by Bob Spitz
Faith and charity upstaged her passion for performing—but not by much. “Performing, I think, was her first love,” Dutch recalled. She acted any chance she got in any part, big or small, that came her way. “Whether it was low comedy or high drama, Nelle really threw herself into a part.”
There was plenty of opportunity to act in Dixon. The church staged morality plays, several of which Nelle wrote herself. In a temperance one-act she scripted for the church, a particularly resonant line—“I love you, Daddy, except when you have that old bottle”—sounded like a personal appeal. Other plays were less preachy: “George Had a Grouch with His Sisters,” “Cornelia Pickle, Plaintiff,” “The Shepherd’s Christmas,” “The Italian Story of the Rose,” every other week seemed to feature her in another role. When the American Legion staged its 500-person “Pageant of Abraham Lincoln,” Nelle starred as the president’s mother, Nancy Hanks.
Much of her standard repertoire took the form of readings. Frequently, she would get up at a meeting or public gathering and deliver a recitation from memory in the form of a parable or poem that took on themes of courage, integrity, and principle. “How the Artist Forgot Four Colors” and “On the Other Train” were among Nelle’s narratives. On Sunday afternoons she was a fixture on the upper level in the library, standing by the railing that overlooked the main floor, for one of the public readings that showcased her sentiments.
“My mother inveigled me into learning a few things, and she’d take me with her sometimes,” Dutch recalled. “She’d have me do humorous things, and I learned what a kick it was to make people laugh.” As early as the summer of 1920, only nine years old, he delivered two recitations as warm-ups before his mother’s appearance: a tearjerker of a poem called “About Mother” and an allegory, “The Sad Dollar and the Glad Dollar.”
One of their joint efforts was a lighthearted church play of Nelle’s about the dangers of family fighting, set in a community not unlike Dixon, where everyone knew everyone else’s business and gossip was harsh. Dutch was roped into playing the aggrieved father, sporting a cast on his arm, the result of a well-placed thwack by his wife.
Another of her routines was an old vaudeville monologue entitled “Lavinsky at the Wedding,” popularized by a Polish-Yiddish comic named Julian Rose. Nelle did all the voices—the disgruntled guest, the intruding Irishman, the rabbi (Dutch remembered him as “the minister”), the pushing and shoving around the crowded buffet table—delivering punch lines with a stand-up’s timing. Nelle’s delivery of the Irish policeman declaring “I’m cleaning out the Jew wedding” never failed to get a laugh.
“I think that’s where I got the bug [to perform],” Dutch said—the applause, the way a performance connected with the audience. At the outset, Nelle had to twist his arm, but as time wore on Dutch eagerly joined her onstage, whether at church, at the library, in a hospital ward, or at one of the local theaters.
Dutch had replaced Jack as Nelle’s favorite co-star. Jack was too busy trying to make a go of it at the Fashion Boot Shop. He still sold shoes, but now he saw himself as something more, a foot specialist, or “practipedist,” as the store’s ads ordained him. He had completed a Dr. Scholl’s correspondence course to justify that title. “I remember my father studying at night,” Dutch said, “about every bone in the foot and . . . he must have been a damn good student at it, because people would come in for shoes that had something wrong, some deformity and . . . he was always able to equip them with an arch support and fit their shoes and correct what was wrong.”
Other times, however, Jack fell back on his innate charm. A classmate of Dutch’s remembered sitting through a string of disastrous shoe fittings with her aunt, when finally Jack threw up his hands and said, “Mrs. Wallace, it just isn’t the time of year for your size.” He had a way about him that delighted customers. He might tell them, “Jesus walked barefoot, but then, he didn’t have to deal with our Illinois winters, now did he?” Or: “I’m glad you chose that pair, they can walk to church and dance a jig on the way home.” But he was also savvy when it came to business. He was “the first salesman in Dixon to X-ray people’s feet,” which gave his customers a sense they were in the hands of a healer. And Dutch recalled how H. C. Pitney relied on Jack to canvass the state for stores that were going belly-up and to buy up their shoe stock at auction. “He’d buy them for pennies. Good lord, he could sell some of them for twenty-five cents and make a profit.”
Jack was well liked, but a livable wage remained elusive. Competition was fierce; Geisenheimer’s, a department store next to the Fashion Boot Shop, also sold shoes. Despite the financial struggles, though, and even in the grip of Prohibition, Jack was always able to manage a bottle.
Jack’s carousing and the family’s ensuing money woes meant that Nelle had to be creative just to feed her family. Her specialty in this regard was a dish she called “oatmeal meat”—a thick patty consisting mainly of cereal flavored with only enough hamburger to disguise its blandness, buried in gravy made from the residue left clinging to the hamburger pot.
The rent on the Hennepin Avenue house ate up the majority of Jack’s salary. Nelle also insisted on tithing, giving 10 percent of everything they made to the Christian Church. Her monthly mantra—“Don’t worry, the Lord will provide”—was righteous in spirit, but it didn’t pay the bills. Dutch offered to contribute what he could. In a hutch behind the barn, Dutch and Moon raised rabbits and pigeons, and on Saturday mornings Moon went door-to-door in the neighborhood, peddling squab and rabbit meat.
Moving to a cheaper rental was inevitable. In the spring of 1923, the Reagans packed up again for a move across the Rock River, to the north side of Dixon, where housing was more available—and more affordable. The boys were distraught. They’d loved the Hennepin Avenue place, with the big side yard and the O’Malley brothers nearby. Jack took a lease on a smaller house some distance from downtown, on West Everett Street, an unprepossessing block of working-class families. There was no front porch, no parlor to speak of, no guest room, and only the stingiest slip of a yard.
Jack tried to put a good face on it. “No need to put up curtains here,” he advised Nelle. “We won’t be staying that long.”
Dutch tried to embrace his father’s optimism. He made the best of the move, and soon after their arrival he scouted the new neighborhood, taking stock of what it had to offer. There were a few grocery stores, a confectionery, a barber shop and pharmacy, but not much else in the way of conveniences. On sultry summer evenings residents pulled chairs outside to avoid the oppressive heat and to chat with neighbors. Saturday nights everyone headed downtown, where businesses stayed open late to accommodate the social do-si-do. In the dappled light of the store windows, Dixonians took care of their weekend shopping, then congregated on the porches and benches beneath the low-slung awnings, catching up on local gossip. Occasionally, Dutch joined his parents among the congenial horde; otherwise he rambled around the backyard for hours by himself, staring pensively over the tree line, where the brooding Rock River loomed in the distance. “The whole street was up on a bluff,” he recalled. “And right out the back door the bluff sloped down to the high-school playing field.” He would matriculate there in a few years, as soon as he was old enough. Moon was scheduled to start there in the fall, but when it came to it, he flat-out refused to attend. He remained enrolled at South Central High. It was the first time he and Dutch would be separated like that. They began to grow apart in other ways as well. Moon now ran with a rough bunch from the south side of Dixon that hung out in Red Vaile’s pool hall, an unsavory little basement dive a few doors up from the Fashion Boot Shop. And there was an element of cruelty now in the way he treated Dutch, something in his manner that hadn’t been there before, a harder edge. It was easy to pick on a boy he viewed as “quiet” and thoughtful, a boy who couldn’t see two feet in front of him. He knew when Dutch had his “down moments,” but refused to comfort him with a kind word. He saw Dutc
h “as a scared kid burying his snuffling tear-streaked face in Nelle’s apron” and developed a talent for locking in on the younger brother’s insecurities with a well-placed dig that further reduced him to tears. Years later Moon would say, “We didn’t have what you would call great companionship.” Their palling-around days were over.
* * *
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Dutch’s faulty eyesight continued to dog him in every phase of his life—in the classroom, on the playing field, in his engagement with the world around him. What he couldn’t see traumatized him throughout his adolescence and made him skittish, occasionally insular. Neither of his parents seemingly paid enough attention to notice. Perhaps his awkwardness seemed more like a lack of coordination, something he’d grow out of or learn to compensate for. Nothing tested Dutch more severely or caused more frustration than his inability to see things clearly.
An idle gesture changed everything. In the spring of 1924, Jack and Nelle took the boys on one of their frequent Sunday outings, an afternoon drive meandering through the Rock River Valley countryside. “Nelle had left her eye-glasses in the back seat,” Dutch recalled. As they edged out of Dixon into the dense prairie, he reached over and, out of curiosity, slipped them on.
It was as though someone had flipped a switch and he could suddenly see. Colors came at him from every direction. And distinct forms, not the ghostly images he’d struggled to make out for years. There was a billboard he could read and cows grazing in the field. He shrieked with delight. For a boy of thirteen, it was an epiphany. “I’d discovered a world I didn’t know existed before.”
The next day, Dutch went with Nelle to see Dr. George McGraham, an optometrist located on the next block from Jack’s shop. The diagnosis was extreme myopia. Dutch was nearsighted—nothing corrective lenses couldn’t remedy. He would be wearing glasses from now on, a pair of thick black frames. Embarrassing, yes, but they did the trick. He took a lot of heat at first—kids on the block calling him “four eyes”—but he could see. It was a life-changing experience.
After years imprisoned by the shadows, Dutch was ready to shine.
CHAPTER FIVE
“EVERYONE’S HERO”
“Throw out the lifeline, throw out the lifeline, Someone is sinking today.”
—EDWARD SMITH UFFORD
Dutch’s life shifted into a new and promising phase. His North Side neighborhood was filled with children his age who went to the same school and church. He’d replaced Moon by making his own set of friends—Harold Marks, Herb Glessner, and Dick McNichol, along with his old pal Ed O’Malley. And he began to fill out, no longer the scrawny four-eyed fumbler of Hennepin Avenue but an amiable, starkly handsome young man.
He volunteered much of his spare time at the Christian Church, where he taught a Sunday school class across the hall from his mother and was an active member in the K.K.K., the acronym—which mortified Jack—stood for the Klean Kids Klub. The YMCA became his after-school hangout. He joined its swim team, and the Boys Band, in which Moon shouldered a tuba. Lacking any discernible musical skill, Dutch functioned as the marching band’s drum major, a position coveted for its spiffy uniform—a blue-and-crimson cape thrown over white duck pants and a towering beaked hat, with a baton patched together from a brass-bed leg and its crown.
He would start pumping his arm to set the band in motion as it followed him in the syncopated “hippodrome strut” along a parade path. That was always the plan, and it was effective—when it worked. During a memorable Memorial Day celebration in 1923, Dutch recalled how, in the nearby town of Amboy, he was assigned to lead his team behind the parade marshal’s horse. They ran through the standard set of patriotic anthems—“Under the Double Eagle,” “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and “Semper Fidelis.” At a certain point, the marshal made an unexpected U-turn along Main Street and rode back along the marchers to make sure everyone was in their proper places. Dutch, ever the standard-bearer, kept pace at the front of the pack, pumping that arm, pumping, pumping, never missing a beat. Unbeknownst to him, however, the marshal led the band off-route, on a detour down a cross street. It was some time before Dutch realized he was high-stepping along on his own. Rather than continuing on alone or quitting in defeat, he sprinted across several streets and backyards cutting through a block of houses, tuning his antennae to the distant ripple of melody, until he located the wayward troupe and fell back in step at the front of the procession, as though nothing had happened. It was a scene adapted years later for an Andy Hardy movie.
Movies became a passion. Dutch and his buddies went two or three times a week, whenever they could scrape together their dimes for tickets. The Dixon Theater on Galena Avenue, just north of the arch, was a grand old palace, with a monster three-keyboard Barton organ whose deep-pitched drone accompanying the silent films sounded celestial when it resonated through that cavernous space. Ed Worley’s brother Bill played that organ, which allowed him to occasionally sneak in friends—and friends of friends—for free. “They changed the movies often,” recalls a classmate of Dutch’s. You could count on seeing a new short, a serial, and a two-reel feature almost every other day. The theater drew a lively but well-mannered audience, especially on matinee day, when a throng of kids filed in past L. G. Rorer, the procrustean owner, who stood sentry in the lobby to root out candy, popcorn, or soda pop, which were forbidden in the theater.
Dutch cultivated a new set of heroes. In addition to the Rover Boys, Frank Merriwell, and John Carter, he now included Tom Mix and William S. Hart, two of the cinema’s foremost cowboy stars; swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks; Wallace Beery; Laurel and Hardy; and wonderdog Rin Tin Tin. His role models were the men on white horses who knew right from wrong.
Jack Reagan forbade his sons from seeing a reissue of Birth of a Nation when it came to Dixon in 1925. “It deals with the Ku Klux Klan against the colored folks,” Jack declaimed, “and I’ll be damned if anyone in this family will go see it.” Having been discriminated against himself for being Catholic, he fulminated against any group that degraded people for their race or beliefs. “There was no more grievous sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance,” Dutch would say. While barnstorming as a traveling salesman, Jack refused to stay at a hotel that barred Jews from its premises. And he was more than familiar with the Klan’s brand of prejudice. One of its klaverns operated out of Grand Detour and made its presence felt in Dixon, where they had burned a cross on the courthouse lawn.
Even though he wasn’t an educated man, Jack Reagan was forceful and articulate when it came to questions of fairness. His politics reflected his idealism. He expressed his views daily, with Dutch listening intently at his elbow, on any number of compelling social issues and maintained that it was the duty of the government to help people personally and have their interests at heart. It was easy for a man who could barely afford to eat liver or subsisted on “oatmeal meat” to lash out against the rapacious banking and railroad magnates whose fortunes influenced most legislation. He spoke often about reapportioning the immense wealth hoarded by the iron barons in Galena in order to bolster the living conditions of the people whose land they were mining and whose water they were polluting.
Unabashedly liberal and a Democrat, Jack wasn’t afraid to take positions that were detested by most people in town. Dixon was conservative—“ultra-ultra-conservative,” according to local historian Greg Langan—and solidly Republican. Only one time since Lincoln was elected did the town not support a Republican for president, and that was in 1912, for the Bull Moose candidate, Teddy Roosevelt. The powerful Shaw family, which controlled the only newspaper in Dixon, made sure, through editorials and the slant of its coverage, that the world its readers read about tilted strongly to the right.
It didn’t matter to Jack Reagan what anyone else thought. He had his viewpoint and he was sticking to it. Dixon Democrats tended to keep their heads down and mouths shut. Jack “was p
robably the most outspoken of them,” Dutch recalled, “never missing a chance to speak up for the working man.” It was a matter of duty to your fellow man. This all made sense to Dutch. He respected his father’s views, especially as they paralleled the principles he was taught in church. Let us not be weary in well doing. Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love. God loveth a cheerful giver. He knew that William S. Hart had opened his ranch “for the benefit of the American Public of every race and creed.” And while some of his schoolmates bullied Dutch as a result of Jack’s politics, he clung even closer to his father’s ideals.
Dutch Reagan was a reflection of both his parents—parroting his father’s politics, admiring his independence, resembling him in appearance if not in spirit, while practicing his mother’s faith, applying scripture, appearing in her inspirational skits. But as he entered high school in 1924, Dutch drifted toward forming his own identity and distinguishing himself in areas that veered from his parents’ paths.
He was athletic, an aptitude that surprised practically everyone, including himself. He started for the Whiffle Poofs, the YMCA’s intramural basketball team, ran track—although according to Ed O’Malley, “he was very slow of foot”—and played outfield on the North Central baseball squad. But deep down, he “worshipped football more than anything else in the world.” Moon starred on the high school team, and Dutch deep down still worshipped him, too. Joining his brother on the playing field became a singular goal, but following tryouts in his freshman year, Dutch was cut on the last day of practice. Too lightweight, at 108 pounds, to do much damage, too short, too weak—maybe next year, he was told. In 1925, thanks to a new division created for players of smaller stature, Dutch, now a heftier 120, won a key spot and was elected captain.
In time, swimming became equally important. He was good at it, some said blessed. He had broad shoulders—a swimmer’s shoulders—and long arms. One could tell from watching the way he knifed through the water that he swam effortlessly, not with the herky-jerky body motion that typified most teenagers. His stroke was smooth, efficient—not a lot of splash upon contact. He was a natural, like Johnny Weissmuller, who’d won the 100- and 400-meter freestyle gold medals that summer in the 1924 Olympics. American kids everywhere were influenced by Weissmuller’s coup to take swimming more seriously, and Dutch was no exception.