Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  In Dixon, where Dutch had gone to listen to the inauguration, effects of the edict were already being felt. You could read the optimism on people’s faces. The downtown business district, long deserted, began churning again with life. One of the city’s favorite sons, Charles Walgreen, the drugstore magnate, personally guaranteed all the deposits and mortgages for the Dixon National Bank. Jack Reagan, especially, benefited from the transition of power. Thanks to a patronage wave that swept the few local Democrats into government jobs, Jack landed a position that would bring him steady work. In May 1933, Harry Hopkins, FDR’s federal relief administrator, created the Federal Emergency Relief Act to provide direct relief, job training, and work for the unemployed. Jack became supervisor of the Dixon office, a storefront at the corner of Hennepin Avenue and River Street. It was an instant magnet for hordes of Lee County men and women blindsided by the Depression, those whose lives had been overshadowed by poverty and hopelessness.

  “That place was always crowded with long lines of people,” says Esther Haack, Dutch’s former classmate who spent long days bent over census logs as a clerk at the FERA headquarters. “People would come in with requisitions for food and wait to see Jack, who had a private office in the back.” They never knew which Jack would emerge. “He could be feisty—or very nice,” says Haack. It was no secret that he drank his lunch at the Stables, a side street bar behind City Hall, and co-workers often had to cover for him. “There were times he wasn’t quite steady. He could get grumpy from drink or be very funny, when he’d do a little soft-shoe, tell jokes, chat you up.” When things got out of hand, which they occasionally did, one of the staff would mobilize Neil Reagan, who had a desk out front with the other social workers.

  When Eureka’s semester ended that May, Moon assumed he’d rejoin the production line at the cement company, where he’d still worked during summer breaks. But the plant closed its doors a few months earlier. Jack shoehorned his son into a FERA job, which enabled him to earn his keep while looking after his father, although Moon shared some of Jack’s traits.

  Dutch was now twenty-two, earning a measure of respect and security in far-off Des Moines at WHO. In short order he had made a name for himself in late April announcing the Drake University Relays, the country’s foremost track-and-field event, in front of eighteen thousand spectators at the college’s horseshoe stadium. Dutch knew next to nothing about track, but crammed for the broadcast, studying past Relays and former record holders, as well as the histories of this year’s participants. Shortly afterward, he was offered a job as WHO’s chief sportscaster, a position that doubled his old salary.

  He immediately signed a lease for a second-floor suite of rooms in a once-grand apartment building overlooking the Mississippi, then called Mugs to give her the news. If he thought it would seal the deal for an impending marriage, he was greatly mistaken. Their separation had given her some perspective on their relationship. All this talk about radio and big-city life and . . . and Hollywood, which he’d mentioned boldly as a possible destination in his excitement. He “was afraid to say [he] wanted to be a movie actor” outright, but it was clear to Mugs, who could read between the lines. “His ambitions sort of crystallized” was how she interpreted it—“after radio, Hollywood.” It unnerved her, made her doubt his objectivity. “He had an inability to distinguish between fact and fancy,” she told Edmund Morris in a 1988 interview. Flirting with the movie business especially put her off. “I didn’t want to bring up my children in Hollywood.”

  If Mugs’s lack of enthusiasm didn’t worry him, her own news did. She was leaving the country in June, sailing to Europe with her sister, Helen. Leaving—for how long? She was vague about the trip’s duration, vaguer still where it left them. In any case, it would give them some time to find themselves. He was shocked. They’d been a couple going on seven years, Mugs and Dutch, indivisible. They were engaged. He’d never envisioned his life without Margaret Cleaver. The separation cast a pall over his news.

  To stanch his disappointment, he threw himself into his job. There was plenty for him to do at WHO. Beyond the Drake Relays and Big Ten college sports, he announced lead-ins to programs that aired on the station, syndicated shows such as the hugely popular National Barn Dance on Saturday evenings and nightly broadcasts of Amos ’n’ Andy, which originated as a fifteen-minute serial, as well as Fibber McGee and Molly, Fred Allen’s Linit Bath Club Revue, Lum and Abner, the Ameche brothers (Don and Jim), and The Great Gildersleeve, all fed by NBC to affiliates like WHO. Occasionally he subbed for newscasters. For a time, he also narrated Iowa News Flashes, a short reel of local interest stories “unabashedly swiped from The Register and Tribune” and shown in movie houses across the state. Although well liked by the producer, he was fired from that task for being unable—or unwilling—to follow the script.

  Scripts were anathema to an overimaginative sportscaster. Dutch relied on his spontaneity when broadcasting games, especially when there was a live-action glitch, such as occurred when he was covering the Drake Relays. “All day long, I’d been telling the audience that the quarter mile was going to be the greatest event.” But between heats, the president of Drake University showed up to say a few promotional words and wound up talking ad nauseam, while Dutch sat watching the quarter-mile race go by. “I couldn’t tell the audience it was all over,” he recalled, “so [as soon as the school official left] I said, ‘We’re just in time for the event I’ve been telling you about!” He knew it lasted a mere forty-eight seconds, so he took out his watch and re-created the entire event from memory, with all the tension and excitement, bringing in the top three athletes in proper sequence. As for the absence of crowd noise, “I explained that it was because the audience was stunned by the sheer drama.”

  Dutch was mastering his trade, and his reputation was growing. He was on the air in some capacity several hours each day, with a daytime audience that blanketed the entire Midwest and nighttime listeners “from coast to coast, border to border, and then some,” as their station ID boasted. “This is Dutch Reagan” was a familiar refrain, a velvety voice that fairly purred. Purred—but still needed fine-tuning. Peter MacArthur bristled at Dutch’s Midwestern dialect that mispronounced words such as “rut beer” and “ruf” for roof. “I stumbled over my words,” Dutch acknowledged, “and had a delivery as wooden as prairie oak.” Myrtle Williams, who had just become the station’s new program director, recalled, “[Peter would] sit at home and listen to the radio, and I can still hear him bawling Dutch out when he’d mispronounce a word or say something wrong.”

  But Dutch was a comer and MacArthur knew it. In no time, he had him headlining the Teaberry Sports Review, a popular roundup of the day’s highlights that aired at 5:25 p.m. and again at 10:10 p.m. Reagan really blossomed that summer of 1933, when baseball season got under way. It fell to Dutch to broadcast the Chicago Cubs and White Sox games—quite a feat, given that he’d never set foot inside either of their stadiums, much less seen a professional game. In fact, he wouldn’t be a presence in either team’s press box. He re-created the games from data translated into Morse code and transmitted over the telegraph wire via Western Union’s Paragraph One service—a pitch-by-pitch account of the game that was available to anyone who paid a small fee. A WHO engineer would pass him the ticker-tape report “through a slit in the soundproof wall between studio and control room,” which read as a series of hieroglyphics—“S1C” for “strike one called” or “B2 LOOS” for “ball two, low and outside”—which Dutch would then spin into a breathless narrative. “Close to him was a turntable with a crowd applause record,” recalled Van Donohoo, a Drake student who worked at WHO, “the volume of which was manipulated by Dutch with a foot pedal.”

  Re-creations were the way most listeners got the game. Only a few stations in cities with major-league teams broadcast live from the ballpark. In fact, many owners of Eastern teams forbade any accounts of games, convinced that newspapers and radio threatened atten
dance. The Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants, for instance, had an agreement until 1939 locking baseball broadcasts out of New York. In those cities, embargoes were circumvented by “bootleggers” who observed games from rooftops with binoculars and phoned in results, or bleacher bums who wrote game summaries on slips of paper and dropped them through the stands to runners. Chicago led the way to modernization, where both Wrigleys, William and Philip, were the most passionate pro-radio forces in the sport. The chewing-gum magnates recognized the value of two hours of free advertising for their product and fought against repeated attempts to ban broadcasts.

  Even so, re-creations ruled the airwaves. Pat Flanagan, a former ad exec at WOC who had moved to WBBM in Chicago, is generally credited with inventing the form, although the Washington Senators authorized play-by-play from wire reports as early as 1925. But practitioners like Gordon McLendon refined it as an art. His dramatic accounts from a studio in Dallas were said to be “far better than the real thing created from the ballpark.” Imagination was the key. If you could create an entertaining narrative from bits of data and convey it to the listeners in an exciting way, you could turn a slow hopper to the shortstop into a dramatic backhanded grab in the dirt. It left room for a tremendous amount of interpretation—stretching the truth—to keep an audience on the edge of its seat. An announcer could not invent a base hit, but that hit could be turned into a screaming line drive through the infield; a routine two-hop grounder at third could become a diving catch with a rifle shot to first base. It was entirely up to the man behind the mic.

  Dutch got the hang of it in no time, with some early coaching from Pat Flanagan. It brought together his love of sports with his acting bona fides. He’d studied the live-action Chicago sportscasters, like Hal Totten on WMAQ and WGN’s Bob Elson and Quin Ryan, who delivered patter such as “This Tiger fielder, Fothergill, has a neck as wide as a chimney . . . [and] runs as though he were pulling a sleigh,” or “Kamm flies out to left field—Hunnefield rolls to short and is thrown out at first—and two men die on the sacks.” Dutch imitated their jazzy lingo, mixing in a healthy dollop of Grantland Rice, whose verbal acrobatics in the Paramount newsreels had dazzled him since he was a kid.

  He re-created dozens of games that first summer, becoming “the voice of Chicago baseball” throughout the prairie states. It was a punishing apprenticeship; he was often on the air, live, six days a week. The Cubs drew a devoted, even rabid, audience of hard-core fans. They had won the National League pennant in 1932 and finished a respectable third in 1933, so Dutch had plenty of good baseball to work with.

  As much as he enjoyed the work, it exhausted him—all that talking, talking, talking. The re-creations demanded that he rattle on nonstop, often for two to three hours at a clip. “He had to ad-lib enormously when he did the play-by-play,” recalled Jack Shelley, a popular WHO reporter. The toll it took was significant, so much so that WBBM’s Pat Flanagan claimed to lose four to nine pounds during an average broadcast. Dutch didn’t exhibit that kind of physical wear-and-tear. But after signing off at the end of a workday, he’d have given it everything he had.

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  Because there was no such thing as night games in 1933, Dutch found plenty of time to relax. He had cultivated a circle of friends from among a class of journalism students at the local college, Drake. Besides Hubert “Pee Wee” Johnson, who served as Dutch’s field spotter at football games, there was Will Scott and his brother Walt, Glen Claussen, Leroy Austin, Ed Morley, and Walt Roddy, men who would appear in Ronald Reagan’s life off and on for decades. They would gather several times a week at the Moonlight Inn, a bar on Seventy-third Street and University Avenue in Windsor Heights, whose rundown charm was its dirt floors and spiked beer—a highly illegal low-alcohol concoction in which the bottle’s long neck was laced generously with grain alcohol then flipped upside down so the two could mix. According to Dutch, who wasn’t much of a drinker, “It’d almost blow your nose off.” The gang would cram into one of the booths in the back room to watch couples slow-dance to records, and after two or three doctored beers, all bets were off. “We sang midwestern fight songs around the piano,” Glen Claussen told author Garry Wills—barn burners like “On Wisconsin” and “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home.” They’d let it rip, singing “what we called harmony” until Cy Griffiths, who owned the place, grew apoplectic, ordering them to keep it down—or else.

  Occasionally, Myrtle Williams and Pete MacArthur would join them, and toward the end of summer Moon Reagan appeared.

  Dutch was still covering for his older brother, whose life had achieved a certain stasis in Dixon. Moon had applied to Northwestern, to study law, and was awaiting word on his application. In the meantime, Dutch had bought a car, a flashy metallic-brown 1934 Nash Lafayette convertible, from Margaret’s brother-in-law, and asked Moon if he would drive it from Dixon to Des Moines. “Plan to spend two or three days out here,” Dutch told him, “see the station and meet the guys.” The day after Moon arrived in Iowa he got roped into auditioning for an announcer’s spot on a new show, Deep Rock Oil’s Scoreboard of the Air, and won the job. It paid only five dollars a week, not nearly enough to get by on, but Peter MacArthur agreed to subsidize it with freelance assignments designed to give Moon a livable wage.

  The Reagan brothers were together again. There were crucial differences between the two men, some residual jealousy, and much competitive jostling, but once again, when Dutch was newly settled in a place and had earned a measure of respect, he found a way to bring his brother along.

  After a few days living together in Dutch’s flat in Des Moines, Moon was moved to WOC, in Davenport. Perhaps it was providential. Dutch was establishing his own routine, independent of his brother. It was that summer of 1933 that he developed his lifelong love of horseback riding. At Myrtle Williams’s invitation, he and two buddies—Murray Goodman and Don Reid—spent free afternoons riding the trails on the old military grounds at Fort Des Moines, taking the cavalry horses out for exercise. Dutch had been on a horse before—during his summers lifeguarding, a Danish immigrant who ran the lodge in Lowell Park owned a big gray nag and let him ride it on the beach—but it was nothing like this. These were horses, thoroughbreds, not “old plugs,” as Myrtle Williams warmly described them. They’d been groomed. They looked like what Tom Mix rode in all the serials that had dazzled Dutch as a boy. And when the cavalry horses weren’t available, he rode with Dave Palmer, who had two show horses, King Cole and Copper Flash, on a farm on Credit Island in the Mississippi River. “All he ever wanted to talk about was horses,” said Rich Kennelley, a noted Des Moines gambler who encountered Dutch in clubs. It was then, Dutch said, “I began to dream of owning a ranch.”

  When he wasn’t in the saddle that summer, Dutch took to the water in “a huge pool the size of a football field and end zones” at Camp Dodge, an old military installation that was open to the public. Often, he’d combine the two, following a ride with a refreshing dip—posing actually, beguiling the goggle-eyed bathers who knew him from the radio. In a few short months, Dutch had become a local celebrity in Des Moines. He was dashing and, word had it, gallant. People were already gossiping about his heroism early that fall, during an incident outside his apartment. Around eleven p.m. on a Sunday night in September 1933, he’d heard a ruckus on the street. Someone could be overheard saying, “Take anything I got, but let me go.” Dutch shot out of bed and squinted out his second-floor window. “Right there in the light of the streetlight was this gal with a suitcase by her side, standing there with her hands in the air,” he recalled, “and a man standing there with a gun.” The gal was a twenty-year-old nursing student named Melba Lohmann, who had just arrived at the bus station and was on her way to Broadlawns General Hospital, across the street from Dutch’s flat. Not willing to be shot for the three dollars in her purse, she handed it to the mugger, along with her suitcase.

  What to do? Thinking fast, Dutch slid open his nigh
t-table drawer and grabbed an unloaded handgun, a Walther PPK .380 pistol that he had bought as soon as he’d moved in. Pointing it at the action in the street below, he shouted in his best basso profundo: “Leave her alone or I’ll shoot you right between the shoulders!” Any self-respecting mugger would have checked the source of the threat to gauge its merits, but this one simply dropped his stash and ran. A few minutes later, wearing house slippers, pajamas, and a robe, Dutch emerged and chaperoned the shaken nursing student to the door of the hospital.

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  After his brush with violence, Dutch decided to move. He’d had his eye on an apartment, a fixer-upper “in a fine old home on the east side of Fourth Street . . . once a wealthy neighborhood of stately homes” but now considered “threadbare.” The ground-floor flat itself was a remnant of days gone by, featuring a large entrance hall carved out of what had originally served as a sitting room and butler’s pantry with “heavy dark varnished woodwork” throughout. It was a step up from his former digs and quite spacious for a bachelor, which might have prompted him to take in a roommate. In any case, he decided to share it with Art Mann, an assistant coach at Drake. He could have swung the rent by himself—he was doing well financially. He was still contributing a third of his paycheck to his parents and tithing, but there was enough left over to fund a jolly social life. With Margaret Cleaver out of the picture in Europe for a while, he had begun squiring young women around town, nothing intimate or romantic, not wanting to torpedo his longtime relationship. He still intended to marry Mugs, but in the meantime he began seeing Mildred Brown, whom he met riding one afternoon at Fort Des Moines. The attraction was easy to understand. She was “quite the most glamorous-looking girl he had ever known,” exceptionally tall and statuesque, a free spirit, and an equestrian to boot. She was from Monmouth, of all places, where her mother had worked in Colwell’s Department Store, across the aisle from where Jack sold shoes; if that wasn’t coincidence enough, her cousin happened to be his old Dixon playmate Gertrude Romine.