by Bob Spitz
It had a thriving industrial center: the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Factory (which became Borden’s in 1903) was producing milk products and caramels in a section of town called Swissville; Reynolds Wire hit it big supplying metal screen for the U.S. Army camps in World War I; and the Medusa Portland Cement Company plumbed the rich limestone deposits along the river and produced foundations for commercial buildings in Chicago. And there were shoe companies galore—Watson Plummer, Freeman, Brown, and Red Wing—as well as the Grand Detour Plow Company, an offshoot of an outfit started a few miles up the road by a man named John Deere, who invented the iron-faced plow in 1837. Local entrepreneurs made their fortune off the river. There were flour mills, sawmills, mills that converted flax into burlap used for bags that shipped almost every conceivable commercial product
By the time the Reagans moved to Dixon, the downtown had pushed out from the riverbanks to an area that extended a half mile in every direction. “Main Street is the climax of civilization,” Sinclair Lewis wrote (ironically) in 1920, and Dixon could boast a superb specimen—Galena Avenue—which ran the length of the city, north and south. The courthouse, built in 1901, was the focal point of town, a stately limestone structure stretching an entire square block. Three years later, the O. B. Dodge Library, with its stone-faced turret, opened with a collection of more than two thousand volumes a few blocks from the Dixon Theater, where for the general admission of one dollar the nightly bill featured six vaudeville acts and a silent movie accompanied by a seven-piece orchestra.
The first landmark that caught any newcomer’s eye, however, was the wooden “Welcome to Dixon” victory arch that spanned Galena Avenue between the courthouse and the post office. The sign was erected in May 1919 to honor the local veterans and commemorate the site where an ecstatic celebration took place the day the War to End All Wars concluded. All the bells in the churches of Lee County sounded as fifteen thousand strong turned out to greet companies of returning troops from Camp Grant. Dutch Reagan knew the details by heart. He walked through that arch almost immediately upon arriving in Dixon, gazing at the legend inscribed on its base:
A Grateful People Pause In Their Welcome
To The Victorious Living To Pay Silent Tribute To The Illustrious Dead.
For the Reagans, Dixon was a huge upgrade in many respects. The rented house they moved into on South Hennepin Avenue was a handsome white clapboard structure with a covered front porch, built in 1891 on a parcel of land once owned by John Dixon himself. It was more than comfortable by neighborhood standards. It had a large parlor with a fireplace, which Nelle designated “for special occasions only,” sealing it off with a bifold pocket door; and upstairs were three bedrooms and a closet-sized bathroom with a claw-foot tub. Dutch and Moon assumed they’d each get their own bedroom, but Nelle had other plans. “She’d never had a guest room before,” says a present-day caretaker. “So she laid claim to the front bedroom, with the best view and the most light, that looked out toward the street.” Dutch and Moon discovered they were going to share, and not only a room, but a bed as well. On humid Midwestern summer nights, when body heat turned the space into a sticky steam bath, the arrangement was less than ideal. Neither brother liked the setup. But come winter, with those frigid winds blowing through the single-pane glass window, all was forgiven.
Behind the house, just off Galena Avenue, was a dilapidated barn with a hayloft, where the boys could play, and adjacent to it a small patch of ground appropriated by Nelle, an avid gardener with plenty of farming in her genes, for growing tomatoes and broccoli.
Dutch was fascinated with the wildlife that drifted into the neighborhood, a virtual menagerie of muskrat, possum, and rabbit, the latter of which he kept in wire cages in the garage. “He went through this period where he was going to become a great trapper,” Moon recalled. He’d “hunt” muskrat along the hillsides that rose above the river, chasing his shadow more often than not. Otherwise, Dutch kept pretty much to himself. He was a quiet boy compared with his brother, more introspective, comfortable to be by himself.
Both Dutch and Moon attended South Central Grammar School, about a five-minute walk down Hennepin Avenue. It was a basic elementary school, but uncompromising. “The teachers didn’t allow any nonsense or backtalk,” says Esther Haack, a classmate of Dutch’s. “We paid attention and were quiet. No speaking unless you were spoken to.” Dutch, a fifth-grader, was your average B student. He loved to read and write but showed little effort when it came to other subjects. Part of the inertia can be attributed to his eyesight. Dutch was severely nearsighted. He could see—shapes, but not much more. In later years he would reminisce unflinchingly about this boyhood burden he called a handicap. “I simply thought that the whole world was made up of colored blobs that became distinct when I got closer, and I was sure it appeared the same way to everyone else.” In class, he could never see the blackboard, even from the front row. And he seldom played sports. Baseball was out of the question; he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn or field a pop-up, much less a grounder. Basketball?—not if he was expected to catch it. He was incapable of anything that required hand-to-eye coordination. The school playground, for Dutch, was a no-man’s-land, recess a stressful ordeal. He was embarrassed at always being taken last when teams were choosing sides. It never occurred to him that wearing glasses might correct his vision; he only assumed that he wasn’t as coordinated as other boys. All told, it caused him “a lot of heartache.”
The only game that gave him any solace was football. There was little likelihood of his hauling in a pass, but tackling an opponent wasn’t a problem. He was small but strong. As long as he played defense, he could hold his own.
This led to after-school pickup games on the empty lot at the side of the Reagans’ house. The O’Malley brothers would come across the street and play a Hennepin Avenue version of two-on-two with Moon and Dutch. Of course, the sides were usually stacked—Moon and George O’Malley against the two younger boys, who inevitably got creamed in the pileups. If the score was too lopsided, Moon and George would entertain themselves by tricking Dutch. They knew he squinched his eyes shut when carrying the ball. Ed O’Malley recalled how the two older boys would pretend to fall back as Dutch charged blindly ahead. Just as he was about to break open, they’d nudge him with a hip, sending him flying into a large bush or the side of the barn. It was always good for a laugh.
Dutch was a pretty good sport about it. He smiled his way through such monkey business, doing his best to maintain the peace. To that extent, friends considered him “something of a goody-goody,” but he had a latent rogue nature that every so often steered him onto dicey terrain.
One Halloween, he and Ed O’Malley joined their two older brothers in giving the rite of shivaree—the Midwestern version of the French charivari, by which newlyweds were hazed on their wedding night—to Joe Vail, a bridegroom who would later become the mayor of Dixon. The four boys made off with an old baby buggy, which Dutch tossed onto the Vails’ porch. He was in the midst of making a clean getaway when Vail, a big man lying in wait, took off after the boy. “[Dutch] was the slowest one [of us],” recalled Ed. Vail was just about to grab him, “when my older brother cut in between them . . . and Dutch got away.”
He wasn’t as lucky that July Fourth, when Moon goaded him into setting off a handful of torpedoes—a type of illegal fireworks that exploded on impact—from atop a stoplight in the middle of the Galena Avenue Bridge. Dutch was still clinging triumphantly to the pole when a police car pulled up and asked him what was going on. No doubt Dutch cast a guileful eye at his brother, whose approval he sorely craved, before blurting out: “Twinkle twinkle little star / Who the hell do you think you are?” It was as reckless and cheeky as it was uncharacteristic, and while it was meant to impress Moon, the policeman wasn’t buying. He hustled Dutch into the backseat of his car and sped off. At the station house, the police chief, J. D. Van Bibber, intervened and, as a favor, called Jac
k, with whom he played cards. Some favor. It cost Jack $14.75 to pay his son’s fine, a small fortune considering his meager salary.
For the most part, Dutch was a model boy. He respected his parents—whom he and Moon always called Nelle and Jack rather than Mom and Dad—and did all his chores on time and without complaint. His primary job was to empty the drip tray beneath the clunky oak icebox in the kitchen. “If you neglect to do that and it overflows onto my floor,” Nelle warned him, “your work just got bigger. You’ll have to clean up the spill, and while you’re at it the entire floor.” He was also responsible for putting a cardboard sign in the window to signal the iceman whenever they needed a delivery. Occasionally, he was recruited to help Jack at the Fashion Boot Shop. Dutch said he “found it boring,” but that might have been an excuse for avoiding the still in the store’s basement where Moon helped his father brew Prohibition beer. Otherwise, Dutch’s time was mostly his own. He and Ed O’Malley joined the Boy Scouts together and sat through double features at the Saturday matinee in the front row of the Family Theater.
But mostly he read. The library was a few blocks down Hennepin Avenue; Dutch had a library card from the time he was ten and was a fixture there most evenings, camped out on the window seat in the turret by the front door. “The library was really my house of magic,” he acknowledged. But there were snags. The stacks were closed, which meant he had to ask the librarian, Mrs. Elizabeth Camp, for any book he wanted, and if she didn’t think it was an appropriate title, she would refuse to get it. What’s more, he could check out only one book at a time. If he was lucky, Nelle would borrow something he could read as well, but there were only a couple of days when women were allowed in the library (and even then, they had to remain in a section by the fireplace known as the Ladies Reading Alcove, which was off-limits to men). So Dutch often read an entire book in the library before heading home with another title under his arm.
His reading was eclectic (he called it “undisciplined”). Dutch devoured books about birds and local wildlife, paging repeatedly through the incomparable Audubon color plates. Nelle gave him a copy of Gilbert Parker’s Northern Lights, a collection of stories about the Hudson Bay Company’s trappers and their pursuit of white wolves in the Saskatchewan Valley, which he “read over and over, imagining [himself] with the wolves in the wild.” He plowed through the Rover Boys series, featuring a trio of mischievous brothers at a military boarding school; the Horatio Alger books about the dreamy-eyed rags-to-riches paths of boys not unlike himself; Burt Standish’s Frank Merriwell stories, immortalizing the all-American Yale athlete who solved mysteries and righted wrongs. “Then I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs,” he recalled, “and not only all the Tarzan stories, but his science-fiction John Carter Warlord of Mars and all the other John Carter books.” Nothing was off Dutch’s reading radar—Zane Grey, Mark Twain, the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Alexandre Dumas, the kind of derring-do adventures that mesmerized teenage boys. Even poetry: he read and reread Nelle’s Robert W. Service collection, memorizing “The Shooting of Dan McGraw” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” both of which he’d recite in bed later in life to help him fall asleep.
No book had more of an impact on Dutch than a turn-of-the-century spiritual bestseller, That Printer of Udell’s by Harold Bell Wright. Nelle had given a copy to him in the spring of 1922, no doubt to prick his interest in the church and its mission through the exploits of a character very much like her son. It was an allegorical tale, loaded with messages of faith and redemption, but its real pull was the novel’s opening scene, the depiction of a wretched family dynamic: the book’s hero, Dick Faulkner, a young Midwesterner, experiences his long-suffering mother’s grim death while his drunken father, passed out cold, lies snoring in a corner.
Earlier that winter, on his way home one evening, Dutch had encountered Jack “spread out as if he were crucified,” on the front porch. “He was drunk, dead to the world,” Dutch remembered, snoring exactly like Dick Faulkner’s father. Dutch’s initial reaction was darkly ambivalent. If he just stepped over his father and went inside, he figured, the situation would eventually resolve itself. Ignore it, “pretend he wasn’t there,” and it would go away. That’s how he’d dealt with Jack’s benders in the past.
But not this time. As the reality of what happened began to sink in, Dutch grew more conflicted. This was his father whom he loved dearly, the man whose infectious happy-go-lucky spirit imbued every good thing in his life. A man of principle, dedicated to his family. Jack’s litany of faults couldn’t wipe that out. And Dutch was no longer the innocent child always protected from the truth. He was eleven years old, old enough to accept responsibility in situations such as this one. Dutch claimed that he grabbed a fistful of Jack’s coat, dragged him inside the house, and got him to bed.
This dramatic rescue is most likely apocryphal—he was hardly able to drag his comatose father into the front hall, carry him up a narrow, L-shaped flight of stairs, undress him, and put him to bed. The way Dutch chose to remember this event owes plenty to William James’s adage that truth happens to an idea. In this case, it might have been more of a symbolic expression. Dutch, wanting to rescue his father, imagined himself as a lifesaver, a role he would play many times over the years.
That Printer of Udell’s had a powerful impact, not just because of the parallels it drew to Jack but through its positions on charity and the church. “I was struck by the hero in the book,” Dutch said, “and the good things that he did.” The criticism voiced by the hero, Dick Faulkner—that “people follow the church and not Christ; they become church members, but not Christians”—stayed with him. There is little doubt that Dutch was exhilarated by its argument about practicing what is preached—what the book called “practical Christianity.”
It also gave him plenty of ethical morsels to chew on. Dick Faulkner, a printer’s assistant, becomes an activist for the needy, a role that arises from an epidemic of homelessness, but he divides such people into “two classes . . . the deserving and the undeserving.” The undeserving, he maintains, benefit from social-welfare policies that “encourage the idle in their idleness” to the detriment of those more deserving of a helping hand. To help the undeserving, Dick says, demeans those in real difficulty. Rather than encourage “the shiftless and idle” in their freeloading, he proposes offering assistance only to those willing to work—“the test of work,” he labels it. Of course, once people are self-sufficient, they go off the dole. It is impossible to read the book now without relating its essential values with positions Ronald Reagan took later in public life.
Dutch later said That Printer of Udell’s had a strong impression on his spiritual development. “I found a role model in that traveling printer,” he wrote to the book’s author’s daughter-in-law more than sixty years later. After finishing the book, he told Nelle, “I’d like to be like him,” like Dick Faulkner. The feeling lingered for a few days, building inside Dutch, until he finally announced: “I want to declare my faith and be baptized.” Was this a youthful caprice? Nelle couldn’t be sure at first. He wasn’t even twelve years old, and she firmly believed “you had to be ready to make the decision.” For that very reason the pastor of her church usually refused to baptize children. But Dutch convinced Nelle and the pastor that the time was right. Moon decided that he would participate in his brother’s ritual as well, but his apostasy was sure to cause fireworks at home. In fact, his friend George O’Malley recalled encountering the boys a short time before the service and being warned, “Shh, we’re going to get baptized—don’t let Jack know.” Nevertheless, both Reagan brothers were baptized at the First Christian Church on June 21, 1922.
Her sons’ commitment to their faith was deeply satisfying to Nelle. Her involvement with the church had become stronger than ever in Dixon, and more profound. She was immediately elected to its inner sisterhood, the C. C. Circle, a group of women dedicated to bringing the good works of the church to the wider community. An
d she was a missionary—a true missionary—for its values. She even became president of the Women’s Missionary Society and taught the True Blue Class as part of the church’s Sunday Bible school program. The more the church asked, the more she’d take on. She gave readings, sang in the choir—often as the soloist—trained religious teachers, led prayer services, wrote and performed in church plays, staged charity events, represented the church at state conventions, striving, always striving, to aid those in need. Moon recalled how “she sandbagged merchants for clothes and food that she then distributed on the east side,” where Dixon’s neediest lived. Cenie Straw, a neighbor, marveled at Nelle’s bottomless energy, how when she finished with her duties at church, she would slip away with a basket of apples or cookies and head across the street to visit at the county jail. “She would take her Bible and go read to the prisoners.” And her generosity didn’t end with readings. Typically, prisoners were released late in the day, when there was a greater temptation for encountering trouble. “So she would often invite them to come and spend the night in her guest room, give them a hot meal, and make sure that they got a good foot into the right path.” The next morning, Nelle helped them clean up so they could look for work.
On Thursdays, she took her ministry to the Dixon sanatorium, where she distributed gifts and entertained tuberculosis patients. And if time permitted, she detoured to the Dixon Home for the Feeble-Minded to visit Jack’s brother Will, who was confined there with “alcoholic psychosis.”