by Bob Spitz
Occasionally, that provoked blithe bouts of extravagance such as the purchase of a Ford Model T in June 1913. “It was on old touring car,” Ronald remembered vividly more than seventy years later. Jack had talked H. C. Pitney into lending him enough cash for the car. There were more cars in Tampico than Main Street could handle—and a legion of horses unwilling to cede precious ground. Driving could be a hair-raising experience. On the afternoon of December 14, while Jack was driving the family to Rock Falls for a Sunday outing to visit Nelle’s sister, not far from Tampico, the “steering gear . . . failed to work properly and the car suddenly shot to one side of the road and turned completely over in a ditch.” Nelle and Neil were thrown wide of the car, but the roof was bashed in, pinning Jack and Ronald underneath. There was just enough air between the seat and the roof for Ronald to breathe—a circumstance that triggered a lifelong struggle with claustrophobia. Jack eventually wriggled free, but it took several men from a nearby house to rescue Ronald, still in swaddling clothes, by pulling him through a rear window.
There were hardships and near-catastrophes for the family, but also amusement. Both boys had fond memories of their parents’ acting endeavors. Nelle and Jack starred in a succession of shows at the Burden Opera House, and by 1913 they were minor celebrities among the towns west of the Rock River. On April 19, several hundred people from as far off as Yorktown thronged the theater to catch their star turns in A Woman’s Honor, a four-act piece that featured “intense dramatic action, thrilling climaxes, uproarious comedy, and a story of absorbing romantic interest.” A reviewer praising Nelle’s performances in two roles, as Olive and Sally, said, “A pin dropped could not be heard in the entire house.” Later that year, on Thanksgiving night, the couple brought down the house in Millie the Quadroon, a five-act tearjerker by Lizzie May Elwyn, in which Nelle played three roles. One can only imagine the spectacle when Millie mused about the life of Gyp, her slave, and Jack bounded onstage in blackface. “Well, yo’ see, missus, I nebber was anything else. I know de whip was dreffel. Golly,” he moaned, massaging his backside, “I feel de smart now.”
Show business: it was in the family.
For the Reagans, Tampico seemed to have it all—small-town community spirit, a stable economy, strong moral values, a place to call home. But to Jack it was the sticks. He had bigger dreams, and by 1914 they prevailed. He’d been casting around for a better job, looking as always for something with a higher profile, something more financially rewarding. If Tampico couldn’t accommodate his ambition, then the answer might lie in an urban area. To an Illinois native that could mean only one thing. So in January 1915, a few days after New Year’s, the Reagans packed up and drove east.
They were heading to the big city. They were bound for Chicago.
CHAPTER THREE
“THE HAPPIEST TIMES OF MY LIFE”
“Poverty is a soft pedal upon all branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.”
—H. L. MENCKEN
Over the next six years, the Reagan family would repeatedly be on the move—haphazard migrations from town to town that were not always well planned and purposeful. “We moved to wherever my father’s ambition took him,” Ronald recalled, but more often it was a matter of outracing the bill collector.
The Reagan family pulled into Chicago at the beginning of 1915, filled with optimism. The city churned with energy drawn from a vastly diverse populace on the make and an infrastructure racing to accommodate it. Evidence was visible everywhere on the skyline; since the turn of the century, Chicago had been transformed by an array of palazzo-style structures—the Rand McNally Building, Peoples Gas, the Unity Building, the Railway Exchange, and the Continental Illinois bank—symbols of growing prosperity. A few years earlier, a network of trains began operating on an elevated track above the streets. Trolleys clattered up and down the avenues. It was all here, in a sprawling twenty-six-by-fourteen-mile stretch—ironworks, garment manufacturing, commercial printing, broadcasting, transportation, meatpacking, chewing gum, and crime, plenty of crime. Chicago, wrote Nelson Algren, was “a city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own particular wilderness.”
What a contrast from tiny Tampico. To a four-year-old who’d never been farther than the Rock River, Chicago was an eyeful, “a congested urban world of gaslit sidewalks and streets alive with people,” 2,185,000 strong pressed shoulder to shoulder. Ronald Reagan might not have been old enough to fathom the life of the city, but it stuck in his pores. From the outset, he was struck by its energy. Not more than two weeks after landing there, he came down with bronchial pneumonia, a strain so powerful it almost killed him. Shortly after that, his brother, Neil, fell off the back of a horse-drawn beer truck, which promptly ran over his leg.
Early one evening, soon afterward, the boys ran off. Jack and Nelle had left their sons home alone, which eventually triggered their fears. Neil—or Moon, as he was nicknamed—blew out the gas on the kitchen stove and grabbed his brother (now invariably called Dutch) by the hand, and they took off across the Midway to search for their parents. Night descended and the dark shadows morphed into spiders and bogeymen. Moon and Dutch soon realized they were lost, at which point their bravado turned to tears. Somewhat miraculously, Jack swooped in to rescue them, but they weren’t off the hook. They’d blown out the gas in the apartment, but hadn’t turned it off, so when Jack and Nelle returned they realized the place was about ready to blow. “I got a larruping for that,” Dutch recalled. And a new set of rules. Thereafter, the boys were restricted to the streets around the hardscrabble South Side, on the edge of the University of Chicago campus, where their father had rented a cold-water flat.
Modern upscale department stores were a natural stepping-stone, and Jack had seemingly stepped into the toniest. In July 1914, the local Tampico paper reported that he had “accepted a good position in the retail shoe department of Marshall Fields & Co.” Its opulent building filled with luxurious merchandise in the Loop of downtown Chicago was a far cry from H. C. Pitney’s. But by the time Jack got to Chicago that job had disappeared. Instead, he wound up working at the Fair Store, a discount emporium billing itself as “the store of the people . . . the market place for the Thrifty.” A discount outlet didn’t have the cachet of Marshall Fields, or its salary.
At the Fair Store, Jack felt like a drone, working long, ten-hour days for next to nothing, hardly enough to make ends meet. The bulk of his pay went toward the rent, with little left over for anything that wasn’t absolutely essential. “We were poor, and I mean poor,” Moon recalled. To save money, Nelle made all of Moon’s clothes, which were eventually handed down to Dutch. Just feeding the family took creativity. Every Saturday morning, the boys were given a dime and sent off to the meat market on Cottage Grove Avenue. The money covered the cost of a scraggly soup bone. Moon also asked the butcher for liver for their cat. “We didn’t have a cat,” he admitted years later, “but our big meal on Sunday was always fried liver,” organ meat usually headed for the bin. “We ate on the soup bone the rest of the week.” Nelle would roast it, then boil up a watery beef stock, adding table scraps like potatoes and carrots, even oatmeal on occasion, to make the broth stretch as long as possible.
Despite the appreciable hardship, Jack always came up with enough to keep himself in drink. He was drinking more openly here—and with more abandon. Not yet officially a “toddlin’ town,” Chicago had saloons on practically every corner—especially in the Reagans’ predominantly Irish neighborhood—so Jack never lacked for opportunity, despite the wave of temperance sweeping the country. On Saturday afternoon he would start early, sending the boys out to fetch buckets full of “backdoor beer,” brew bought cheaply from unlicensed joints run sotto voce—or “speak-easy”—by the mob. When he drank, he’d go until he couldn’t see straight. Inevitably, he’d make a spectacle of himself, becoming rowdy, stumbling, falling down—or worse. “There were times,” Moon remembered, “when he
didn’t open the screen door, he just walked through it.”
The boys were finally old enough to understand that their father’s drinking was a problem. They could see how it caused tension between their parents. Little Dutch certainly knew the score. “I can remember overhearing my father, after one of those [binges], say to my mother, ‘If you ever smell a drop on my breath, lock me in the bedroom if you have to. Don’t let me get out, because there is no way that I can stop.” But Nelle was no match for Jack’s frequent lapses. When he staggered home drunk, she flew straight into safeguarding mode, circling mother-bear arms around her young sons. “She always tried to protect us,” Moon said.
Nelle was careful to give the boys some perspective about Jack’s alcoholism. “She told us that we must not turn against our father for that,” Dutch recalled, “that it was a sickness he could not help, and that we should try to be of help to him in this at all times.”
Other times, help was beyond everyone’s control, no more so than in December 1915, when Jack’s behavior cost him his job. The Fair Store must have run out of patience with his repeated “coffee breaks,” his overexuberant exchanges with customers, his mounting unreliability, all the familiar warning signs.
With or without a job, Chicago was too expensive for a shoe salesman’s family. Nelle had tried to compensate by taking in needlework on a freelance basis, but even with that it didn’t provide nearly enough. So the Reagans packed up and moved on. Again.
Jack caught on with a department store in Galesburg, about two hundred miles southwest of Chicago. Founded as a college town, Galesburg had the kind of amenities that coalesce around campuses. There was a music conservatory whose house bands gave concerts on the town square, regular parades that were all well attended. Acts like W. C. Fields and Harry Houdini appeared at the opera house, where the Marx Brothers were given their nicknames during a backstage poker game. Chautauquas flourished a few miles off at Lake George, with its own natatorium. There was even a resident poet—Carl Sandburg, known around town as Charlie—who had grown up across from the railyards and gave frequent readings.
Because Galesburg sat at the crossroads of the Burlington and Northern, the CB&Q, and the Santa Fe, most of its populace descended from Swedish, Italian, and Irish immigrants who had come to work on the railroads in the mid-1800s and stayed on. In the sixty years since, they had parlayed their hands-on expertise into the construction of homes, one of which Jack rented on North Kellogg Street, in a new subdivision practically at the end of the city limits.
For five-year-old Dutch, Galesburg was a lovely, manageable town, unlike Chicago. It had a big-city feel but a quaint, sleepy nature. There were any number of thriving factories, like Western Tool Works, Polter’s Disk, and Frost Manufacturing, which made boilers for the locomotives, but their expansion was limited by town boss Omer N. Custer, a benevolent autocrat who feared that runaway growth would destroy Galesburg’s character. In the summer, Dutch could watch the two semipro baseball teams in the Illinois-Missouri League square off in Lincoln Park. In all likelihood, he got a chance to see the Galesburg Boosters’ ace pitcher, future Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander, whom he would portray in 1952 in his final film for Warner Bros. No doubt he was taken on a tour of Old Main, a redbrick building with a cream-colored cupola on the campus of Knox College, where Abe Lincoln had debated Stephen Douglas in 1858.
Dutch could come and go as he pleased here. Trolling through the weedy empty lot directly across the street, with its barrier of poplar trees, he’d forage for jungle treasures, like grass snakes. He learned how to ride a bicycle outside his house, wobbling over the street’s bumpy bricks produced by the same local Puritan plant that shored up the brand-new Panama Canal.
Jack also used the bike, which he rode to work each day at the O. T. Johnson store in the center of town. Known as the Big Store by nearly everyone in the state, O. T. Johnson’s was a commercial showpiece—two massive buildings that took up an entire city block and catered to a genteel clientele from as far off as Peoria and the Quad Cities. It had a bookstore, bakery, flower boutique, camera shop, and soda fountain, as well as a fine-dining restaurant on the ground floor that offered French service.
Jack felt right at home in the Big Store’s massive shoe department. It had an imposing display wall that ran the length of the floor, stacked with thousands of cardboard boxes. From nine to five it was Jack’s little fiefdom and a wonderful companion piece to the house he was renting, number 1219, on the corner of North Kellogg and Fremont. Overall the house was quite comfortable, if modest compared with the nearby Victorian mansions on Quality Hill. It had a wide front parlor cordoned off by oak-and-glass pocket doors, and behind it a dining room and kitchen with built-in pine cupboards. Upstairs were three ample bedrooms and a dormered attic that looked out over a silver maple shading the front lawn.
* * *
—
Dutch’s five-year-old mind was brimming with curiosity. At night, after the supper dishes were put away and only the soft glow of lamplight filtered through the parlor, Dutch and Moon would curl up on the couch, one boy on either side of Nelle, as she read to them from books they’d borrowed from the library. This was Dutch’s favorite activity of the day. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t make sense of the letters on the page, it was the learning process that so intrigued him. He hung on the words, following along as Nelle ran her finger under each one. In time, he began to decipher the hieroglyphics. By the summer of 1916, Dutch was claiming that he knew how to read.
Jack was a serious skeptic. One balmy July night in 1916, watching his young son stretched out on the floor all but wrapping himself in the pages of the Galesburg Evening Mail, he asked Dutch what he was doing.
“Reading.”
Jack decided to play along. “Well, read me something,” he said, swallowing a chuckle.
Dutch folded back the front page, squinted at one of the long columns, and began delivering an account of an act of sabotage at a munitions depot on an island in New York harbor.
Jack was stunned. Nelle drifted in the room to see what all the commotion was about, which provoked a hasty repeat performance. Soon, she flew off across the street to roust their neighbors, the McGowans and the Tennerys, to come over and hear Dutch read.
Now there was no stopping him. Dutch combed the paper every day, proudly reading aloud. He was especially drawn to graphic accounts about the progress of Allied troops in Europe. For over a year, much of the world had been at war—a war that was about to reshape the map in ways no one could have foreseen. In 1916, there was no sentiment in insular Galesburg to join hostilities that were viewed as alien to American interests. The largely Republican townsfolk, including the newspapers, were vehemently opposed, supporting Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to keep the United States neutral.
Jack, a diehard Democrat, was on the fence. Like most Irish Catholics, he was adamantly opposed to aiding the United Kingdom, which persistently denied independence to Ireland. But his convictions got the better of him. He was a humanitarian first and therefore leaned toward intervention as a means of saving lives and ending the monstrous slaughter that had already claimed over two million casualties. When, in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson finally declared war on Germany, Jack was one of the first men in line at the local recruiting office. It was a valiant, if futile, act of patriotism; there was little chance he’d be allowed to enlist. He was thirty-three that spring, two years beyond the age limit set by the Selective Service. He was out of shape and the family’s sole supporter.
Instead, Jack remained behind in Galesburg as the younger men in town hoisted duffel bags onto crowded troop transports leaving from the depot en route to Chicago. It was the scene of numerous teary farewells. Many afternoons, after Moon was done at school, Nelle would walk the boys to the railyards—a distance of more than two miles—to cheer on troop trains passing through town and hand the doughboys good-luck coins through open win
dows. Nelle did her part as well, helping the Red Cross to distribute care packages among the men.
That September, when Dutch was six, he started first grade at the Silas Willard School, a block from his house. The classes were huge because the rooms were enormous; often there were sixty-five children in a class. Because there was no lunchroom, Dutch walked home at noon, usually joining his father for what they called “the dinner meal.”
He took to school with unbridled enthusiasm. Unlike his classmates, who were struggling to read simple phrases, Dutch was already racing ahead by plowing through books. “I could pick up something to read and memorize it fairly quickly,” he recalled, “a lucky trait that made schoolwork easy for me but sometimes annoyed my brother, who didn’t have the same ability.”
Siblings, especially brothers, are naturally competitive, and things can get tense when a younger boy begins to outshine his big brother. Moon was no exception. Not particularly the brightest student, he bristled when Dutch called attention to himself by reciting a poem by heart or reading aloud to his parents. There were other times when Moon watched his younger brother sitting all by himself, playing contentedly with a cherished collection of lead soldiers, shutting him out.
Resentment boiled over one day after school, when the boys were messing around across the street in the vacant lot. They had the area—their fort—“booby-trapped for adults, [with] caves [they had dug] covered over with boxes” to foil anyone who trespassed on their turf. Eventually, they decided to build a campfire. “I got the ax out of the garage,” Moon recalled, “and [Dutch] would hold the [logs] while I cut them.” The second the ax made contact with the wood, Dutch would let go of his end so that the piece flew up, hitting Moon in the face. The older boy had had enough. “After three or four times like this, I let him have it in the head with the ax.” Fortunately, the blade caught bone, sparing any critical damage, but there was enough blood to satisfy Moon.