by Anne Edwards
“He can do it,” Jack Reagan urged. “Give him a chance.”
Mrs. Graybill hired him for the summer and Dutch took to the job “like a rodeo rider to a bronc’s back.” His pay was eighteen dollars a week* and all the nickel root beers and ten-cent hamburgers he could eat. (“Everybody piled all the onion, pickle and relish on so they really got their money’s worth.” Ruth Graybill grinned.) His schedule called for him to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week (except on heavy rain days when the concession was closed). Extra lifeguards were hired for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. He began work at ten A.M., when he picked Ruth Graybill up at her home “kitty-corner from South Central School” (then about ten minutes from his house) and helped her pack up the day’s food supplies before they drove out to the park (a fifteen-minute drive) in her old Ford truck. On very hot days he remained on duty until ten P.M.
“I kind of had to laugh at myself when I went to work at [Lowell Park] in the summers,” he confessed. “You know why I had such fun at it? Because I was the only one up there on the guard stand. It was like a stage. Everyone had to look at me.”
“He liked it and we liked him,” Mrs. Graybill said. “He was real pleasant to everybody and treated everybody the same. In the morning, if he had time, he would give small children swimming lessons… there was never a basket left at closing time. That meant we had a good lifeguard; there was no bodies at the bot-
torn.… Oh, when he went after them, he went because they needed help.… Some swimmers, well, they would shrug off his help. ‘Oh, I could have made it alright,’ they’d say. I guess they resented being ‘saved’… they just felt he was showing off. Maybe. But he was with us six years [seven summers] and we never had a drowning in all that time.… He was a wonderful, good-natured young man. I never heard him speak one cross word to the bathers. He was a beautiful diver. He would do the swan dive out on the springboard.”
“He was the perfect specimen of an athlete, tall, willowy, muscular, brown, good-looking,” Bill Thompson remembered. “Of course, the girls were always flocking around him.” Thompson also recalled a white canoe, owned by Honey Glessner, that Dutch would rent out to young lovers for fifty cents an hour and then split the money with Glessner.
He began making notches on an old log (at Jack’s suggestion) for those swimmers he had “saved” the very first summer. “How many you got now?” people would ask. “You count ‘em,” he would reply. But, if pressed, he always knew the current total. Only once did he receive a reward. When he retrieved Gus Whiffleberg’s dental plate, which had come loose when Gus hit the water too hard coming down the slide, Whiffleberg gave him ten dollars for his efforts.
One of the “jokes” in a page of the Dixon annual (1928) reads:
DROWNING YOUTH: “Don’t rescue me. I want to die.”
DUTCH REAGAN: “Well, you’ll have to postpone that; I want a medal.”
Bee (Elizabeth) Drew* was a year ahead of Dutch in high school, but her best friend (“a sparkling brunette”), Margaret Cleaver, daughter of Reverend Ben Cleaver, who had taken over the Dixon Christian Church in 1922, was in his class. For one entire year, Dutch had not been able to take his eyes off her in church. When he became a lifeguard, she took her first real notice of him.
Bee Drew, her boyfriend, Margaret and Dutch would go out on the river in the white canoe late in the day. Drew recalled that “Dutch had a portable windup Victrola that he used to take in the canoe. There was one record, ‘Ramona,’ that he played over and over all the time. My boyfriend finally threw it in the river.”
In order to get some time to go canoeing with Margaret (his private name for her was “Mugs,” although her family called her “Peggy”), he would have to clear the river of swimmers early. To do so, he would skip a pebble into the water and then wait to see the lagging swimmers’ startled expressions.
“Oh, that’s just an old river rat,” he would say drily, thereby emptying the swimming area.
In his graduation annual, he wrote an article entitled “Meditations of a Lifeguard,” which gave his view of the day-to-day experience. In it, he was cynical about the swimmers whose lives he came to guard. He refers to a big “hippopotamus,” a “frail and forty maiden” and “this motley crew.” But then he points out “one ray of hope”:
… she’s walking onto the dock now. She trips gracefully over to the edge of the crowded pier, and settles like a butterfly. The life guard strolls by, turns and strolls by again. Then he settles in the immediate region of the cause of all this sudden awakening. He assumes a manly worried expression, designed to touch the heart of any blonde, brunette or unclassified female. He has done all that is necessary. She speaks and the sound of her voice is like balm to a wounded soul.…
Reagan wrote: “She [Margaret] was (strange as it sounds) grown up enough to know we weren’t grown up enough to call this anything but friendship.… Me!—I was in love…” His classmates insist he never had another high school girlfriend except Margaret Cleaver.
They saw each other on a regular basis. However, the first year they were dating, Margaret was also seeing Dutch’s friend Dick McNichol. By the time of the senior banquet, McNichol came to Dutch and said, “I think Margaret has made her choice and you should ask her to the banquet.” That ended the triangle and Margaret and Dutch became a couple in the eyes of all who knew them. Members of the church expected that one day they would wed.
Yet, there was something about Dutch that Margaret could not understand, some elusive element in his personality. His charm was overwhelming, his kindness almost extreme. He always left people with a way of saying “God bless you” that made them feel—just maybe—”he had an inside track.” Her father hoped the boy might find his way into the ministry and encouraged him along that route.
Dutch had a deep-felt compassion for Jack in spite of his drinking. He admired his father’s good instincts, his fury at racial or religious bigotry, his respect for the independence of his sons’ thinking, and he loved his father’s bawdy stories and locker-room jokes which made father and sons confederates in a manly sect. But Jack was never able to reach out, or to dig in, to understand his sons any more than he could unravel Nelle’s mysterious needs and inclinations. Jack took his family on a surface level and showed little interest in their accomplishments. Moon confessed that his father rarely managed to see him play football, at which he was a local star, or Dutch in a school play, in which he also was invariably the star. Whatever his sons achieved did not impress Jack greatly unless the achievements had to do with money earned, and yet he could display a great sensitivity toward his sons.
Moon graduated high school the summer of 1926. “We were poor, and I mean poor—the class decided and voted that for the senior prom and for graduation the fellows would wear tuxes. There was no way. So, the subject came up one evening at home, for dinner, about graduation, and I just remarked at the table, ‘I’m not going to graduation,’ and my mother said, ‘You’re not what?’ I said, ‘I’m not going to graduation.’ And she said, ‘Well, there’s no question about whether or not you graduated, is there?’ I said, ‘No… I passed everything… [but] the class decided that the fellas were all going to have tuxes for the senior prom and… at the graduation.’ And that was the end of the conversation.
“I worked that season part time in the shoe store for my dad.… Saturday afternoon [a week before the prom], my dad says, ‘Let’s take a walk.’ Business was not very good, so we [closed the store and] started out walking. All of a sudden, we wheeled into O’Malley’s Clothing Store, and no questions asked, Mr. O’Malley says, ‘Hi, fellas, how are you?’ He turned around and walked away, and went back into one of the cubicles where they had clothes hanging, and pulled something off a hanger. As he turned around before I could even see what he had, he says, ‘Take your coat off, Neil.’ I took my coat off, you know, and here was a tux coat. He puts it on, and he said, ‘Well, we won’t have to do anything with the coat. I’ll get the trousers. Try the
m on. We might have to shorten or lengthen them.’… Now this was a sacrifice to my family, don’t think it wasn’t, even though it didn’t cost probably over twenty-five dollars in those days. But that was my dad.”
Nelle would have much preferred the $25 to go toward Moon’s education, but he did not want to go to college. Instead, he took a job at the Medusa Portland Cement Company doing cost work for a salary of $125 a month, which enabled the Reagans to live a slightly more comfortable life. Moon seemed determined to oppose his mother’s wishes. His decision against going to college was a big disappointment to her; a harder knock was his sudden conversion to Catholicism. “I was eighteen years old and decided I was dissatisfied with the church,” he explained, “and went out shopping for a church, and went home and told my mother I was going to join the Catholic church. She then, with a tear in her eye, told me [for the first time] I had been baptized Catholic when I was six weeks old.”
For “fatherly advice,” Dutch went to either the Reverend Cleaver or his drama teacher, Mr. B. J. Fraser, or Ed Graybill. He had a number of surrogate fathers in Dixon throughout his youth. Jack Reagan and his younger son had little in common. He was not a mean or brutal drunk. Still, he was an alcoholic, able to escape from real life, and that generally included the lives and feelings of his family. Upon occasion he would make a gesture as with Moon’s tux, but Neil attributes such actions to his father’s concern with his own image, his need to appear able to keep up with the Joneses.
Nelle worried about Dutch’s ironclad control, his ability to block out such things as Jack’s binges. But the boys, as the children of an alcoholic, suffered certain humilities and defended themselves as best they could. Moon threw himself into a frenzy of physical activity, a host of friendships; he became the life of the party. Dutch developed two worlds—public and private—and was acutely alert to the dangers of Jack’s benders so that when they came he could cope with them, a feat that took a tremendous amount of self-control for a young boy to achieve (which he did, plus a great deal more). For if Jack’s drinking had forced Dutch to be self-reliant, Nelle’s obsessiveness demanded a continuous performance by him in public—being gracious to everyone and accepting social responsibilities, church activities. “Look people straight in the eye,” she counseled him. “Remember people’s names. Let them know you care.” Dutch appears never to have shared the harsh experiences involving his father with anyone, including Margaret, Nelle or Moon. Years later he did discuss these feelings, perversely not with those closest to him but with the press and in his book—for the public.
B. J. Fraser was a young, aggressive English and world history teacher at North Dixon High School. Fraser also was adviser to the Dramatic Club and responsible for school productions. He quickly encouraged Dutch to join, and since Margaret was also a member, it did not take much convincing. Fraser found him “head and shoulders above the rest of them [in the Dramatic Club].… He possessed a sense of presence on the stage, a sense of reality… he fit into almost any kind of role you put him into. Wisecracking, hat-over-the-ear, cigarette-in-the-mouth reporter—he could do that as well as any sentimental scenes.”
School plays were performed just for the student body until Dutch entered his senior year. He then approached Fraser on a plan to open the productions to the public, and by so doing encourage outside interest. The club elected him president. At the same time he was president of the senior class, vice-president of the Boys’ Hi-Y (who had as their aim to promote “Clean Speech, Clean Sports, Clean Living and Clean Scholarship”), on the varsity basketball team and had finally made it as tackle on the varsity football team (over local radio, he also broadcast a game in which he did not play). Another job he undertook was the art editing of the Dixonian—the school annual. His line drawings show originality and talent. The Dixonian was also filled with several examples of his writing. The following was titled “Geth-semane” (the olive grove east of Jerusalem where Jesus was betrayed):
To every man comes Gethsemane! Some fight the battle surrounded by prison walls, but for all the soul is laid bare. Some fight the battle when old age is creeping on like a silent clinging vine.
This is the story of a boy who fought his Gethsemane on the level sward in the shadow of a deserted grandstand.
An early harvest moon made ghostly figures of the milky mist tendrils, that hung over the deserted gridiron like spirits of long dead heroes, hovering over scenes of ancient triumphs. The level field was silent and lonely to all save the huddled figure who lay stretched out on the close cropped grass. But to this boy the field was crowded with ghosts of former stars.
Great linemen, brilliant backs who had given their all for the highschool were pointing ghostly scornful fingers at him. The quitter cringed before the visions his tortured mind brought up.
The quitter was the greatest half-back the school had ever produced, he was a story-book type, tall, good looking and very popular—or rather he had been popular until the last game the Saturday before. Crippled by ineligibility his team had run into competition harder than was expected. Held scoreless, and held to few gains he had quit—refused to risk his brilliant reputation by being flopped for losses.
His sham injuries were quickly perceived by the coach and team. Now he stood on the field, his mind torn by emotions and desires. His soul was being torn apart and all the petty little egotisms were preying on his mind. He realized his grandstand nature, he saw for the first time how cheap he really was. Great sobs shook him and he writhed before the pitiless conscience that drove him on in his agony of self punishment. Then his sobs ceased and he stood up, his face to the sky, and the ghosts of honored warriors urged him and drew him from the low shadows. A love and loyalty took the place of egotism. His hand strayed to the purple monogram he wore, and as he looked at the curving track, at the level field, he realized that he loved them.
Stubborn pride held him in silence while his team fought a losing battle in the last game of the season, he had been a quitter but now some sense of honor kept him from asking to play. The team filed into the dressing room at the end of the half, beaten and discouraged. The strained silence was broken by a stamping and shouting in the stands above them. Then they cried as the opening lines of the old loyalty song boomed across the field, and as the last notes died away, so died stubborn pride. The quitter rose and spoke. In three minutes the team trotted out to warm up, and eleven boys were wiping tears from their eyes as the quitter took his place by the full-back.
To finish the story right, perhaps they ought to win the game, but this is a story of football, of football when the score stands thirteen to nothing against you.
Time and again the quitter pounded around right end in a beautiful ground gaining stride that made the coach want to recite poetry, the rhythm was so even. He didn’t scurry like so many open field runners; neither did he push and fight his way, but he sailed, and as he side-stepped a man the rhythm remained unbroken, until, as he hit an inevitable tackier his bird-like flight changed to a ripping, tearing smash that gained a last yard every time.
The game ended a tie. The first score was made when he sprinted thirty-seven yards over tackle for a touchdown, after running and smashing his way the length of the field in three short snappy plays. As they carried him off the field he received the perfect tribute; with rooters for both sides standing while the waves of sound broke on the gray cloudy sky, broke and seemed to shriek in the ears of the quitter.
And when a friend asked the coach whether he considered the past season successful or not, he thought of the greatest half-back and murmured to himself, “It matters not that you won or lost, but how you played the game.”
R.R. ‘28
Also included in the annual was his poem called “Life”:
I wonder what it’s all about, and why
we suffer so, when little things go wrong?
We make our life a struggle,
When life should be a song.
Our troubles break and drench us.
Like spray on the cleaving prow
Of some trim Gloucester schooner,
As it dips in a graceful bow…
But why does sorrow drench us
When our fellow passes on?
He’s just exchanged life’s dreary dirge
For an eternal life of song…
Millions have gone before us.
And millions will come behind,
So why do we curse and fight
At a fate both wise and kind?
We hang onto a jaded life
A life full of sorrow and pain.
A life that warps and breaks us,
And we try to run through it again.
Neither work is what others might have expected an all-Amer-ican type like Dutch Reagan to have penned. In the story “Gethsemane” he revealed a fear of failure, and in the poem “Life” he obviously felt quite comfortable exposing his more emotional side to his peers in Dixon. By now he was a kind of hero (thirty notches had been carved into the log out at Lowell Park), a role model to those younger and less strong than he. From being a skinny, small kid, he had filled out and finally made the varsity football squad. He wore glasses but had won the heart of Dixon’s prettiest girl. For him, Dixon had become the embodiment of all he was to hold true and right. Small-town folk stuck together. They were a family, a greater one than your own. You were in the boat rowing together. People were involved with each other’s problems, their kids, their kids’ futures. Most thought that future meant staying in Dixon, and so everyone was concerned with what was happening to affect their neighbors’ lives.
At seventeen, Dutch, like Jack, was a dedicated Democrat, counting the days of the years until he could vote. An anti—third-term resolution had been passed by the Senate in February, making certain Calvin Coolidge would not run again.* When the Republican Convention met in Kansas City early in July, they nominated Herbert Hoover on the first ballot despite strong opposition from the Old Guard, who suspected him of being a Democrat at heart because of his allegiance to Woodrow Wilson during his presidency and his pro-British stands (privately they called him “Sir Herbert”). In his acceptance speech, he vowed (in a midwestern monotone, his head bent as he read the words), “We shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from the nation.”