Ronnie and Nancy (6 page)

From their freshman year, both Ronald and Margaret were in the Dramatic Club, which was run by the school’s English teacher, B. J. Frazer, who was quick to recognize Reagan’s talent. Under Frazer’s direction they co-starred in productions of contemporary Broadway plays. In his senior year, Ronald was elected president of the club. He was also president of the student body (Margaret was president of the senior class), art director of the yearbook, and—what he considered the greatest accomplishment of his high school career—tackle on the varsity football team. In addition he found time to serve as vice president in charge of entertainment for the YMCA’s Hi-Y Club, which was dedicated to “Clean Speech, Clean Sports, Clean Living, and Clean Scholarship.” His job was to invite local businessmen to give inspirational talks to the group. Only his grades suffered: he graduated in June 1928 with a B average.63

That month the Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover to succeed Calvin Coolidge, who had presided over the greatest economic boom the country had ever known, and the Democrats nominated New York governor Alfred E. Smith, the first Catholic to run for the presidency. Smith, who had been born on the Lower East Side, spoke with a heavy New York accent, played up his Irish background, and opposed Prohibition. The Re-Early Ronnie: 1911–1932

2 9

publicans portrayed him as a lush and spread rumors that the Pope was going to move to Washington if Smith won. Jack hung Smith banners on his car, and was deeply disappointed when his candidate lost by a landslide in November.64

One wonders what Nelle, who apparently was also a Democrat, thought about the wet Al Smith. According to Garry Wills in
Reagan’s America,
one of the men in her church used to kid her by saying, “I could really take a liking to you if you weren’t such a Democrat.”65 Jack’s sons shared his enthusiasm for the party of the people. Neil became part of the blue-collar working class when he took a job at the Medusa Cement Company after graduating from high school in 1926. Ronald’s summer jobs, on the other hand—first as a caddie at Plum Hollow Country Club, then as a lifeguard at Lowell Park—brought him into direct contact with the opposition: wealthy Republicans.

He started caddieing in junior high school and continued on and off all through high school. One of the men he caddied for regularly was Charles Walgreen, America’s first drugstore tycoon. Walgreen, who had started with one store on Chicago’s South Side in 1901 and built a national chain of 110 stores by 1927, had grown up in Dixon and often returned to his hometown. In the late 1920s he bought a six-hundred-acre estate overlooking the Rock River. In her memoir, his wife, Myrtle Walgreen, remembered that the young Reagan “came to one of the picnics which we gave for the caddies each year and I brought him his plate of food while he lay in the hammock. That was his idea of being king.”66

In 1926, when he was fifteen, Ronald spent the summer as a construction worker, which he liked because it helped him build up his skinny body.

“I was hired at 35 cents an hour—10 hours a day, six days a week,” he wrote in a 1984 article for UPI. “First tools handed me were pick and shovel. . . .

Before the summer was over I’d graduated to laying hardwood floor, shingling roof and painting the exterior.”67 The following summer, between his junior and senior years, he was hired as a lifeguard, a job he loved—perhaps because it allowed him to be narcissistic and altruistic at the same time.

From Memorial Day to Labor Day, he worked seven days a week, from ten in the morning till ten at night. Three miles north of town, Lowell Park was a 320-acre heavily forested preserve with a beach on the Rock River and a posh hotel called the Lodge, where well-to-do Midwestern families, mostly from Chicago, spent their summers. Here he found another mentor in Sid Altschuler, a Kansas City businessman married to a Dixon girl, whose 3 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House daughters he taught how to swim. Ronald even became a local celebrity, making the front page of a newspaper for the first time on August 3, 1928, when the
Dixon Telegraph
reported that he had rescued a drowning man68—one of seventy-seven lives he would save during his six summers at the park.69

In September 1928, Ronald and Margaret both enrolled in Eureka College, a small Disciples of Christ institution located a hundred miles south of Dixon. Only 8 percent of their graduating class went on to college, and Ronald was not actually sure he could afford it—tuition, room, and board at Eureka came to more than $300 a year. “While Margaret registered,” he later wrote, “I presented myself to Eureka’s new president, Bert Wilson, and Ralph McKinzie, the football coach, and tried to impress them with my credentials as a football player and as someone who could win some trophies for Eureka’s swim team.” Ronald was given a scholarship to cover half his tuition and a job washing dishes to cover his board at the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity house.70

A teachers college that had evolved into a liberal arts institution, Eureka had a faculty of twenty and fewer than two hundred students in 1928, but its handful of ivy-covered red-brick buildings set on a spacious campus of rolling lawns crisscrossed by gravel paths and shaded by elms looked like Princeton to the small-town shoe salesman’s son. “I fell head over heels in love with Eureka,” he later wrote,71 and he was immediately caught up in campus life.

In his freshman year he took an active part in a student strike that led to the resignation of Bert Wilson, who had infuriated students and faculty with his plan for severe cutbacks in the academic curriculum. During the strike Ronald first became aware of his effectiveness as a public speaker, when a fiery speech he gave in the campus chapel, denouncing the “morally evil” president, brought the student body to its feet.72 “I discovered that night that an audience has a feel to it and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together,” he said.73 One of the strike’s organizers, Howard Short, would later explain, “We put Reagan on because he was the biggest mouth of the freshman class; he was a cocky s.o.b., a loud talker.

Dutch was the guy you wanted to put up there.”74

In October 1929 the stock market crashed, but on the surface the Depression did not seem to have much effect on Ronald’s college life.

That September, Neil had entered Eureka on a scholarship arranged by
Early Ronnie: 1911–1932

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his brother. Ronald’s days and nights were a whirl of extracurricular activities, occasionally interrupted by a bout of cramming. He made the varsity football and track teams, captained the swimming team, and was the lead cheerleader for the basketball team. He was a sports reporter on the school newspaper for a year, features editor of the yearbook for two years, and president of the Eureka Booster Club, which was responsible for the college’s public relations, for three years. As a senior, after two years in the student senate, he was elected student body president. Along the way he co-starred with Margaret Cleaver in several plays, including Edna St. Vincent Millay’s avant-garde verse drama
Aria da Capo
, which won a prize for the Eureka Dramatic Society in the Eva Le Gallienne tournament at Northwestern University’s School of Speech. Ronald played Thyrsis, a shepherd boy, in the one-acter, which was set in ancient Greece and had a strong pacifist theme; he was cited as one of the six best actors in the competition. Almost as an afterthought, it appears, he majored in social science and economics, and maintained an average that hovered between B and C. “He would take a book the night before the test,” Neil recalled, “and in about a quick hour he would thumb through it and photograph those pages and write a good test.”75

Things were not so carefree at home in Dixon. The
Dixon Telegraph
noted on April 3, 1928, that Jack Reagan had “severed his connection with the partnership operating The Fashion Boot Shop.”76 Jack took a temporary job at Dixon State Hospital, a mental institution, which he found “humiliating,” before going to work at another shoe store in town in August 1929.77 The Reagans had already given up their house on the North Side, and had moved from one small apartment to another. They were soon reduced to subletting all but one room and cooking on a hotplate. Jack spent most of 1930 and 1931 based two hundred miles away in Springfield, working as a traveling shoe salesman for the Red Wing Company, while Nelle remained in Dixon, working as a salesclerk and seamstress at the Marilyn Dress Shop. There was talk of a girlfriend in Springfield—and of divorce—but by late 1931 Jack and Nelle were reunited in an apartment on Monroe Avenue on Dixon’s South Side. On Christmas Eve 1931, Ronald and Neil were home for the holidays when Jack received a special delivery letter firing him. Like millions of other Americans, Jack was unemployed throughout 1932.78 Ronald, then in his last semester at Eureka and working part-time as the school’s swimming instructor, would later recall sending his mother $50 to buy food. He was able to complete his final 3 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House year at Eureka with a $115 loan from the Disciples of Christ–affiliated Henry Strong Educational Foundation,79 but could not afford to buy his $30 class ring.80

On June 30, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was nominated for president at the Democratic convention in Chicago, and Jack went to work as a volunteer at the Dixon Democratic Party headquarters for the patrician who promised a New Deal. Ronald was back on the lifeguard stand at Lowell Park, where he would get into arguments over politics with his Republican boss. He was a twenty-one-year-old college graduate with no clear idea of what he was going to do with the rest of his life, except to spend it with Margaret Cleaver. “Soon after our graduation, I’d given her an engagement ring,” he later wrote, “and we’d agreed to marry as soon as we could afford it.”81

C H A P T E R T W O

EARLY NANCY

1921–1932

After Mother and my father were separated, Mother had to go back to work.

She didn’t take any alimony and she didn’t think that hauling me around from town to town and theater to theater was the best thing in the world. So I lived with my aunt and uncle and cousin in Bethesda, and it was very nice. I had a wonderful time. I’ve read that I was abandoned. I wasn’t abandoned. I adored my mother. She could have, I suppose, sent me to I don’t know where, but letting me live with my aunt and uncle and cousin—this is family. I was with my family.

Nancy Reagan to author,

June 4, 2000

When I had lunch with Peggy [Noonan, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan], she said, “Well, you obviously had a couple of unhappy years.” I said, “Well, no, I didn’t.” I didn’t have a miserable, unhappy childhood. I was living with my aunt and uncle and cousin. And Mother would come to Bethesda.

Oh, that was a big thing when Mother came to Bethesda.

Nancy Reagan to author,

April 30, 2001

AMONG THOSE ATTENDING THE OPENING OF THE WEEK-LONG DEMOCRATIC

convention that nominated Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Chicago at the beginning of that summer of 1932 was a chubby, well-dressed eleven-year-old girl named Nancy Robbins. She and her mother, Mrs. Loyal Davis, the wife of Chicago’s first full-time neurosurgeon, were guests of Edward Joseph Kelly, the powerful Democratic machine politician who would become mayor the following year and rule the nation’s then second-largest city with an iron hand through the Depression and World War II. While the twenty-one-year-old Ronald Reagan was back in Dixon deciding what 3 3

3 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House to do with his life after graduating from Eureka College (and his unemployed father was rooting for Roosevelt from afar), his future First Lady was already well situated at the center of things. A photograph of Nancy and her mother at the convention ran in one of the Chicago papers.1

Nancy’s mother, the former Edith Luckett, had been a theater actress of modest success until she married Loyal Davis, at the socially prestigious Fourth Presbyterian Church on Chicago’s fashionable North Michigan Avenue, in May 1929—about the same time that Jack Reagan grudgingly took a job at the state mental institution in Dixon. Edith had separated from her first husband, a well-bred but unenterprising New Englander named Kenneth Robbins, barely a year after their daughter’s birth in 1921

in New York, and Nancy had spent her early years in Bethesda, Maryland, living at the home of her mother’s sister. Dr. Davis would not officially adopt his stepdaughter and give her his name until she was almost seventeen, in 1938, nine years after he married her mother.

For the rest of her life Nancy would refer to Loyal Davis as “my father,” and for a long time she even went so far as to deny the existence of Kenneth Robbins and to falsify her birthplace. When she was First Lady of California, her official biography began, “Nancy Davis Reagan was born in Chicago, the only daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis.” When confronted with her
Who’s Who
entry, stating that she had been adopted by Loyal Davis, she said, “I don’t care what the book says. He is my father. In my mind, he is my father. I have no father except Loyal Davis.”2

As she explained in
Nancy,
her 1980 autobiography, “Since Kenneth Robbins was such a small part of my life, it is impossible for me to think of him as my father.”3

Nancy Davis Reagan was born Anne Frances Robbins on July 6, 1921, at Sloane Hospital in Flushing, a middle-class section of the New York City borough of Queens, where Edith and Kenneth Robbins were living at the time. “I was due on the fourth of July,” she later wrote, giving her birth a patriotic twist, just as her husband had given his, “but my mother, as she tells it, was a baseball fan who was determined to see a doubleheader on that day. Knowing her, I believe it. When she arrived at the hospital two days later, she was told there was no room and she would have to go elsewhere. My mother is a strong-willed woman. She lay down in the middle of the reception room floor and said, ‘Well, I guess I’ll have my baby right here.’ Everyone bustled around and miraculously discovered
Early Nancy: 1921–1932