he forgot to turn down the planned route and the band continued without him. When he realized he was all alone, he raced back and overtook them, to much applause and laughter from the crowds on the sidelines.

  The great thing about belonging to the YMCA was its supervised swimming program at Lowell Park, a three-hundred-acre naturally forested reserve named after the poet James Russell Lowell, author of “Ode to a Waterfowl” (supposedly written in the area). The Rock River tore through the park with the same vehemence with which it ripped through Dixon. Reagan was to recall, “There was a dam downstream which, when the sluices were opened, gave the ordinarily slow current a quicker tempo and deeper thrust. The bottom sloped swiftly into deep water not too far from the edge. An additional hazard was the other bank, about six hundred feet away; swimming across was a challenge—once started you had to go all the way, or else.”

  The year Dutch turned fourteen (1925) saw a tremendous change in his appearance. He matured into a tall, muscular young man, and that year he and Moon were roustabouts for the Ring-ling Brothers Circus when it came to town. It quartered in Demon Town and the boys earned twenty-five cents an hour for dragging the circus wagons into the mud so they couldn’t accidentally be sent rolling. (Moon managed to make extra money by s
calping the passes they were given as a bonus.) They had to be on the grounds at four o’clock in the morning to feed the elephants before the tents were raised. “In those days it was the elephants who set ‘em up by pulling the ropes you know,” Bill Thompson explained. “It was a sight.”

  An only child and a poor swimmer, Thompson had wanted nothing more than to swim as well as Dutch. (“I guess you are notches one, two and three on my log,” Reagan wrote him years later.) Because of Dutch’s strong crawl stroke and his speed, no one could touch him in a race. But in the spring of 1926, after several tragic drownings, the Park Commission threatened to close Lowell Park that coming summer unless better safety precautions could be assured. Dutch thought what the park needed was a good lifeguard and applied to the concessionaires, Ruth Graybill and her husband, Ed, for the job.

  “You’re pretty young,” Mrs. Graybill scoffed.