Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  He began dating shortly after his arrival. Though he had not yet accepted the fact that he and Margaret might have broken up for good, he was not sitting home nights waiting for the year of her French adventure to pass. He took out one of the vocalists from the station, but they soon became just buddies. This might have occurred because he met a beautiful young woman, Mary Frances,* who was two years younger than he. (“Where are you from?” he asked when they met. “Illinois,” she replied. “Where in Illinois?” “Monmouth—you’ve never heard of it.” He said, “No? I once lived there, my dad worked in shoes at ColwelPs Department Store.” She told him, “My mother was in millinery at Col-well’s, how about that!”)

  Mary Frances was quite the most glamorous-looking girl he had ever known: tall, slim, dark-haired, a sleek catlike quality to her, lithe, graceful, fast-moving, and a superb athlete and horsewoman. She rode in horse shows, taking one blue ribbon after the other. Dutch emceed one of these events, held at the fairgrounds, and was so taken by her that over the loudspeaker he asked her to meet him later, and, indeed, she did. Both were movie fans and they attended all the new films together. Often in the evenings they met at Fort Des Moines Hotel, directly across from the side door of the Stoner Building on Ninth Street (“unquestionably Des Moines’s best hostelry and containing the city’s finest restaurant,” said Jack Shelley) or at the Kirkwood, which had recently opened and was only a few blocks from Reagan’s apartment. (“He was a nice man but a terrible dresser,” recalled Chuck Schosselman, who became the assistant manager of the Kirkwood. “I’ll never forget his tan topcoat that was so long we called him ‘Sweet Pea’ [from the Popeye comic strip]—not to his face, of course, but all regular hotel guests have pet names, and none ever know!”)

  Mary Frances preferred meeting him away from her home, because when he came to pick her up, “Dutch would clear the dining-room table and with cards and markers re-create the football or baseball game he had just announced that day for her father’s benefit and it would be at least an hour before they could depart on their way.” A steady relationship soon developed, but Dutch remained noncommittal. Margaret still occupied an important place in his heart. Mary Frances’s dedicated Catholicism created a problem for her but not for him. After all, in the Reagan home, Christian Church and Catholic philosophies had co-existed in harmony. But Mary Frances made it clear that when she married, her husband and children would have to share her faith.

  One year after Margaret went to France, she wrote Dutch that she had met a young man in the U.S. Consular Service whom she planned to marry.* The shock was severe. As if to console himself, he bought his first car, “a smart little two-seater brown Nash convertible” from his savings (the car dealer was his old school friend Enos Cole) and gave every appearance, as he gunned the motor, of being “a dashing young blade around town,” with the top down even in inclement weather.

  The disappointment in hearing of Margaret’s engagement was followed almost immediately by news that Jack had suffered a serious heart attack. After a lengthy convalescence, he was told he could no longer work. Dutch had just been given a raise in salary to seventy-five dollars a week, twenty-five of which now went directly to Nelle. Making money had suddenly become an important consideration. His first year was not entirely clear sledding. Myrtle reports, “Peter [MacArthur] was the one who really brought Dutch along. He’d sit at home and listen to [him on] the radio and I can still hear him bawling Dutch out when he’d mispronounce a word or say something wrong. But Dutch took it.”

  To augment his income, Dutch took on extra jobs. He was hired for five dollars to narrate a filmed news program (by Burton B. Jerrell, a local man who made short newsreels for release in Iowa theaters). “He was a great announcer with a wonderful voice, but he wouldn’t follow the script, so I had to let him go,” Jerrell said. He lost another job as interview host on Parker’s Perfect Polish radio show to Myrtle, when she took over for him one time and the client liked her better.

  Despite these small setbacks, within a year of his joining the WHO staff Dutch had become a celebrity throughout the Midwest. Maland took advantage of his ability and his appeal and had him interview numerous visiting greats in the sports fields—Doc Kearns, Ed Strangler Lewis, Max Baer—film stars like Leslie Howard (“I was so stage-struck that I forgot his name as I stepped up to the microphone,” Reagan admitted) and James Cagney, as well as controversial personalities such as the famed evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

  The woman Dutch interviewed was no longer the miracle healer who could draw a crowd of thirty thousand people clamoring for admission, creating pandemonium as the sick and ailing tried to make their way to the platform where she stood. She was at the Fairgrounds in Des Moines on yet another tour that she hoped might turn the clock back for her to better days. Attendance had been disastrously low and she had agreed to be interviewed on radio in order to bolster ticket sales. The famous red hair was now dyed that color, but something of the old “insistent hyperthyroid vitality” (overpowering, to say the least), the high personal magnetism and sexuality remained.

  By far, this was to be the most difficult interview Dutch was to conduct. Aimee appeared at noontime wearing a flowing chartreuse ankle-length gown, gardenias at her throat. Dutch had little chance to ask her many questions, for once she began talking she took over the microphone and Dutch was too mesmerized by the potency of her voice to interrupt. (“Her voice… was a voice that the ordeal of thousands of sermons, preached on street corners, in outdoor pavilions, in camp meeting tents and in large city auditoriums in the days before microphones, had strained and coarsened. It was the husky vibrant ‘contralto of the midway,’ a voice of range and power, which she learned to use with rare dramatic skill. Above all,” recalled a former neighbor of hers in the thirties, “I remember the deep huskiness of that voice, the occasional throaty richness, the suggestion of stifled laughter.”) Dutch wasn’t too far into the interview when he realized he had lost control of his own program.

  “… suddenly I heard her say ‘good night’ to our radio audience,” he remembered. “There were four minutes to go by the radio clock.… In my most dulcet tones I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we conclude this broadcast by the noted evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, with a brief interlude of transcribed music. [I signaled to] a sleepy engineer [to put on a record]. I expected nothing less than the ‘Ave Maria.’ The Mills Brothers started singing ‘Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day.’“

  The lesson was one he was never to forget. After that time, he did not allow his radio guests to talk at any length and he became adept at forming questions or comments to interject as soon as the other person had made a point, or, for that matter, simply said something pointless.

  Baseball was the backbone of WHO’s sports department. Shortly after he joined WHO, Reagan was given the job of broadcasting the home games of the Chicago Cubs, remaining in his small studio on the ground floor of the Stoner Building while a telegraph operator in the press box in Chicago tapped out each play. Curly, a young man in an anteroom outside Dutch’s studio, received the plays and typed them out in a coded message, which he then slipped through a glass window to Dutch. Without a pause in his reporting, he would translate the cryptic code “S2C” into “It’s a called strike breaking over the inside corner making it two strikes on the batter.” While he waited for the next message, he would improvise with some fictionalized description. “Hartnett returns the ball to Lon Warneke. Warneke is dusting his hands in the resin, steps up on the mound, is getting the sign again from Hartnett, here’s the windup and the pitch.” Near at hand was “a turntable with a crowd applause record, the volume of which was manipulated by Dutch with a foot pedal.” As he relayed the game, he would dub in stadium sounds to make the broadcast sound more realistic.

  Football had always been his game, and as he said, “I knew… how it felt to be on the field, and the smell of sweat and the taste of mud and blood…” He had never attended a major-league baseball game. A
lways able to absorb material fast, he managed to sound knowledgeable, but he had to give an impression of being there. Maland remedied that situation by sending him to Chicago (an overnight journey) to talk to Pat Flanagan, a well-known NBC sportscaster and the man who had created the telegraphic-report process. Flanagan gave him an on-the-spot education in the workings of major-league baseball. He advised Dutch to memorize all he saw—the press box, the diamond, the clock, the habits of players, the jargon. By the time Dutch returned to Des Moines, he had an image of Wrigley Field etched clearly in his mind along with a full cast of characters and their idiosyncracies.

  Within a matter of a few weeks, he had reason to be grateful for this on-the-spot training. During the ninth inning of a play-byplay broadcast of a game between the Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals, with a scoreless tie, Dizzy Dean on the mound, Augie Galan at bat, Curly slipped Dutch the news: “The wire has gone dead.” For a period of six minutes and forty-five seconds, Dutch improvised, calling numerous foul balls on Galan and describing a “red headed kid who had scrambled and gotten the souvenir ball,” along with several other imaginary incidents on the field. This adroit handling of what could have been a disaster for the WHO sports department made Dutch a bit of a hero, a status he unqualifiedly reached a few days later.

  Humid weather had prevailed, and on this particular Sunday evening Dutch had left his windows open as he prepared for bed. About eleven P.M. he heard a scream. Poking his head out he saw a woman (Melba Lohmann) in a white nurse’s uniform fighting off a man across the street near the nurses’ entrance to the hospital. He grabbed a .45 caliber automatic gun he had just purchased (for target practice) and, aiming it directly at the man, shouted, “Leave her alone or I’ll shoot you right between the shoulders!”

  The assailant, who turned out to be a mugger, dropped the purse and small suitcase that he had managed to wrest away from Miss Lohmann and ran off. “Are you all right?” Dutch called down.

  “I guess so,” the young nurse answered.

  “Wait there,” he shouted. Moments later he was by her side dressed in robe, pajamas and slippers. After ascertaining that she was shaken but not injured, he insisted on seeing her to the hospital entrance. It never occurred to either of them that dressed as they were they made a strange couple. Fifty years later, Dutch was to claim that the gun had not been loaded and that he would have had to throw it at the man to do any damage. Melba Lohmann was taken with the fact that “on a mild, warm night at an hour when people might well be awake, only this young man came forward to help. He was so strong-sounding in his command that the robber believed his gun was loaded—and so did I—and that was the main thing.”

  Moon graduated from Eureka in June 1933. By late summer he had not been able to find employment. Reagan claimed in his autobiography that at Nelle’s instigation, Moon arrived on his doorstep in Des Moines with the hope that there might be work in a larger city. Moon told quite a different story. “Dutch called me and said, I just bought a new Nash convertible. Would you drive down and pick it up [in Eureka] and drive it out here? I’ll send you some money for a hotel and gasoline.’ I said, ‘O.K.’ Then he says [sic], ‘Plan to stay two or three days out here and see the station and meet the guys at the station,’ and I said, ‘O.K.,’ although I had been thinking of going on to law school.”

  He moved in with Dutch, which was not particularly easy for either of them. The quarters were small and they found they had less to say to each other than ever before. Two or three days extended into three weeks without any job opportunities for Moon. With no pocket money to spend, he hung around Dutch at the station. One Friday night, he sat in the studio as Dutch broadcast a regular spot in his sports commentary—predictions of upcoming league football games. As Dutch spoke glibly, Moon shook his head. Introducing his brother and pushing a live microphone in front of him, Dutch asked why he disagreed. (They had differing political ideologies as well. Moon had rejected Roosevelt and the New Deal six months after the 1932 election and was now a registered Republican, a fact that Jack and Dutch took as a kind of betrayal.) At the close of the program, Dutch promised his audience he would broadcast whether he or Moon had the better percentage the following Friday night.

  On the strength of his performance on Dutch’s program, Pete MacArthur offered Moon five dollars a week to read the football scoreboard on the Saturday night news broadcast at WOC in Davenport. Moon said he couldn’t even starve on that salary. MacArthur expanded this to thirty dollars a week to include Moon’s doing a cathartic commercial three times a day, five days a week. Within six months he was made program director at a ten-dollar-a-week increase, a great relief to Dutch, who would no longer have to contribute to his brother’s support (which he had been doing for a year and a half).

  After Moon left, Dutch moved to a larger apartment at 400 Center Street which he shared with Art Mann, an assistant coach at Drake. His new home was in an old house that had been divided into four apartments, each consisting of “a large living room, a small bedroom and dressing room and a bathroom.” The apartment quickly became a busy bachelors’ flat. “The house was beautiful,” recalled one former friend who added that her most vivid recollection was of the “heavy dark varnished woodwork. Dutch’s apartment, on the ground floor, was off the large entrance hallway and had originally been the front and back sitting rooms and butler’s pantry.”

  Art Mann was going steady with Lucille Robinson (a fine athlete who was to win the Woman’s State Golf Championship). The three of them became fast friends, and when Lucille and Art married a year later, Dutch was best man. Having a roommate enabled him to afford an apartment better suited to the needs of a successful radio announcer. By the time Art and Lucille had married, he was capable of supporting the apartment on his own. And he had become quite a man about town. Cy’s Moonlight Inn remained one of his favorite hangouts, but he had also discovered Club Belvedere, Des Moines’s one real night spot. “Club Belvedere was strictly class. It even had a chorus line. Illegal booze, of course, and… a casino,” explained Des Moines reporter Walter Shotwell. Dutch showed up almost every Saturday night “with many girls.” Rich Kennelly, one of Club Belvedere’s owners, remembered that “all [Dutch] ever wanted to talk about was horses; he knew I kept riding horses.”

  His relationship with Mary Frances had brought horses into Dutch’s life. He claims that as a youngster he might have “had a yen to be like Tom Mix.” He now dreamed of owning his own mount, but the prohibitive cost of boarding and grooming a horse made this impossible. Ernie Saunders suggested that if he signed up and was accepted as a reserve officer in the 14th Cavalry Regiment stationed at Camp Dodge, not only would he be able to ride fine cavalry mounts, he would receive invaluable training in horsemanship.

  Lucky for Dutch, an eye examination was not required by the Reserve Cavalry until the candidate had completed his training. Dutch reckoned he could prolong that period for a few years. Ultimately, of course, he would reach a place where he would either have to finish his work and apply for a commission or give up his privilege of riding cavalry horses. His intentions were not entirely honorable. He admitted that he had “no particular desire to be an officer” and that he believed the United States “had already fought the last war”; but “doing correspondence courses and going to once-a-week classes wasn’t too high a price to pay for getting astride a horse.”

  He broke up with Mary Frances not long after he became involved with the Reserve Cavalry. Mary Frances cited their religious differences as the cause. Certainly this had an effect on their relationship, but Dutch had just discovered his own power with women. By now he was not only the voice of the Big Ten football and major-league baseball broadcasts in the Midwest, he was known to devoted Cubs fans from coast to coast. (No one would have believed that his “vivid descriptions of crowds and players, with soaring enthusiasm at the crack of the bat” had been faked in an Iowa studio.) This had given him a new assurance that was bolstered even more by Moon’s need for his assi
stance and his ability to provide it as well as by his sole and continuing financial aid to his parents. If the attention of attractive women was not a new experience for him, playing the man about town was. When an affair broke up, a pattern was to turn to Myrtle for consolation. Myrtle shared an apartment with her sister, Nell, and the two women would whip up some scrambled eggs or macaroni and cheese (his favorite food) for him. Dutch felt drawn to Myrtle, yet, though on the edge many times, they never entered into a romantic relationship.

  Camp Dodge had been a training camp during World War I and occupied several hundred acres of some of the most beautiful parkland in Iowa. A portion of it had been given over to the city of Des Moines for playgrounds, picnic areas and a “huge pool the size of a football field and end zones.” The pool capacity was about three thousand swimmers, who were looked after by seven lifeguards. One of these—Richard Ulrich—struck up a close friendship with Dutch when he began to make a steady habit of swimming there after his riding lessons with the Reserve Cavalry. Photographs of Dutch frequently appeared in the local papers and he was recognized on sight. Ulrich says that “he would wave at the swimmers” as he came to join them much the way “he later waved at crowds of fans and political followers. We first met at a radio broadcast of a game I played with the Des Moines Comets [a professional football team]. He idolized athletes. He was a terrific swimmer, but otherwise only fair. I think he once might have wanted to be a ball player. But now he just wanted to be a ‘jock,’ one of the boys. He liked to put on riding breeches and ride and make like the cavalry. People liked him right away. He was easy to know, good-looking, an extrovert, and he never made you feel he was better situated than you were. Des Moines was hard hit by the Depression. My lifeguard pay was eighteen dollars a week for six days, and of that six dollars went for food. Many of the people at the pool were on Relief.”