by Bob Spitz
But beyond the sibling rivalry, there was a kinship regarding the tensions at home. Relations were unusually fraught between Jack and Nelle. “Sometimes,” Dutch recalled, “my father suddenly disappeared and didn’t come home for days, and sometimes when he did return, my brother and I would hear some pretty fiery arguments through the walls of our house.” Occasionally, when things boiled over, Nelle would bundle up the boys and take them to her sister’s house until everyone’s emotions calmed down.
During this time, Galesburg seesawed in its official policy toward alcohol; one year the city was wet, the next dry, which made casual drinking difficult—but not that difficult. A barfly like Jack would always find a way. Paydays were the worst, when Jack would inevitably take his earnings to the nearest bar. Nelle did her best to run interference. She even petitioned the payroll department at O. T. Johnson’s to give Jack’s paycheck directly to her, but they refused. His drinking put the family in a familiar financial squeeze.
Dutch remembered hearing his father promise Nelle that better days were just ahead. But if so, the family wouldn’t be enjoying them in Galesburg. By the summer of 1917, the drinking had caught up with Jack again, and as a result he was fired from his job at the Big Store.
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After struggling to make a few payments on the rent, Jack and Nelle grew desperate, and in January 1918, under cover of night, they packed their belongings and hopped a train heading west.
Monmouth was the first town they came to and was as good a place as any to start over: smaller than Galesburg, larger than Tampico, with a booming wartime economy and lush surrounding farmland that produced a wealth of corn that made livestock fat. The local hogs especially thrived, giving Monmouth bragging rights as the biggest bacon-processing center in the country. In order to plow the cornfields, James H. Pattee invented a new, revolutionary machine—a cultivator named after “the Swedish nightingale” Jenny Lind—which begat three factories that employed half the town. All of which meant there was a prosperous downtown anchored by a department store. With a shoe department.
For a while, everything went fine. The Reagans managed to rent a house at 218 South Seventh Street in a neighborhood called the College Addition. Jack indeed got a job at the store, E. B. Colwell, selling shoes in the basement. And the boys were enrolled at Central School, just a few blocks away.
Dutch’s teacher, Mabel Lukens, made a big production of introducing him—the new boy—to the rest of the second-grade class. He was escorted in after the other kids were already seated, causing several students to make note of how he carried himself, so self-assuredly, “with his jaw set, as though somebody was going to take a poke at him and he was ready for the punches.” That was all it took to convey the impression that Dutch was “stuck up or something.” Gertrude Romine, who sat a few rows in front of him, remembered how half a dozen classmates waited after school and “chased him all the way home, up onto his porch.” Nelle intervened to save Dutch’s skin, giving the young posse “a red-hot lecture.” Eventually, Dutch managed to win them over, and life again fell into a comfortable routine.
Dutch had a frankly appealing soft side. Neighbors remembered seeing him rescue a nest of birds that had fallen out of a tree on the campus of Monmouth College. But he was also an incorrigible scamp. As a member of the Knot Hole Gang, there was never any question who would lead the pack sneaking in, under the fence, to the college football games.
But, as usual, extenuating circumstances intervened. In the fall of 1918, an influenza outbreak cut a swath of devastation from Europe to the Pacific islands. In less than three months, more than twenty-five million people died from the flu. And by early November, it had arrived in Monmouth.
Every precaution was taken. The city ordered its schools closed. A student Army Training Corps set up emergency facilities on the college campus, and face masks were distributed to anyone who asked. Thankfully, Monmouth and the neighboring towns were largely spared the flu’s impact, but not the Reagan household.
Nelle came down with all the dreaded symptoms—a scorching fever, the telltale scarlet flush, an inability to move off the couch. There was never any doubt as to what it all meant. “The house grew so quiet,” Dutch recalled. He took up sentry at the front window to watch for Dr. Lawrence, who lived around the corner, to arrive and examine his mother. “When he came down, Jack went outside with him and I waited with a lurking terror for him to come back and say, ‘She’s going to be all right.’” But the doctor wasn’t optimistic; Nelle wasn’t out of the woods, and Dutch went to sleep, as he recalled, “with a weight dragging at the pit of my stomach.”
It was touch-and-go for days. Jack dragged himself to church to pray and to light altar candles for Nelle’s recovery. Dutch brooded obsessively. He didn’t put much stock in idol worship, and was less sure about Dr. Lawrence’s advice to “keep [Nelle] stuffed to the gills with old green cheese, the moldier the better.” (No one called it penicillin for another ten years.) Not even the armistice and its furious all-night celebration were enough to allay the family’s worst fears. Finally, though, the fever and night sweats had run their course, and Nelle began to respond. Jack doubled down: “She’s going to be all right.”
But her upturn was the beginning of their downfall in Monmouth. The onerous medical bills bore heavily on Jack, who dealt with the pressure the only way he knew how. There was really no way for him to avoid the bars—the 100 block of South Street was crawling with them. Respectable ladies wouldn’t walk on that side of the street, but the bars were on Jack’s route home from work. Easy for him to make a brief pit stop. Before long, the drinking had reclaimed him. How long before they cost Jack his job?
A letter arrived in the nick of time from his old boss, H. C. Pitney. Pitney was losing his eyesight, and he wanted Jack to consider returning to Tampico. He offered an irresistible profit-sharing incentive. Tampico—a step backward—wasn’t what Jack had envisioned for himself, but he must have seen there was little time left for him at Colwell’s in Monmouth. Maybe he was better off being a big fish in a small pond again.
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Soon enough, the Fulton Journal-News broke the story that on August 25, 1919, Mr. John E. Reagan and family had moved back to Tampico, where Mr. Reagan, formerly of Broadhead’s et al., would once again “take charge of H. C. Pitney’s large store.” The Tampico Tornado ran a corresponding piece, announcing that no less than “a graduate of the American School of Practipedics” would be returning as the shoe authority in town. Both papers made it sound like a grand homecoming. But Jack was disgruntled from the start. Pitney’s illustrious “shoe department” was barely a cubbyhole in the store; the styles hadn’t changed since he’d last managed the place. He knew there was no future in this job, and his restlessness set in immediately.
His family, on the other hand, settled right in. They occupied a spacious apartment above Pitney’s store, across the street from their former flat. Moon found a posse his own age to run with, and Nelle burrowed deeper into her beloved Christian Church. Dutch fell in love with Tampico, later calling the move there “the most fortunate shift in my life.” He set out on a deliberate exploration of every delight and diversion the town had to offer. “There were woods and mysteries, life and death among the small creatures, hunting and fishing.” He learned how to swim—a pastime that would gratify him for the rest of his life—frequenting two local sources: a clear-water creek just north of town where the county ditches merged, and the Hennepin Canal, which he reached by walking along the cinder path that hugged the railroad tracks. Like Moon, Dutch found his own crowd, palling around with a few boys he knew from school—a third-grader named Vern “Newt” Dennison, Gordon Glassburn, and Harold Winchell, whom everyone called Monkey. According to Newt Dennison’s account, they played tag across the pens of the city stockyards, smoked corn-silk cigarettes, and had food fights with fruit salvaged from garbage can
s behind the Main Street shops.
Although Dutch could read better than most classmates at Tampico Grade School, his progress was stunted by the school’s limitations. The building, nothing more than a four-room steepled box, did not have adequate space, so classes were combined—third- and fourth-grade students shared one teacher, Miss Nellie Darby. Providing schoolbooks was the responsibility of each pupil. Dutch was reading well beyond the fourth-grade level, and in an effort to remain stimulated, he resorted to borrowing books from a library stack displayed in a glass case at the front of the room—titles such as “The Sermon on the Mount,” King Solomon and the Ants by John Greenleaf Whittier, a biography of Alfred the Great, and History of the United Netherlands. For a curious student such as Dutch, it was catch-as-catch-can. And he was a quick study. Classmates were impressed by his “photographic memory for dates,” and his mastery of the curvy Palmer Method handwriting.
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Home life was more of a challenge. After school, most boys his age, sons of farmers, were expected home straightaway to attend to a litany of chores. Dutch invariably returned to an empty house. His father was either minding the store or away on one of his buying trips, and his mother was burdened with obligations at church. To say she was an “active” member would be an understatement. Since returning to Tampico, Nelle assumed a variety of administrative duties at the Christian Church, which in 1919 had no pastor and few volunteers. She wrote most of its bulletins, handled mailings, prepared Sunday services, oversaw charitable programs, and took on virtually any outstanding task. A well-informed source reported that “Nelle ran the . . . church almost single-handed” and fanned speculation that she often preached. The woman who began life as a freethinker was a deacon now.
Nor was her ministry confined to four walls. Nelle often took her faith on the road, giving scores of religious and spiritual recitations “in tragic tones, [in which she] wept . . . and poured out poetry by the yard.” Dutch referred to her as “the dean of dramatic recitals for the countryside,” not without a touch of irony. For him, Nelle’s devotion signified countless afternoons spent mostly on his own.
It took his neighbors, the Greenmans, to come to his rescue. They were an unfussy, elderly couple whom Dutch called Aunt Emma and Uncle Jim, and they ran a jewelry business in a shop adjacent to Pitney’s. He would come to spend most weekday afternoons at the Greenmans’, curled up in their old oak rocking chair with a plate of homemade cookies and hot chocolate. It was a strange environment for an eight-year-old boy, with a parlor that both fascinated and repelled him. Fifty years later he could still envision the “horsehair-stuffed gargoyles of furniture, its shawls and antimacassars, globes of glass over birds and flowers, books and strange odors.” Occasionally he would wander into the jewelry shop, filled with similarly kooky relics, a parallel universe to explore and contemplate. Dutch endeared himself so much to the couple that they gave him a weekly ten-cent allowance. But their contribution to his welfare was far greater, helping to fill an emotional absence.
His father was only growing more distracted, and restless. He would never have come back to Tampico if it hadn’t been for the profit-sharing scheme, but its yield hadn’t panned out as expected. With H.C. unable to assist him on the floor, Jack was more or less on his own, working long days without much to see for it.
Almost from the outset, he wanted out. According to Tampico historian Paul Nicely, “Immediately they tried to sell the store because Pitney was sick and Jack Reagan didn’t want to live here.” They put out feelers through 1919 and into the next year, without generating much interest. The only prospective buyer died during negotiations. Truth be told, there was little opportunity for growth in Tampico. No one wanted a stagnant business.
In the meantime, the Reagans made the most of their time in town. The cost of living there was reasonable. For once, their bills were paid without too much personal sacrifice. There was no chance of Jack’s getting fired, no bars within walking distance. On the face of it, life in Tampico was agreeable, as agreeable as the picture-postcard vistas that framed the town, the verdant farmland that stretched on forever under brilliant blue skies. Snapshots of that time remained vivid in Ronald Reagan’s memory—the Sunday picnics along the Hennepin Canal, horse-and-buggy rides across pristine fields, flickering silent-movie nights in the town square under firefly-filled skies, riding seesaw on the enormous iron cannon in Railroad Park, those July Fourth all-day celebrations featuring chicken roasts followed by fireworks and square dancing, and ice skating on a makeshift rink filled by a firehose that Jack Reagan manned. Dutch credited such days for providing “the happiest times of my life.”
A childhood in Tampico was a refuge from the complexities of the wider postwar world. Life in this remote pocket of the Midwest changed hardly at all. There, boys were isolated from the influence of radio, the rampaging stock market, and the hedonism of Jazz Age America. They weren’t affected by the sweeping changes reshaping the country, such as the new leisure class and the reduction of the workweek to forty-eight hours. None of it touched the lives of the farm community, where everyone, from generation to generation, worked from dawn to dusk seven days a week—but worked contentedly, with a shared sense of worth.
Dutch would have been happy had this simple, unpretentious lifestyle been his fate, to grow up in sleepy Tampico among these good people—idyllic, as it would always remain in his perception. He must have been heartbroken when, in the fall of 1920, Jack came home from work practically levitating, jubilant, with news he couldn’t wait to relay. H. C. Pitney had finally conceded Jack’s point that there was no future for retail growth in Tampico. Such opportunity abounded in larger towns, with diverse economies and booming populations. Pitney proposed that the two of them open a shoe store in a place that fit the criteria. They were moving again, twenty-five miles north, to Dixon, Illinois.
CHAPTER FOUR
READY TO SHINE
“In love of home, the love of country has its rise.”
—CHARLES DICKENS
For Dutch, Dixon was everything his father had promised—a small town masquerading in big-city clothing. It was a thriving town with a population just under the ten thousand mark and an abundance of solid industry. Held up against Chicago, however, its small-town traits were clear—a whistle-stop on the Illinois Central line, God-fearing, conservative, a handmaiden to the mighty Rock River, which cleaved a swath through the center of town. Dixon wasn’t a country crossroads, nor was it a Windy City in all the respects that nickname implied—no crime, no Al Capone, no Democratic political machine, no el. Dixon prided itself on its downhome, esoteric character and frontier past.
The story of the town’s namesake, John Dixon, was practically scripture. He had come from New York in an ox-pulled wagon with his wife and children in 1820, venturing into what was Indian territory—the Potawatomi to the east, the Winnebago to the north, and the Sauk and Black Hawk to the west. It was fertile prairie, some of the most gorgeous river-valley land this side of the Mississippi. The Indians had farmed it for 150 years. For a white man, settling there took enormous courage. Though the tribes tolerated outsiders, there was only fragile peace. In the spring, the Indians traditionally ferried travelers and their draft animals across the Rock River—which they called the Sinnissippi, meaning “rocky bottom”—shuttling them back over in the fall. Any competitor was burned down and driven off—that is, until Joseph Ogee, a French Canadian married to a Potawatomi princess, got into the game. He constructed a rival ferry service at the river’s narrows, just south of Grand Detour, in 1828. John Dixon bought it from him two years later, adding a tavern and a log cabin that doubled as a trading post and inn, thus establishing a legitimate settlement, which people began calling Dixon’s Ferry.
Dixon gained the Indians’ trust by learning their language, giving them credit, and respecting their traditions. And the trust was mutual. In return, the Potawatomi gave Dixon th
e job of collecting their debts and paying off their creditors. Later, in the fall of 1852, General Winfield Scott charged him with distributing fifty thousand meals of grain and beef to the Sauk and Winnebago, whose hunting grounds had been decimated by federal troops.
Dixon rubbed elbows with generals and presidents alike. Martin Van Buren commissioned him to move the state land office to his town; Zachary Taylor consulted Dixon during the Black Hawk War; Jefferson Davis oversaw the building of Fort Dixon on the north bank of the river; and, when the Republican Party was formed in Bloomington-Normal in 1858, the principal speaker before Abraham Lincoln took the lectern was the ubiquitous John Dixon. In fact, a young Captain Lincoln spent forty-five days with the Sangamon County volunteer militia in Dixon and, according to John Dixon’s books, still owes money for supplies he bought on credit.
But Dixon was a vision as well as a visionary. He had a mane of fine-spun silver hair that flowed in waves below his shoulders, earning him the nickname Father John. And his accomplishments were epic. He built dams and bridges across the Rock River, brought the railroad—not one but two major lines that crisscrossed just south of town; you could get on a train in Dixon and end up in Texas, Florida, or California—plotted a business district along the river, set up a local government, and established schools, banks, and a hospital, all feats designed to speed progress. By the end of the Civil War, his efforts had paid off by way of a vast immigration that fortified the town’s future. People poured into Dixon from across the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, and down the Rock River. The town grew exponentially—not quite as large as nearby Aurora or DeKalb, but by the turn of the century Dixon was a budding industrial center, with businesses drunk on the lavish hydropower.