by Bob Spitz
The responsibilities of running farm and family were left to the resilient, hard-shelled Jane Wilson, who shepherded her children through the ardors of prairie life. Because she was so isolated from the nearest town, there was no end to the pressing imperatives: feed the children, tend the crops, slaughter the chickens or hogs, shoe the horses, sew and mend the clothes, handle the washing and ironing, sell off any of the harvest not used for subsistence. Raise the kids. For a woman on her own in what was still essentially frontier, Jane proved a more than able matriarch. Three years later, when John returned from the west without so much as a nugget to his name, he found the farm humming along.
But Jane had her own setbacks to contend with. Her brothers—Daniel, Alexander, and Charles, great-uncles of Ronald Reagan—along with a cousin and his friend, set off on a similar quest for gold that ended in disaster when they were caught in a terrible snowstorm and resorted to eating the flesh of those who had died. Only Daniel Blue returned alive.
Jane Wilson, devastated, retreated “in the teachings of the Christ life.” With two brothers dead and an impetuous husband to contend with, religion proved a genuine comfort. “The Bible became her constant companion,” its sacraments governing every phase of her life. She handed down a legacy of strong faith to her children, all of whom followed her lead except Thomas, Nelle’s father and Ronald Reagan’s grandfather.
Thomas Wilson shared his own father’s wanderlust. He was a dapper, well-dressed man “with a flamboyant mustache and a goatee” who, by all accounts, “radiated an air of self-confidence.” When he was twenty-seven, Thomas married a thirty-five-year-old domestic named Mary Ann Elsey, staking out a farm life in North Clyde, near his parents. The Wilsons bore seven children in quick succession, the youngest of whom, Nelle Clyde Wilson, born in 1883, would become Ronald Reagan’s mother.
Life in that part of the state was still a primitive affair—miles from the closest town, open to the elements. “How those people survived out in the middle of nowhere . . .” mused a Fulton historian, “it took a lot of guts.” Perhaps more guts than Thomas Wilson could muster. When Nelle was five, Thomas abandoned the family. He simply rode off one morning, leaving his wife and seven children to fend for themselves on that hardscrabble farm. The Wilson children were pressed to take over the full-time farming duties, tending the fields, baling the hay, and milking the cows. They worked that inhospitable land until their knuckles were raw, only breaking on Sunday, when they would travel by horse and wagon to the Methodist Episcopal Church, a few miles off, for religious services.
Nelle, being the youngest, was often spared the harshest chores. When she was old enough, she churned the butter with her three older sisters, leaving plenty of time for her mother’s readings from Dickson’s New Indexed Bible, which never left Mary Wilson’s side. She felt that the parables in it contained everything her children needed to instruct them in their young lives, as did Nelle, who inherited the Bible after her mother’s death, and her son Ronald, who was sworn in as president on it almost a hundred years later. Leaning heavily on that Bible, Mary did all she could to maintain the pretense of a normal family life; in time, no one made much of the fact that Thomas Wilson was no longer part of it.
All of that changed in the early spring of 1894, when Nelle’s grandmother Jane, who was now seventy-seven, complained of pain and took to her bed. It was clear that Jane’s illness was terminal, and she went immediately about settling her affairs. One unfinished piece of business, reported vividly in a local newspaper, was a “deep-seated yearning . . . to see once more for the last time her son, Thomas, gone so long.” His brother, John, found Thomas living in La Crosse, an unplowed enclave in the southwest corner of the state, and persuaded him to honor his mother’s last wish.
He had been gone almost six years without so much as a word or a contribution toward the family’s welfare, and he returned with no explanation offered. To the children, he was a virtual stranger. Yet, upon his return, Thomas gravitated back into the family in an abstracted, melancholy way. He was noticeably restless, distant, unsure of his role. Mary had displaced him as head of the household, her reliance on the Bible too formidable, making it impossible to stand up to her moral authority.
One thing was for certain, Thomas’s farming days were over. Whatever his affairs those six years in La Crosse, he’d lost all of his natural affinity for the land. It was a disconnect so profound that, after bumping around North Clyde for eight months, he felt compelled to sell what was left of the farm and move the family to a less isolated place.
At first sight, Fulton seemed like a natural choice. It was a town that had grown steadily over the years since the Reagans settled there. Coming from the country, the Wilsons surely marveled at the string of shops lining the newly electrified Fourth Street, beginning with J. W. Broadhead, its commercial centerpiece, and beyond that, Utz the butcher, whose icehouse in the rear held mammoth blocks cut from the Mississippi to be used for refrigeration all year round. There was also a redbrick grocery store stocked with every conceivable staple, and the imposing Fulton Bank. Across the street was the Reagan sisters’ millinery shop, a soft-drink parlor, a confectionery, a newsstand, and the Union Hotel. Here, at last, community seemed possible. Further on, there was an opera house that featured vaudeville acts, a skating rink, and a baseball diamond in Pleasure Park, where the town’s young men, including Jack Reagan, played. And there was a profusion of churches, most notably the Christian Church on Eleventh Avenue, which became a vital influence on Nelle’s character.
In Fulton, it was impossible to avoid the Mississippi and everything that was brought with it. A tidal swell of opportunity arrived on its banks, pumping hard cash into the general economy. Businesses rose up and thrived from the constant river traffic; just across the water, in Clinton, Iowa, stood millionaires’ mansions, visible to all. But Fulton also bore the brunt of the river’s powers. Swimmers were unable to resist jumping in for a dip, despite the ever-changing currents that were known to sweep bathers under. “A lot of capable people drowned there every year,” recalls a Fulton resident, “even off the designated swimming hole just south of town.” Skiffs, like the one that held Thomas Reagan, capsized regularly in the strong currents. His sister Mary’s first husband also drowned in the Mississippi. And roughnecks passing through often brought with them drunken tavern fights, horse-and-carriage accidents, and an upsurge of burglaries.
All in all, it was an unlikely town for an ex–dirt farmer and his Bible-clutching wife. Nevertheless, the family moved into a white clapboard house on the northwest side of town.
For Nelle Wilson, the move was heaven-sent. As a thirteen-year-old with an enthusiasm for poetry, she was drawn to the social life that Fulton had to offer—a real school, a library teeming with books, the camaraderie of other children her age, and above all the churches. No longer restricted to the farm and its chores, Nelle cultivated a circle of friends and a growing interest in her new community. She remained tightly bound to the family, but the center of her life shifted somewhat from home to church, where she immersed herself in its various charitable endeavors, a practice that became a lifelong pursuit. Years later, her son, Ronald, would say that “she was a natural, practical do-gooder, but never self-serving, always with humility.”
Helping people was something Nelle Wilson did without asking; helping herself was another matter. Nelle was bright, but she regarded her own schooling as an unnecessary extravagance when she could work to help support the family. As soon as she turned fifteen, she dropped out and took a job in the wrapping department of the Mississippi Valley Stove Company.
Did the Wilsons need the money? It’s hard to say. The sale of the farm gave them a tidy cushion; the oldest children had married and moved on. But Thomas was idle, and relations between Nelle’s parents were tense in the house. For all intents and purposes, Thomas and Mary’s marriage lay in ruins. Though they lived together under the same roof, Mary, “toothl
ess and wizened,” had begun referring to herself as a widow. Perhaps Nelle needed to distance herself from the fray.
In 1902, to her great delight, Nelle moved jobs from the stove works, which lay in the farthest reaches of Fulton, to the J. W. Broadhead store owned by the same family, just a few blocks from home. For Nelle, the timing couldn’t have been more auspicious. Within months of her transfer, stores like Macy’s in New York, Filene’s in Boston, Nordstrom in Seattle, Dayton’s in Minneapolis, and J. C. Penney in Kemmerer, Wyoming, opened their retail outlets, expanding the concept of dry goods into the modern department store. Broadhead’s had already undergone an expansion earlier that year, hiring a wave of new young clerks, one of whom—the wily shoe salesman—lost no time moving in on the slight, auburn-haired salesgirl.
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It is difficult to imagine a more unlikely couple than Jack Reagan and Nelle Wilson. The dapper, raffish Jack was a character “known for his copious blarney” who had already “developed an early thirst for corn whiskey.” Yet there was no defense against his infectious charm. And once committed, Nelle never looked back. For Jack, the family-oriented Nelle augured potential for a rooted, stable life after years of shuttling between relatives. He must have also recognized in Nelle a woman much like her mother who could roll with the punches.
The religious innocent and the vivacious man-about-town—the only meaningful thing they seemed to have in common was that they both had known deep and unsettling grief. Sometime before Nelle arrived at Broadhead’s, her mother, Mary, died suddenly, leaving Nelle alone at home with the task of caring for her father. Jack, orphaned as a child, lost his sister, twenty-two-year-old Katie, in 1901. She had been working at the Fulton Steam Laundry when she suffered “an attack of lung fever and [was] sent home from work.” What seemed like nothing more than a nagging ailment ultimately stretched on for months, until Katie’s death in November from pneumonia. A year and a half later, Annie Reagan, who had been sickly for some time, died at the age of eighteen. Such loss was a powerful unifier. Jack and Nelle, both emotionally adrift, took solace in each other’s company.
Not everyone viewed their relationship favorably. Nelle’s father, Thomas Wilson, it was said, “disapproved of Jack Reagan.” Thomas was protective of his youngest daughter and depended on her. And perhaps he recognized Jack’s wild streak, one spitfire to another.
It is not known whether Thomas Wilson gradually came around or if the young couple decided to marry without his blessing, but at their wedding—on the evening of Tuesday, November 8, 1904—it was Nelle’s uncle, Alex Wilson, who gave the bride away, not her father. Most likely Thomas did not attend.
In any case, he would have disapproved of the venue. The couple got married not at the Wilson family church but at Immaculate Conception, the Catholic facility on Twelfth Street, which the Reagans attended. In Fulton, it was rare that Protestants and Catholics intermarried; as late as the 1950s it was still considered unseemly. The pastor considered the union “a mixed marriage,” and the church prohibited them from marrying at the altar, bumping the ceremony from the main sanctuary to the parsonage next door.
To save money, the newlyweds moved into the little house on Twelfth Avenue with Jack’s grandmother Catherine, now living on her own. Jack and Nelle took over the spare bedroom in the back. The arrangement was convenient for everyone—for a while. Catherine, whose health was failing, was grateful to have family to help around the house. Nelle couldn’t have been more attentive. She doted on Jack’s grandmother and pitched in with his aunts at Palace Millinery, settling into her new life. But Jack Reagan was a young man on the move. Only twenty-two, he always had one eye on the door. “He was a restless man, burning with ambition”—a description offered fifty years later by his son, Ronald, but just as fitting in 1904. Sixteen months after his wedding to Nelle, Jack seized an opportunity to work as “senior salesman in the clothing and shoe department” of a new business. It meant relocating, uprooting Nelle, and leaving their families behind. A half hour’s ride southwest on the CB&Q was the rural farm town of Tampico, Illinois—an ideal place, Jack and Nelle thought, to begin a family.
CHAPTER TWO
“A LITTLE BIT OF A DUTCHMAN”
“Sons are the anchors of a mother’s life.”
—SOPHOCLES, Phaedra
Tampico looked more like frozen tundra when Jack and Nelle Reagan first laid eyes on it. They arrived in February 1906, in the middle of a brutal cold snap, with miles of farmland buried under a thick crust of snow. The wintry landscape, silvery and bucolic, could have been the very model for a Currier and Ives postcard. The town itself was another story.
A visitor might have felt he’d stumbled onto the set of a low-budget Hollywood western. Main Street, the only commercial thoroughfare, was nothing more than an unpaved rutted lane, owing to an uneasy alliance of horse wagons and automobiles. A single block of two-story brick buildings lined either side of the street. There were sidewalks of a sort, but to reach them one had to wade through ankle-deep muck and scale an inclined plank. The stores were limited to basic essential services: a few groceries, a bank, a barbershop, two pharmacies, a general store, a hotel. Otherwise, most of the businesses that drove the economy—the stockyards, Simpson’s lumberyard, Legg’s poultry house, the feed mill, and the grain elevators—lay, literally, off the beaten path. Almost all of the fifteen hundred residents were scattered across farms. As the birthplace of a president, Tampico wasn’t much to whistle at. In fact, you could whistle “Dixie”—maybe just the first few lines—and be through town before you hit the second verse.
Jack and Nelle had rented a modest second-story flat at 111 Main Street, empty since the local pub owner vacated the building after Tampico residents voted the town dry. Modest but comfortable, it consisted of five rooms at the top of a narrow flight of stairs, with a pair of windows facing the opera house across the street. A nice-sized front parlor led to the dining room, and a screened-in porch overlooked the alley, where the couple could sleep once the weather cooperated. In the meantime, they placed their bed in the corner of a gloomy interior room illuminated only by an overhead skylight. The makeshift toilets lay out back near the water pump and were reached via “a treacherous-looking stairway from the dining room”; the kitchen sink sufficed in lieu of a tub. Nevertheless, the apartment was certainly large enough for two young adults starting their lives together.
Jack started work at a salary of forty dollars a month. Between rent, food, and clothing they would just about get by. They managed to stretch their budget by living above the shops. It wasn’t ideal; hauling endless buckets of water and coal up those stairs took a physical toll, especially for the delicately built Nelle, and it was noisy, with traffic pulling in and out all day long. Still, as newcomers, the Reagans didn’t feel so isolated and weren’t in need of a car to do their everyday shopping. For Jack, the commute to the H. C. Pitney Variety Store was barely a two-minute walk up the street, at the corner of Main and Market. At first, Jack flourished. He became the proverbial big fish in a small town, “an extremely popular man . . . with more gloss” than the local denizens. “Everybody liked Jack,” says a woman familiar with his position in town. “He was smooth, a real charmer, with a great laugh and ready yarn.”
And H. C. Pitney’s was the perfect forum for Jack’s brand of amiable soft-shoe. It offered him a larger profile than he’d had at Broadhead’s, as a master salesman with the chance to work the whole store. He’d ply his specialty in the shoe department and then work the other aisles, chalking up a pant-leg hem or outfitting a toddler for a church social. In 1906 and for a steady stretch of years, Pitney’s did great business clothing most of Tampico’s citizens. “What You Buy We Stand By” was the store’s well-known motto. In addition to his position as clothes manager, Jack was also the store’s buyer, which meant long train trips between Tampico and Chicago, where most of their merchandising originated.
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p; Jack hopscotched between Tampico and Chicago in a well-worn seat on the CB&Q. It was a punishing journey that meant four or five transfers and could take up to five hours for the 125-mile trip. Many regulars who traveled that route soothed themselves with a bottle of whiskey, especially on the return leg from Chicago, where liquor was plentiful. During the trip, there might be any number of businessmen who passed out and missed their stop.
Jack Reagan was no exception. Alcohol was in his blood. His family, dating back to the O’Regans in Ireland, were earnest drinkers, a distinction that extended all the way through their line. Thomas, Michael . . . “the whole family drank—a lot,” says a person familiar with the Reagan ancestry. Jack’s father, John, had a reputation for being “a two-fisted drinker,” but it was his brother Will who grappled hardest with the bottle. Will Reagan drank badly—the kind of fall-down-drunk drinking that attracted attention, the wrong kind of attention, in an unforgiving town. It was a taste he passed on to his younger brother, Jack.
Jack drank with gusto, but not without restraint. There is strong evidence that he could go cold turkey for long spells—or maybe just periods when he didn’t drink to excess. But Jack Reagan was a binge drinker. He’d go on a weekend bender now and then and eventually stumble home roaring drunk. In April 1907, a year after the Reagans arrived, Tampico tightened restrictions on alcohol. Jack had to have heard the complaints from customers at work about how Tampico men were being corrupted by liquor, how the saloons only reinforced the problem, how the children were at risk. Saloonkeepers, scarce though they were, had run afoul of the Tampico chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. A local Law and Order League was formed to tackle the issue, and a week later legislation was passed ending all liquor licensing in town. People like Jack Reagan were forced to drink secretly—or elsewhere. In Jack’s case, that meant Chicago—not in Tampico, where he’d have to face Nelle—but during buying trips, real or otherwise, which occurred with more frequency beginning that spring.