by Bob Spitz
Nelle wasn’t blind when it came to Jack’s drinking—she could smell it on him when he returned from Chicago—but more often than not she turned a blind eye. As long as he stayed sober at home, she kept it to herself. It was only when his brother Will showed up, bottles in hand, that things got messy. He was always ready to share a bottle with his brother—and Jack was always ready to oblige. Nelle dreaded these dissolute family reunions. Will Reagan was a surly drunk, abusive and foul-mouthed, who had caused a lot of havoc dating back to Fulton, where Nelle had angled to keep the brothers apart. Will, in her mind, was a terrible influence on Jack, and it is believed that she encouraged the move to Tampico in order to put some distance between the two men. It was bad enough that Will worked with roughnecks in the grain elevator, where that kind of behavior was generally accepted. But Nelle was having none of it.
In 1906, Will Reagan and alcohol seemed like the only two burdens on what was otherwise a relatively happy marriage. Money was always an issue, but there were plenty of affordable pleasures to be had. Since arriving in Tampico, Jack and Nelle had managed to assimilate into the social fabric of the community. They were welcomed into the cast of local players who staged amateur productions at the Burden Opera House. Nelle loved the theater. She had a natural talent for it, and in Tampico it blossomed. She acted with intensity and gave dramatic recitations—short readings with moralistic overtones delivered in the footlights downstage. She regularly shared billing with Jack, who often appeared onstage in blackface. Their grandson Ron later referred to them as “the Lunt-Fontanne of the northern Illinois farm set,” as apt a handle as any to describe them.
There were also Chautauquas, community assemblies held under a tent in a field near town with inspirational speakers, entertainers, educators, and musicians. And revival meetings, most notably those featuring Billy Sunday, the ex–National League outfielder cum barnstorming evangelist who worked the so-called Kerosene Circuit—the small towns not yet electrified—in western Illinois. Sunday was a dynamic and inspired performer, and his sermons offered pious Midwesterners new ways of coping with their daily problems. He opposed dancing, reading novels, playing cards, the teaching of evolution, and, most vehemently, alcohol, encouraging his followers to “get on the water wagon,” a message that no doubt resonated with Nelle. “Whiskey is all right in its place,” he’d holler, high-kicking across the stage, “but its place . . . is . . . hell!”
Tampicans heard him loud and clear. After Sunday’s revival at the nearby Prophetstown Tabernacle in June 1906, during which he reformed twelve converts from Tampico, the town welcomed fellow reformer Dr. L. W. Munhall’s tabernacle, which raised another hundred for its penitent flock.
Weekends in Tampico were especially festive affairs. The town converged on Main Street every Saturday night. “It is an interesting sight,” a visitor observed, “to see the more than 100 rigs or teams and vehicles tied up to the hitching cable running through the posts.” Whole families off the farms poured onto the street and sidewalk, strolling arm-in-arm. Windows were lit up, doors thrown open, refreshments offered to one and all.
The Reagans could observe the developments from their front windows. Still in their early twenties, Jack and Nelle were game to mingle, and they swept downstairs to join the crowd as soon as it gathered. With Jack’s arm clamped tenderly around Nelle’s waist, they were familiar figures at the Saturday soirees, and “it was often after midnight before they got back home.”
Their carefree lifestyle got derailed somewhat when their first child, a son, was born on September 26, 1908. He became the third boy in the family tree to bear the name John Reagan, although to distinguish between father and son his parents decided to call him by his middle name, Neil, an alliteration of Nelle. Later, there would be some wrangling over which church would lay claim to the baby, but there was never any doubt that his initial baptism would take place in the theater. “My first appearance on the stage was when I was about three or four months old,” he recalled, when Nelle cast him opposite her as a dying baby in the Tampico Players production of The Dust of the Earth.
With Jack gone much of the time, on the road buying merchandise or managing the store, Nelle was often alone with Neil. She made the most of that time, reading to her son from Scripture or taking him on errands along Main Street and beyond. In the spring, when the weather cooperated, they would rock for hours in front of the open window, where “Nelle would count the endless line of farmers with their wagons of corn, oats, or wheat waiting to unload at the Boyer Brothers’ elevator.”
Nelle was accommodated. Life in Tampico was relatively comfortable, even gracious when compared with her childhood on the farm. Jack had a good job, a job with potential, and they had a healthy young son. But something was missing. By early 1910, Nelle had found it in the Christian Church, and became active in its affairs.
The Disciples of Christ, as the sect was known, believed that a true, devout Christian dealt directly with the day-to-day issues in this world. “Living the gospel”—the idea of social gospel—was a strong part of the Disciples’ doctrine. Unlike the Methodists and others in the mainstream, they incorporated poetry and played music in their services and extolled missionary work, encouraging congregants to serve those in need—not only the poor, but anyone who had fallen from grace. The spirit of unity and inclusiveness appealed to Nelle’s sense of generosity, to say nothing of the church’s militant stance against alcohol.
Jack resented the rift that divided their home along a religious Mason-Dixon Line. Nelle had “tried very hard to bring herself to join the Catholic Church when she and Jack were married,” Neil recalled years later, but she ultimately rejected it. Over time, it created issues over which church would prevail. As a prerequisite for a church wedding, Jack had promised the pastor who married them that he would raise his children as Catholics. Whether he forgot to inform Nelle, as he later insisted, or simply reneged is a matter of speculation. But a tug of war over Neil’s faith—and the widening family schism—persisted. Nelle wouldn’t be deterred. On Easter Sunday in 1910, she underwent baptism by total immersion, sealing her membership in the Christian Church of Tampico.
How this weighed on their marriage is a matter of conjecture. Jack’s persistent drinking was a growing problem, and suspicions arose about other women. This breach of religious unity presented yet another source of conflict. Whatever the case, the landscape shifted again when, shortly after her baptism, Nelle became pregnant with her second child.
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It snowed viciously all Sunday evening, February 5, 1911, in what the Tampico Tornado called “one of the worst blizzards” to hit the region in years. “The snow was ten inches to a foot and drifted badly, making the highways nearly impassible.” Strong winds had blown across miles of open prairie, burying Main Street. No traffic could get into or out of town.
For two people in particular this was a hell of a time for a storm. Nelle Reagan had gone into labor early that morning, and her doctor, Harry Terry, was stranded elsewhere, presumably on a house call. Nelle was not having an easy time of delivery. Her pelvic muscles had weakened alarmingly during labor, and the baby wasn’t moving properly. Her contractions were excruciating, so much so that “Jack feared for her life.” Three-year-old Neil was shipped off to a neighbor’s care, while Mrs. Roy Rasine and Mrs. John Daly, two “midwives with a hardiness of pioneer dedication,” struggled to stabilize the delivery.
Nelle’s labor stretched on well into the next morning. Finally, around 3:00 a.m., Dr. Terry stumbled into the flat bleary-eyed and half frozen. When the baby finally appeared at 4:16 a.m., its feet came first through the birth canal, compressing the umbilical cord and requiring the doctor to pick up the pace in order not to deprive the newborn of oxygen. It was a touch-and-go process that took serious skill.
The baby, another boy, weighing in at just over ten pounds, was fine, but Dr. Terry informed Nelle it would be her
last child. Her pelvic muscles had stretched during the birth and would no longer support the uterus. So be it; this baby was a gift. All along, she had planned to call him Donald, after her great-grandfather, but her sister, Jenny, had beaten her to it with her own son. Instead, Nelle named the child Ronald with Wilson, her maiden name: Ronald Wilson Reagan.
There is a famous anecdote—probably apocryphal—that has Jack bending admiringly over his new screaming son and uttering an opinion that branded the boy forever: “For such a little bit of a Dutchman, he makes a hell of a lot of noise, doesn’t he?” Dutch—he would be Dutch from now on because of the incident. It was a good story, but many years later, in a handwritten letter to the Holland Herald, Ronald Reagan explained that the name Dutch “evidently came about because of a hairstyle for children—a Dutch Bob”—that was given to him when he was “three or four years old.” He wrote, “My father started calling me Dutch, and an older brother kept it alive.”
But in February 1911, it was a grudging effort for Neil to call him anything at all, much less “brother.” The older Reagan boy had been promised a baby sister. Nelle was certain of it from the moment she became pregnant. So Neil felt shaken and betrayed when the neighbor he had been staying with told him, “Now you can go home and see your baby brother.” In fact, for two days he downright refused to go into the bedroom where his mother and brother were recuperating. “I didn’t want any part of a brother,” he recalled.
It became perfectly clear to everyone, especially Neil, that Ronald was destined to be Nelle’s boy, while Neil was cast in Jack’s long shadow. Ronald had his mother’s tender features and serene, somewhat subdued temperament. There were echoes of her straight brow and strong jaw and two rosy dimples. His thick mop of hair was courtesy of Jack.
When Jack Reagan agreed to manage the H. C. Pitney store in Tampico, he thought he was on his way. At least that’s the way it had been presented. After years of clerking for his aunt and uncle and apprenticing at Broadhead’s, he was finally calling the shots. But H.C. had him on a relatively short leash. There were other outlets in the boss’s retail empire, such as it was, that remained off-limits to Jack. He was Pitney’s man in Tampico, and even though that took Jack to Chicago and Clinton, Iowa, a manufacturing hub, the stakes were too small for his burning ambition. Yes, Jack “loved shoes,” as his son later noted, but he wanted something more substantial for himself, something solid, with no one looking over his shoulder or telling him what to do. He was always searching for an opportunity that would give him the independence he craved.
One option he considered was a complete change of scenery. In early October 1909, Jack had jumped at the chance to score a valuable piece of property in a government land lottery under the homesteading act. It seemed like a long shot, with so many applicants registered for the raffle, but—wouldn’t you know it!—Jack won a 160-acre farm in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He immediately jumped on a Burlington overnight train headed north to check on this windfall. But the dream fell apart soon after he arrived. The property, he discovered, was remote and isolated. Aside from the wayward location, one thing crystallized: he was a shoe man. Farming, he reasoned, wasn’t part of his makeup, he had none of the skills, no feel for the land. Grudgingly, he stuck it out for a week or two before returning the land and heading home.
Nelle kept Jack on solid ground. She spent her days largely in service to her sons, with any time left over cooking and sewing or ironing the spotless white shirts Jack wore to work. Time to herself was a rare commodity. In those odd spare moments, Nelle would drift to the back of the flat and commiserate with her neighbor, Daisy Seymour, through the common window of their adjoining back porches. Daisy’s son Fred was a few months older than Ronald. Whenever possible the two young mothers bent toward the wall and discussed “looking forward to God’s plan for a better world . . . and setting a good example for [their boys] to follow.” When one woman needed to do some shopping, she would pass her son through the window for some free neighborly babysitting.
Like Jack, Nelle was restless, too. Their apartment was unsuitable for her needs. “Upstairs flats were not very desirable in those days,” noted a Tampico historian. They absorbed considerable street noise, particularly from the backfire of cars that had multiplied since the Reagans moved to town. The stairs were hard on the bones and treacherous when it came to children. And winter made that trip to the outhouse an ugly affair.
Once the spring thaw took hold in 1911, Nelle leaned on Jack to find a better home in which to raise the boys, someplace where Neil and Ronald would flourish. She envisioned “a nice, white bungalow with modern plumbing, grass lawn, and spacious playground for the children.” By May, Jack found their place—the old Burden House on Glassburn Street, just south of the town depot and right around the corner from Pitney’s. It was everything Nelle had asked for. It had a white picket fence, no steep stairs, an indoor toilet whose flush shook the walls, and an adorable front porch. Right across the street was a manicured town park featuring a Civil War cannon mounted on wooden standards and a seventeen-foot obelisk inscribed with names of local men who had died serving their country—the perfect playground for two rambunctious boys. The one drawback was the railroad, whose tracks ran adjacent to the property by a grain elevator.
One morning, when Ronald was two and a half years old, these elements conspired to give Nelle a terrible fright. From the porch she contentedly watched the boys playing in the park. No one paid much attention to the idle coal car parked on the tracks, just across the street. “We spent a few minutes in the park,” Neil recalled, “and I took [Ronald] by the hand, and we got down on our hands and knees and crawled under the train.” An ice wagon had pulled up on the other side of the tracks, an oasis in summer for Tampico kids. “They’d give you a piece of ice that you could suck, and we thought it was like candy,” according to Ronald.
Nelle didn’t see them make it safely across; she saw only their little legs disappearing under the train chassis. While the boys were still at the ice wagon, the train chugged to life “with a hissing burst of steam” and Nelle let out a scream that rivaled its shrill whistle. Neil could hear her from the other side of the tracks and decided to let her cool off rather than to go home and face the music. “So we went down and played in the sand until the train pulled out, probably an hour or so later.”
More than seventy years later Ronald recalled how Nelle gave them a reminder never to repeat that stunt—“physically, a reminder.”
Whereas Jack only went through the motions. He’d growl and threaten, then strip off his belt as a preview of the whipping to come, but he was all bluster. Jack had enough on his plate without cuffing his boys. The store kept him busy, but he had a hand in a number of other pots. He practiced rescue drills routinely with Tampico’s volunteer fire department, helped manage the local softball team, devoted hours to the local chapter of the Knights of Columbus, and became active in the town’s Businessman’s Association.
There was also his brother Will to contend with. Will’s life had come dangerously off the rails. In the spring of 1912, he had been jilted by a Fulton woman and drank himself into such a stupor that the local paper reported that he was “seriously ill . . . unable to leave his room” for ten days. There followed a series of brawls and unprovoked attacks on colleagues, and a drunk-and-disorderly charge in nearby Sterling that earned Will time in Whiteside County Jail. A reporter noted that “he has not appeared to be just right,” which was code for “off his rocker.” Jack eventually committed his brother to a sanatorium for a stretch and later had him officially declared “mentally deranged.”
Jack also argued openly about politics, a pet topic. Tampico was an overwhelmingly Republican stronghold, with Jack an impassioned Democratic voice in the wilderness. Nothing made him more animated than castigating President Taft and his conservative cronies for wrenching the Republican Party to the right. There were also exposés in the newspaper that fed Jack’
s sense of injustice, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, which underscored the issue of dangerous working conditions for the poor, and a coup in Honduras custom tailored to an American tycoon’s interests.
Growing up in Illinois, Ronald Reagan would always hear some form of political talk in the house. Jack Reagan was devoted to the kinds of social causes that would one day be construed as entitlements: relief for the working poor, trust-busting, child labor laws, a fair minimum wage, regulation of communications conglomerates, a graduated income tax.
Nelle’s own views supported her husband’s when it came to giving the downtrodden a leg up. Since her conversion by the Disciples of Christ in 1910, she burned with charitable devotion, convinced that generosity and good works were God’s greatest gifts. She set aside parts of every day to perform some public-spirited deed, whether it was visiting someone in town who was suffering from an illness or reassuring people in desperate straits with words of hope and encouragement.
The church also offered her escape from the gnawing problems at home. Jack was growing frustrated with a career in stasis. Pitney’s sales were solid and steady, but they weren’t growing, and Jack saw no room for advancement. His forty dollars a month had been sufficient for two people, but now they were four. These days, he was always strapped for cash, always just making the wages stretch. As ever, Jack tried to put a good face on things, but he was restless.