Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  Ulrich was married to Lois Hadley, a former model who introduced Dutch to a close friend, Gretchen Schnelle, who was also a model. The two couples would double-date, driving around Des Moines in Ulrich’s ‘29 Ford sedan (larger than Dutch’s car) and stopping for near beer at Cy’s Moonlight Inn. (Prohibition had ended on December 5, 1933, but the popularity of near beer continued for a time.) Cy now had a large blowup of Dutch seated at a microphone hung on the wall behind the bar. Dutch would notify his friends of just what time he would be at the Moonlight by a verbal code at the end of his broadcast. At the Moonlight, Dutch Reagan reigned supreme. “There was one young man who drove a ‘33 Ford V-8. He was under twenty-one and Griffiths wouldn’t sell him a drink. But Dutch sneaked him a bottle.”

  He dated the very personable, shapely Miss Schnelle for about a year, although not exclusively, for he had met Jeanne Tesdell, another beauty.* “He [had] bought a Nash convertible… new … it was one of the first ever done in metallic brown. He looked very nice in it and he knew it. We went to Club Belvedere just for the floor shows. He didn’t drink much and I never saw him gamble. We were seeing quite a bit of each other, but I always had the feeling that I was with him but he wasn’t with me. He was always looking over his shoulder, scanning the crowd. I’d say he was a born politician, courting important people, favoring goodwill—wanting it.”

  “I’d agree with that,” Mrs. Ulrich says. “Politics flared so wildly in the early thirties. I remember when Henry Wallace was secretary of agriculture, there had been an overproduction of little pigs that year [1933] in Iowa and he ordered a slaughter of them on a pretty grand scale, reimbursing farmers for their losses. He was an Iowan, a farm man, and Dutch thought he should have known better, that it was wrong to pay farmers to kill pigs. But he defended him in some terrific debates with Voith Pemberthy, a Republican friend of his (our section of Iowa has always been Republican anyway). Voith had a very strong personality. But so did Dutch. He was what we call mind-set. I never will forget how he held his mouth and chin [in these debates]—tight, chin jutting. He wasn’t one to back down even if he knew he was wrong.”

  Jeanne Tesdell recalled that Dutch argued with her father about the same issue (the overproduction of pigs) when he came to pick her up.

  Voith Pemberthy and WHO’s news director, H. R. Gross, both exerted a great influence on Dutch during his years in Des Moines. Gross, who was known as Hal among the executives at WHO, and as “the fastest tongue in the business,” had been born in the small town of Arispe, Iowa, and raised on a 240-acre farm. He attended the University of Missouri School of Journalism and served on the Mexican border in 1916 with the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I. Then he had worked as a newspaper reporter and editor, including jobs with the Associated Press and the Iowa Farmer (the newspaper of the National Farmers Union), before joining the staff of WHO. Gross was only twelve years older than Dutch, but his experience made him a senior citizen by comparison. Dutch’s friendship with him did not take the form of after-hours camaraderie, as it did with other WHO staffers. Except at lunch time, Hal Gross maintained a distance from all his co-workers. He had an aura of righteousness and a no-nonsense voice that could have made him a fine preacher. Dutch transferred his old awe and respect for the Reverend Cleaver to him. (There had always been an “older” man to whom Dutch turned as a role model—a substitute for Jack whom he loved but did not want to emulate—the Reverend Cleaver, Mr. Fraser [the drama teacher at North Dixon High School], Ralph McKinzie, Pete MacArthur, and Gross. In later years, this list would grow with each new stage in his life.)

  “They used to sit over lunch or in the newsroom and harangue each other pro and con about various issues,” a former co-worker remembered. “Gross was a Republican but he was involved with labor unions because of his years with the National Farmers Union. He and Dutch would go at each other over FDR’s New Deal policies, which Gross strongly opposed. Dutch was always deferential. He sometimes called Gross ‘Sir,’ and although he could swear just as easy-come as you please, I don’t recall his ever using that kind of language in his debates with Gross.

  “Somewhere around the last months of Dutch’s employment at WHO [1936-37] I recall thinking that maybe Gross was winning Dutch over. He was still a Democrat, or claimed to be, still as enthusiastic about Roosevelt as when I first met him [1933], but he had begun to talk about the [federal] government moving too heavily into people’s lives. It struck quite a few of us in Des Moines that Dutch might make a good congressman one day. He was only in his early twenties then. And it seemed like Hal might have seen that, too.”

  Dutch’s life had changed drastically, and his need for acceptance in the new society in which he found himself had altered his attitudes. By 1936, he had given up his fantasies of one day becoming a major sports figure. But he knew now that he possessed a special charm and he had learned how to use it to his best advantage. “He was handsome, charismatic, always joking,” Lois Ulrich remembered. “Have you noticed that he seems to have a fetish concerning his left side—his hair parted on the right and combed to the left? He did that back in the thirties. It gave him a ‘pouf on the left side and I asked him once why he combed it that way. He said he thought it gave him a ‘rakish’ look. He wore hats deliberately tipped to the left for the same reason.”

  Moon had met Bess Hoffman, a Des Moines girl, a graduate of Drake, and had fallen rapidly in love. In two weeks they decided to get married. Dutch liked Bess, she was cute and slim, a good dresser, a bright young woman, but he tried to convince Moon to wait. “Two weeks—that’s way too fast,” he told him. “I took Dutch out to the wedding,” Bob Dillon, a Des Moines friend of Moon and Dutch’s recalled, “and all the way out he complained bitterly and gave me a very hard time. He said, ‘Now here’s your very best friend in the world, he’s only known this girl for about two weeks, and they’re gonna get married, and what kind of a friend are you?’ And I kept saying, ‘Well, she’s a lovely woman, she’s a lovely girl.’ He says, ‘That doesn’t make any difference,’ and gave me a hard time.”

  His visits to Dixon were brief but fairly frequent. Even with what he was able to give Nelle, his parents were struggling. His father had aged drastically. The heart attack had affected the nerves in his left arm, weakening it, and his energy level was low. Jack would never be able to work again—and how long could Nelle keep up a ten-hour day, six-day week, on her feet for most of the time? Moon was self-sufficient, but now he had his wife to support. Thoughts of finding a better-paying radio job in New York or Los Angeles entered Dutch’s head. He discussed it with close friends. But to leave WHO without the other job secured was simply out of the question.

  The values that Nelle and life in Dixon had taught him remained with him. He believed in family, God and country (and perhaps even in that order). He agreed with Jack that Relief was demeaning, abortion a crime, and the big unions controlled by too many thugs. Careful spending was a daily concern. He had a budget and he held fastidiously to it. He shunned credit and bought only what he had saved money to buy. At WHO “Dutch treat” had a special meaning, for he was never known to pick up anyone else’s tab and didn’t appreciate someone picking up his. But he was the first to offer comfort to anyone in ill health or suffering grief. He had retained his boyish charm, his Irish way with a story and a guilelessness that never ceased to surprise. His smooth-shaven face and his well-tuned physique added to his good looks. Above all, his success had not diminished his extreme modesty, the way he had of holding a slightly receding posture so that people often had to lean toward him to hear what he was saying (a manner that created an almost instant sense of intimacy). And then there was his distinctive voice—hospitable and at the same time persuasive, seductive and without sham. An investigative reporter could search long and hard and not find one man, woman or child who disliked Dutch Reagan in the 1930s. Even Frank Merriwell’s creator, Burt Standish, could not have invented a more all-American, likable, true-blue fellow.
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  It took two and a half years before the army staff at Camp Dodge insisted he complete his courses (which he did) and submit to an eye examination (a cavalry officer was required to have good vision without the aid of glasses). Knowing he would not be able to see the chart with his naked eye, Dutch employed a bit of strategy. When asked to hold one hand over his good eye, he later confessed, “I managed to squeeze my fingers down to where I had the narrowest of slits and [when] I was supposed to be reading with the uncovered eye, in reality I read with the covered eye, now corrected by virtue of squinting through this tiny slit between my fingers [a technique that can greatly aid nearsighted vision].” Having passed this test, he then had to meet the riding standards of the Reserve Cavalry.

  Astride a large horse which he had never ridden before, in teeming rain, a mounted officer on each side of him and a platoon of twenty-seven enlisted men awaiting his commands, Dutch competently executed the maneuvers required to become a cavalry officer. After more than two hours, with every man “soaked to the skin,” Dutch was given his final test. The company rode behind him at a gallop over wet, slippery earth. Ahead of him was a high jump formed by a stack of telephone poles. He claimed that with twenty-seven mounted men biting at the hooves of his horse, he had nowhere to go but over the top. “If my horse balked, ran out, or slipped, there was no way in the world we could escape being trampled… I closed my eyes, grabbed a handful of mane, and landed on the other side of the jump a second lieutenant.”

  “Dutch could stretch the truth a bit.” Dick Ulrich grinned. He did, indeed, have a talent for turning any small incident into a colorful story in the retelling. Jack’s influence could be seen at such times. It seems unlikely that the two cavalry officers putting him through his paces were not prepared to stop a stampede if he did not make the jump. Similar tests are given today, with the company ordered to stay a safe distance behind. But a good part of Dutch’s enthusiasm for most things in his life was his ability to envelop himself completely in what he was doing. The astounding realness of his play-by-play broadcasts came out of this skill. No one could have ever guessed that Dutch Reagan was not in the press box at the game in Chicago.

  His fellow workers were all struck by his lack of arrogance. Dutch Reagan might “flirt with the truth,” but that was because he didn’t take himself too seriously. One WHO staffer commented, “I always thought he was a deeply religious man. Not the kind who went to church every Sunday. A man with a strong inner faith. Whatever he accomplished was God’s will—God gave it to him and God could take it away.”

  He put up anyone who came through Des Moines from Dixon. A number of his old friends hadn’t found work in over a year and they were forced to move on. Because Des Moines had few jobs to offer, they would come, stay a short time and then leave. The Midwest suffered a double blow when the first of the disastrous dust storms swept across South Dakota on Armistice Day, 1933. “When the wind died and the sun shone forth again,” one observer wrote, “it was on a different world. There were no fields, only sand drifting into mounds and eddies that swirled in what was now but an autumn breeze.… In the farm yard[s] fences, machinery, and trees were gone, buried. The roofs of sheds stuck out through drifts higher than a man is tall.”

  During the next two years numberless dust storms of this intensity swept the Great Plains. “Roads and farm buildings and once-green thickets [were now] half buried in sand… a farmer, sitting at his window during a dust storm, remarked that he was counting the Kansas farms as they came by.”

  The refugees “from this new Sahara” fled westward in ancient family jalopies. “They roll westward like a parade,” wrote Richard L. Neuberger and Kelley Loe in Harper’s Magazine in March 1936. “In a single hour from a grassy meadow near an Idaho road I counted 34 automobiles with the license plates of states between Chicago [Illinois] and the mountains.”

  Some stopped in towns or at farms or government projects along the way to find temporary work. Roosevelt had created many work-relief projects. One, the building of the world’s largest earthen dam—two thousand miles up the Missouri River from St. Louis, in northeastern Montana—attracted thousands of migrants who had to pass through Iowa to reach their destinations. Fort Peck City was built to accommodate them when they arrived. Within a year, the place was overcrowded. Six shanty towns sprung up around it—Wheeler, New Deal, Delano Heights, Square Deal, Park Grove and Wilson. There was even a red-light suburb called “Happy Hollow,” all “as rickety as git-up-and-git or Hell’s Delight.” The building of the dam had been intended to aid the grave unemployment problem in Montana. Jobs were available for “as many as 10,000 veterans, parched farmers and plain unemployed parents at a time,” but the tremendous influx of out-of-state job-seekers turned “Franklin Roosevelt’s Wild West” (as it was called) into a welter of broken-down Fords forced to be used as temporary housing for whole families. Shacks made “of grocers’ boxes, tin cans, crazy doors and building paper” were being thrown together, providing little protection from Montana’s often subzero winters. Many of these people headed west again and “kept right on rattling toward some other hopeless hope” in “their second-hand cars full of children, chairs, mattresses and tired women.”

  America seemed a land of displaced people. No longer did this refer to aliens immigrating to the United States. America’s own were now on the move. Those who undertook the “Great Trek to the Pacific” were not so much seeking frontier possibilities as some divine haven—sun and sand and sea—fruit to pluck off the trees. Old cars were being pressed to lives far beyond the car manufacturers’ expectations. Men and women whose farms had fallen under the hammer rattled homeless through the land, as did their former workers. The days were over when Americans could count on a consistency in their lives. But this fact had not put an end to the American dream, which seemed to have lodged itself in an accelerating wind that blew westward.

  Father Coughlin, now rabidly anti-Roosevelt, his Irish voice raised more and more in pro-German propaganda, had lost his network program. The current radio sensation was Major Bowes and his Original Amateur Hour. The Depression years had clung too long. Disenchanted audiences no longer wanted sermons of faith or political dogma; they sought entertainment—a glimmer of belief that circumstance could change despair into high hopes. Dance orchestras blared forth the ubiquitous refrain “The Music Goes ‘Round and ‘Round” while the snappy foxtrot “Blue Skies” spun ‘round and ‘round phonographs across the country. Astaire and Rogers’s nimble feet transported millions of fans into the plush fantasy world of their films, while an eight-year-old Shirley Temple, distilling the innocence of childhood, sang about “The Good Ship Lollipop.” More than a million readers buzzed with the question of whether Scarlett got Rhett back in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. The parlor game of Monopoly, in which players could undertake imaginary feats of financial daring, was all the rage. But no flight of fancy could equal the economic complexity in the government. Federal agencies multiplied with the speed of tadpoles. It took an expert to identify the alphabetical designations—WPA, NRA, RFC, AAA, CCC, SEC, TVA, FAA, HOLC, FCC and NYA.

  Roosevelt hit the campaign trail for the 1936 election stressing the continuation of his policies. Eleanor Roosevelt visited Des Moines on June 8, 1936, walking through some of the city’s poorest sections, her receding chin set in sadness, a defiant flower on the brim of her hat and a huge corsage (presented to her by J. O. Maland as she greeted Des Moines over the traveling WHO microphone) that pulled down the shoulder of her dress.

  Radio played a major role in the 1936 campaign, as it was to do until the advent of television. Roosevelt’s fireside chats, which brought him into the kitchens and living rooms of millions of Americans, had made him a close friend. The effect paid off. One workingman said, “Mr. Roosevelt is the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a son-of-a-bitch.” The Democratic Convention was held in Philadelphia. “For the first time,” Joe Lash wrote, “women were
granted parity with the men on the platform committee, a measure of how far they had traveled since 1924 when Eleanor and her feminine colleagues had sat outside the locked doors of the Resolutions Committee.” There were 219 women delegates and alternates, as compared to the 60 who had helped to nominate former Kansas Governor Alfred Landon as the Republican candidate. Women made eight of Roosevelt’s seconding speeches, their large role at the convention symbolizing the recognition achieved by them in the Roosevelt administration.

  The Republican party had not taken into consideration the strength of the women’s vote, nor of Roosevelt’s tremendous charisma and radio personality—traits not possessed by their candidate. There was optimism in the midst of despair. Yes, hundreds of thousands of young people had given up thoughts of college, farmers had lost their land, millions were unemployed—but the nation was a hundredfold better off than it had been in 1932 when Roosevelt took office. Many millions had also been put back to work, banks were solid, a social security bill giving the elderly a future had been passed, along with other reforms.