by Bob Spitz
And he was strong. He added muscle to those broad shoulders, working out afternoons at the big YMCA pool. Crawl, backstroke, butterfly, Dutch switched among strokes as fluidly as some switched radio stations. And when the spirit moved him, he would spring high off the diving board, grab on to the overhead bar, and swing like a trapeze artist over the pool to execute a neat backflip into the water.
His performance in school was less impressive. Ed O’Malley remembered Dutch as being “a better than ordinary student,” but that was a faithful buddy’s assessment. His Dixon High School teacher Freya Lazier described him as “just an average student.” Dutch did just enough work to get by. It wasn’t that he wasn’t bright. He had an unusual talent: total recall for dates and facts; he could read over a page of text and recite it verbatim. But he was preoccupied by extracurricular activities and, most of all, by a young woman who had hijacked his attention.
Dutch had first noticed Margaret Cleaver at the First Christian Church, when her father, Ben, settled in as the congregation’s new pastor. The family had arrived in Dixon after a stint in Canton, their ninth ministry in an eighteen-year circuit that took them through small communities dotting the Missouri and Illinois countryside. Margaret was easy to spot. “She was very pretty,” recalls Esther Haack, a classmate at North Side High. “We all tried making ourselves up like her.” She was an attractive, fresh-faced brunette with lively button-brown eyes and an easy smile framed by a mop of wavy hair. Margaret’s most distinguishing trait, however, was an easygoing disposition. She was polite, friendly, and smart, maybe the smartest girl in Dutch’s class. Her name first started appearing in the newspaper early in 1924, entertaining as a soloist at church meetings and acting in plays, often opposite Nelle Reagan in the cast. Dutch eventually got into the act, appearing in the church’s 1924 Christmas program with his mother and Margaret in an inspirational piece called “The King’s Birthday.”
Dutch was smitten with Margaret. He had no trouble finding an excuse to be around her—they were together at school, at church, at the Y, onstage—but she was quite popular with everyone in their circle, including several young men. Dick McNichol, the captain of the football team, already had his eye on her, but Dutch had an ace up his sleeve: McNichol was a “mere Methodist,” according to Dutch, whereas he was a Disciple, a bona fide member of Margaret’s father’s congregation.
Dutch made his affections known, giving her a pet name—Mugs—and escorting her home from school whenever possible. “They’d walk along the street, holding hands,” a classmate recalls, Mugs’s books tucked snugly under Dutch’s free arm. Most days they’d stop off at Fulfs’ Confectionery, the local hangout on North Galena Avenue, a Dixon institution, where soda jerks served up malteds, phosphates, and Cokes in tall frosted glasses. Dutch especially liked Fulfs’ because of its dual character—it was a place where he could socialize with Mugs, but it also had an annex where they sold sporting goods. He’d often leave Mugs talking to her best friend, Dorothy Bovey, and steal away for a few minutes to run his hands over a dimpled football or to swing one of the shiny baseball bats showcased in a rack. Fulfs’ gave Dutch an opportunity to ply the Dixon social scene.
The summers presented fewer occasions. For several years, Nelle had taken her boys to the Chautauquas in Assembly Park on the north side of town. The Chautauquas were the most popular events in Dixon. Large crowds of people either rented or pitched tents, and many stayed on the grounds for weeks on end. There was a big tabernacle with a dais that seated as many as five hundred people, and for several weeks, usually in August, it featured a revolving lineup of figures: educational and inspirational speakers, marching bands, opera soloists, monologists, storytellers, comedians, preachers, politicians, faith healers, and suffragettes.
Religion was an underlying current of the Chautauqua experience. Dutch heard the festival’s flamboyant star, William Jennings Bryan, deliver his famous “The Prince of Peace” oratory, arguing that Christian theology was the basis for morality, and that morality was the foundation for peace and equality. Another yearly stalwart, Russell Conwell, stirred up the crowd with a fiery sermon exhorting the town’s young men to get rich, “for money is power and power ought to be in the hands of good people.” And a succession of temperance advocates rose to make their case.
In the summer of 1925, when he was fourteen, Dutch took his first real job, with a local construction contractor. It was an eye-opening experience, involving everything that went into building a house: digging the foundation, framing the structure, pouring concrete, laying flooring, putting in plumbing, shingling the roof, painting, the works. Dutch worked strenuous, ten-hour days for a miserable thirty-five cents an hour. At the end of the season, however, he had two hundred dollars to show for his effort—a nice nest egg for his first bank account.
Sometime between his thirteenth and fourteenth years, Dutch decided he wanted to go to college. It was a pipe dream for a boy of his background. Most Dixon students who graduated from high school went straight to work. Looking back years later, Dutch would observe that “in the 1920s, fewer than seven percent of high school graduates in America went to college,” and, if anything, that’s an exaggeration. The odds were stacked against him. But he had watched how hard his father struggled to make ends meet as a shopkeeper and desired a different fate. What’s more, Dutch’s personal hero, Garland Waggoner, the former captain of North Side High’s football team, was a freshman at a school called Eureka, not too far from Dixon. College, he thought, was the key—but an expensive key. Jack was all for it, as long as Dutch realized he couldn’t count on his father for financial help.
He’d never make it earning thirty-five cents an hour. In his spare time, Dutch caddied at the local country club, and according to boyhood friend Bill Thompson, “Dutch and his brother were roustabouts” for the Ringling Bros. circus, “carrying water to the elephants and following the parade path” when its train cars pulled into the vacant lot on West Seventh Street in Dementtown each year. Every little bit helped; still, at this rate he’d be woefully short.
In 1926 Dutch learned about a job opening on the Rock River, a lifeguard, paying eighteen dollars a week plus all the hamburgers and root beer he could pack away, a respectable salary that would give him enough to contribute to the family and still save toward his college fund.
He might have had an easy time landing the job had it been at the YMCA pool, in a controlled environment. But the post was at Lowell Park—a thicket of hilly woodland about three miles from downtown Dixon, with hiking paths and a generous picnic area adjacent to a crescent of man-made sandy beach at a bend of the river. The land had been purchased in 1860 by Charles Russell Lowell, a businessman who was killed during the Civil War, and was given to the city by his daughter, Carlotta, in 1906. A group of town fathers helped clean it up and build a watering stall for horses and a bathhouse. Townspeople flocked to it. It was peaceful there and bucolic, with a beautiful view, a fine place to escape from the hustle of town. The crowds would start drifting into the park at ten in the morning, picnic along the water, and wouldn’t disperse until well after dark.
“Lowell Park was a great place to go,” says historian Greg Langan, “but not the safest of swimming holes.” The currents of the Rock River were a lot swifter than most people realized. Supply boats routinely capsized. The water was murky and polluted with industrial waste from Rockford and other places upstream. All of which is why a lifeguard was necessary.
Hiring one was the responsibility of the park’s concessionaires, Ed and Ruth Graybill, a high-minded couple who oversaw the picnic and beach area. Dutch felt he had an inside track. The Graybills had lived a few blocks north of his old Hennepin Avenue house, and he used to wave to them on his way to and from the library. He knew Ruth Graybill from church. And he’d even been invited into their place a few times to listen to a baseball game on the radio.
Ed Graybill wasn’t convinced. When Dutch presented himse
lf as a candidate, Ed saw a fifteen-year-old boy with a very slight physique and wondered how someone like that could save a person twice his size and weight. “You’re pretty young, my lad,” he said. “I’ll have to talk to your father.”
Jack wasn’t at all hesitant. “Give the boy a chance,” he told Ed. Remarkably, Dutch got the job.
It might have been more than Dutch bargained for at the outset. His responsibilities began at eight each morning, when he reported for duty at the Graybills’ home, where he picked up their old Dodge truck and began a round of deliveries to prepare for the day. The first stop he made was at Beier’s Bakery on Hennepin Avenue for dozens of just-baked buns, then farther along the block to Hartzell & Hartzell, the butchers, for a mountain of hamburger, and finally over to the icehouse, where he helped load a three-hundred-pound block, which he’d later break into three sections for the soda-pop coolers. Once he got all that squared away, he’d change into his suit, a skintight one-piece tank with “lifeguard” stenciled across the front, and swim the area from rope line to rope line to get a sense of that day’s current. By the time the park officially opened, Dutch would already be tired.
That boy had stamina, though. He was on duty at the beach for twelve hours each day, seven days a week, from June through August, perched atop a wooden lifeguard chair that looked out over the water. “Dutch was no-nonsense,” remembers a frequent bather at the park. “He was as handsome as they come in his bathing trunks, and he smiled at everyone. But you couldn’t chat him up or distract him while he was on duty.” He had to keep his eyes peeled on a wide stretch of the landscape, where as many as several hundred people were in motion at all times—swimming, diving, splashing, engaged in all sorts of horseplay, in his words: “a mob of water-seeking humans intent on giving the beach guard something to worry about.” There were plenty of distractions to test his mettle: a wooden raft with a low diving board and slide, an anchored “tipping disk” that swiveled much like a mechanical bull and challenged swimmers to hang on for dear life, a chain of slippery moss-ridden barrels that bobbed as floating boundaries for swimmers, and girls. Dutch was a magnet for gushing teenage beauties who mooned over his studly appeal.
Dutch had grown substantially in just a few short months. “He was the perfect specimen of an athlete,” recalled Bill Thompson, a neighborhood friend who often described himself as Dutch’s little brother. He was “tall, willowy, muscular, brown, good-looking. The girls were always flocking around him.” And Dutch knew it.
The girls were a perk—and often a peril. More times than he could count, Dutch would see a swimmer flailing in what he knew was dangerous water and bolt off into the river . . . only to “rescue” a young woman too eager to snuggle in his grip. Many a Lowell Park habitué saw the drama for what it was. “I had a friend who nearly drowned herself trying to get him to save her,” said one. Dutch was never amused, not under those conditions. There was too much at stake, and the responsibility weighed on him. “At the first hint of trouble, Dutch would be in the water, moving like a torpedo,” said Thompson. Many years later, he could close his eyes and envision how Dutch would “look over his glasses to see who was out there in the water, and if somebody went down . . . he’d just throw off the glasses and take off.” He’d hit the water running, and with a few powerful strokes he’d be upon the hapless struggler, just the two of them thrashing about in the current until he could bring his quarry under control. On those occasions when he had to perform such a rescue, the situation was risky and demanded courage. As Dutch himself recalled to a reporter: “The drowning person invariably is panic stricken,” a condition that made everything doubly dangerous.
There were plenty of genuine rescues in the six years Dutch patrolled the beach. Fred Moore, who was ten at the time, recalled how he was about fifty feet from shore when the current grabbed him and he started gulping for air. “I sank under the water and thought: ‘So this is what it’s like to die,’” he said. “But then I felt an arm wrap around me, and the next thing I knew my head was out of the water. Within seconds Dutch had me back on shore . . . and was squeezing the water out of me.”
Another beachcomber saw Dutch rescue a four-year-old girl who had wandered too far from shore. “One second he was on a raft, and the next he was pulling the girl out of the water.” Afterward, everyone on the beach applauded.
One weekend, a local man named Bert Whitcombe, who was attempting to mount the high diving board, slipped off the ladder and sustained a serious head injury as he tumbled to the platform. “He was unconscious when he struck the water and soon sank beneath the surface,” according to a newspaper account. “Beach guard Dutch Reagan . . . hurried to his rescue and dragged the unconscious body to the shore,” after which CPR was performed and lucky Mr. Whitcombe was whisked off to a local doctor’s office.
Occasionally, things took a scarier turn—like the time Dutch thought he wasn’t going to make it. One night, under a gibbous moon, a blind man visiting the park had waded into the water by himself. “He started for a float guided by a friend’s calls, but the river current pulled him away,” Dutch recounted. It was a mismatch from the get-go. “He was a big fellow—outweighed me by sixty pounds or so—and he was thrashing badly.” By the time Dutch reached him the guy was in full crisis mode, and in the struggle that ensued it seemed they might both go under. That was always a lifeguard’s worst nightmare. A man struggling for air took on enormous strength in the throes of drowning. Sometimes it meant Dutch taking a drastic measure, like a stranglehold from behind, even on occasion “a right cross to the jaw.” In this particular instance, he was resourceful, needing only to rely on tried-and-true water-safety technique. Ultimately, he defused the situation to a point where the two men could eventually float into shore.
Forty years later, during an event in San Francisco, James Benton Parsons, the country’s first African American federal judge, was swapping stories with California’s newly elected governor, Ronald Reagan, about their experiences as Boy Scouts in Illinois. Benton recalled an outing with his troop to the McCormick Farm, a camp on the Rock River, where he decided to try out for his badge in swimming. “I had to be pulled out,” he admitted to the governor. “What was your name?” the governor demanded. “Were you Jimmy?” McCormick nodded. The governor roared with laughter. “I was the one who pulled you out.”
Legend has it he made seventy-seven such rescues, although the number could certainly be held up to scrutiny. His exploits repeatedly garnered headlines in the Dixon Evening Telegraph. “Dutch Reagan Has Made Fine Mark As Guard—Dixon Youth Has Made 71 Rescues at Lowell Park Beach” and “James Raider Pulled from the Jaws of Death.” But lifeguarding wasn’t just a succession of daring rescues. “When the beach was not busy, he taught kids to swim,” recalled Ruth Graybill. “And if he was in a jovial mood, he’d start walking like a chimp and give us a little entertainment.” Dutch would perform graceful swan dives off the springboard, arcing high out over the river, arms spread like an eagle in mid-flight, or sing standing up in the bow of a canoe—both exercises part feat, part performance. His swimming stroke was beautiful, elegant—built for speed. In the summer of 1928, Dutch set a record in the annual Labor Day race across the river and back with a time of two minutes eleven seconds, finishing just strokes ahead of his cousin Donald Hunt.
Over time, Dutch developed quite a reputation in Dixon. “He was everyone’s hero,” a schoolmate recalled. “All the young teachers would go see him whenever he was in a play,” said Esther Barton. You could detect a swoon in the audience when Dutch made an entrance onstage.” At school, as Esther Haack noted, “every girl talked about how good-looking he was and felt special around him.” Dutch had come to carry himself with a sense of purpose and distinction that belied his seventeen years. It seemed to come naturally—an innate inclination to do good, not unlike his mother’s. But was it something else? Was some of the public facade Dutch’s way of protecting himself from the painful real
ities of his family? A saintly mother too wrapped up in her good works, an alcoholic father who withheld the emotional guidance a son needs to thrive, a sharp-tongued brother whose constant put-downs knocked him off balance. Dutch certainly didn’t learn intimacy within his family. Whatever insecurities he might have fostered, he kept them walled off from his parents, brother, outsiders—maybe even himself. He didn’t share his thoughts and feelings with anyone. He was popular and admired but had no close friends.
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If there was an exception it was Margaret Cleaver. There was no doubt as to how he felt about her. “Me—I was in love!” he wrote some years later about his first and mightiest teenage crush. Margaret—Mugs—was more reticent. “Love” might not have been her response, had she been asked. She was a serious girl, the daughter of a sober-minded minister, not one to swish-and-sashay around the lifeguard’s chair at Lowell Park. She rarely if ever went to the park when Dutch was on duty; it just wasn’t her scene.
There were other reasons to keep her emotional distance. Mugs was appalled by Jack Reagan—more than appalled, offended. Her father, Ben Cleaver, was violently opposed to the drinking of alcohol. He had no tolerance for anyone who indulged, and he made his feelings known freely from the pulpit and in private. If you were his daughter, this issue was especially acute. Drinking wasn’t only out of the question, it was repugnant in others, period.