Ronnie and Nancy (12 page)

“Smile your voice!” The Palmers lived in a mansion next to the school; their

“world famous collection of spines” was housed on the third floor. The small garden between the buildings was called “A Little Bit O’ Heaven.”26 Reagan leaves B. J. Palmer out of his books, probably because he considered him too weird: he had a full beard and long flowing hair, which he washed once a year; he slept with his head pointed toward the North Pole; and his late Saint Bernard, Big Ben, which had been stuffed, was kept under the piano.27

Nonetheless, one can’t help but think that the Colonel’s assortment of peppy slogans, which were hung in the hallways of the school and radio station, had their effect on the future actor and politician.

Two years before Reagan went to WOC, Palmer had bought WHO, a larger station affiliated with NBC, in Des Moines, the state capital. He spent close to $250,000 upgrading its technical capabilities, making it one of only fifteen stations in the country with a 50,000-watt transmitter.

WHO’s 532-foot antenna tower was the tallest structure in Iowa, and its broadcasts could be heard throughout the Midwest.28 In April 1933, MacArthur sent Dutch to Des Moines to broadcast the Drake Relays, a major national amateur track event held annually at Drake College. (Like Eureka, Drake was a Disciples of Christ institution, but eight times larger.)29

The following month MacArthur was transferred to WHO, and he took 6 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Dutch with him as chief sports announcer. MacArthur would become the younger man’s Iowa mentor, following in the line of Reverend Cleaver and Sid Altschuler. According to Reagan, MacArthur had come to America from Scotland with the celebrated Harry Lauder’s vaudeville troupe; he eventually found his way to the Palmer School of Chiropractic, where he sought relief from his crippling arthritis, and was taken on as one of WOC’s first announcers. (His strong Highland burr became his on-air trademark.) By the time Reagan met him, he was walking with two canes, and would soon be on crutches.30

At WHO, Dutch’s salary was doubled to $200 a month; a year later it was raised to $300. He was now making enough money to marry Margaret Cleaver, but it was not to be. After graduating from Eureka, Margaret had taught high school for a year in a nearby town, then, to Dutch’s dismay, decided to spend a year in Paris, where her sister was living.31 In the summer of 1934 she wrote to say that she had fallen in love with an American diplomat named James Waddell Gordon Jr., and she enclosed Dutch’s fraternity pin and engagement ring in her letter.32 Reagan later reflected stoically, “As our lives traveled into diverging paths, we would find that it was true that before and after age twenty-one, people are often different. At any rate, our lovely and wholesome relationship did not survive growing up.”33 However hurt he may have been at the time, his feelings didn’t stop from him buying his first car, a brand-new metallic-beige Nash Lafayette two-seater convertible, from Margaret’s brother-in-law, who had a dealership in Illinois.34

Dutch asked Neil to drive the car to Des Moines. His brother was out of work again, so he introduced him to MacArthur, who guaranteed Neil $30 a week for announcing football scores and reading laxative commercials.35 Neil moved into Dutch’s apartment in a subdivided mansion in an old neighborhood near the radio station for a few months, before being sent to WOC in Davenport as a full-time sports announcer. In 1936, he was promoted to program director at WOC.

That same year he married Bess Hoffman, a Drake College graduate from Des Moines, two weeks after meeting her. Dutch urged him to wait, but Neil ignored his advice.36 Meanwhile Jack, still chain-smoking, had suffered the first of his heart attacks and could no longer work.

Dutch started sending his parents $100 a month. “I had the satisfac-tion,” Reagan later wrote, “of being able to send a monthly check that removed all his economic problems for the first time in his life . . . it never entered his mind that he could apply for public assistance.”37 Nelle
Iowa: 1933–1937

6 5

gave up her job at the dress shop in Dixon and frequently visited her son in Des Moines.

Dutch’s official title at WHO was sports director. He announced football games, swimming meets, track meets, and car races. By 1934 he had his own show,
The Teaberry Sports Review,
which aired twice a day. He also interviewed visiting sports stars, most notably the world heavyweight champion Max Baer (in Reagan’s words, “as beautiful a piece of physical machinery as ever stepped into the fight ring”).38 Occasionally he was asked to interview celebrities from other fields, including the movie star Leslie Howard (“I was so stage-struck that I forgot his name as I stepped up to the microphone”) and the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, whose flam-boyant style and dramatic voice so mesmerized him that he let her run away with the interview.39

He became best known for “covering” baseball games from Chicago’s Wrigley Field without ever stepping out of WHO’s studio in Des Moines.

“To millions of sports fans in at least seven or eight middlewestern states,”

the
Des Moines Dispatch
reported on August 3, 1934, “the voice of Dutch Reagan is a daily source of baseball dope. Every afternoon at 2:00 o’clock,

‘Dutch’ goes on the air with his rapid-fire, play-by-play visualization of the home games of Chicago’s major league baseball teams, the Cubs and the Sox.”40 Reagan called this technique “the magic of radio.” A telegraph operator sitting in the stadium press box tapped out the game’s plays in Morse code to an operator sitting in the radio studio opposite Dutch at his microphone. From these brief flashes he constructed the entire scene in the baseball park—the pitcher’s form, the batter’s gestures, the fans’ reactions, even changes in the weather—out of his imagination. (He had visited Wrigley Field only once, when it was empty, to get a sense of what it looked like.)

“You just couldn’t believe that you were not actually there,” remembered a WHO colleague of Reagan’s decades later. In his four years at the station, Dutch made some six hundred baseball games come alive this way.41

Reagan lived in Des Moines between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six—an attractive, enthusiastic, unattached young man, a local celebrity making good money in the middle of the Depression, a big fish in the small pond that was the capital of the Hawkeye State. Bland, drab Des Moines, with a population of 145,000 and the home offices of innumerable insurance companies, was the largest city Reagan had lived in, and he found it exciting. Civic organizations asked him to give speeches at their 6 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House banquets, the
Dispatch
made him its sports columnist, he dated prairie beauties with names like Jeanne Tesdell and Gretchen Schnelle. Cy’s Moonlight Inn, a former speakeasy on the edge of town, and Club Belvedere, the capital’s only real nightclub, with chorus girls and a casino, were his regular hangouts. But he never gambled and was always careful not to drink excessively. He was most comfortable, it seemed, with the friends he made at Drake University, some of whom belonged to his fraternity (Tau Kappa Epsilon), many of whom were fellow Disciples of Christ. On fall weekends he was field announcer at Drake’s football games, and for a year he shared an apartment with an assistant coach at Drake. When Nelle came to town, he and his Drake friends took her out with them. It was all very wholesome: Dutch and his buddies had formed a barbershop quartet and often sang at Cy’s on Saturday nights.42

Reagan took up riding in Des Moines and, according to his memoir, it was there that he first heard the saying that would become a lifetime motto: “Nothing is so good for the inside of a man as the outside of a horse.”43 In order to ride the horses at Fort Des Moines, he joined the cavalry reserve, but he had to cheat on his eye test to earn his commission as a second lieutenant in the 14th Cavalry Regiment.44 For a while he dated a blue-ribbon equestrienne he had met while emceeing a horse show; as the romance became more serious, however, their religious differences—

she was a devout Catholic—became a problem.45

He kept in excellent physical condition by swimming regularly in the pool at Camp Dodge, another major military installation just outside the city. In Des Moines, too, he apparently developed his predilection for the brown suits that would raise eyebrows when he was president. He liked tooling around the Iowa capital in his beige convertible in tawny tweed jackets, puffing on a briar pipe, evidently aware of his snappy, color-coordinated image.46

On September 4, 1936, his hero came to town. FDR had been nominated for a second term that summer; in his acceptance speech he declared, “This generation has a rendezvous with destiny,” a phrase Reagan would use twenty-eight years later in his famous speech for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. During the campaign Colonel Robert McCormick’s
Chicago Tribune
claimed Roosevelt was the candidate of Moscow, and as election day approached the paper constantly reminded its readers of how many days remained “to save your country.”

(McCormick ordered his switchboard operators to repeat this message to
Iowa: 1933–1937

6 7

all callers.) McCormick wasn’t alone: across the country, from Beacon Hill to Nob Hill, America’s rich were angrily telling one another that Roosevelt was “a traitor to his class.” FDR counterattacked on the radio. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he told his listeners. “They are united in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”47

Between broadcasts at WHO, Dutch entertained his colleagues, of both parties, with his affectionately mischievous imitations of the Fireside Chats. He also plugged his candidate whenever he could on his radio shows.48 And it was with a mixture of awe and excitement that he watched FDR drive by the WHO building in his open limousine, waving to the crowds, on his way to the Great Plains Drought Committee conference with Midwestern governors.49 Two months later, Roosevelt carried every state except Maine and Vermont as he trounced one of those governors, Alf Landon of Kansas.

As the fish grew bigger, the pond seemed smaller, and the Iowa winters seemed colder and longer. So in February 1936, Dutch Reagan, star broadcaster, came up with a way to get WHO to give him “an all-expense paid holiday under the California sun.” Every winter the Chicago Cubs trained on Catalina Island; if the radio station let him accompany them there, he would agree to count the trip as vacation time. It was more than the weather that impelled him toward Los Angeles. He may have put off his dream of movie stardom, but he hadn’t abandoned it. An interview he did shortly before that trip made him realize that Des Moines was not, after all, that far away from Hollywood.

Joy Hodges had started out as a child singing star on WHO and gone on to become a semisuccessful big-band singer in Hollywood, with hopes of a contract at RKO; the Des Moines press gave her star treatment when she came back to town to visit her parents. Dutch was only too happy to interview her at WHO. His first question: “Well, Miss Hodges, how does it feel to be a movie star?” Her answer: “Well, Mr. Reagan, you may know one day.” As she explained many years later, “He sat across the microphone from me in riding breeches, which I found amusing. But he was very good-looking even with his glasses.”50

After the interview he seemed reluctant to let her go. He grilled her about Hollywood, as well as her personal life: “Next thing I know he’s got me to agree to a riding date in the morning. I change my mind overnight, 6 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House and pretend to be out when he rings our bell. He just keeps on ringing, ringing, ringing. I thought he’d
never
go away! Ring, ring. I had to go stand in a closet and
cover my ears
. Well
finally
he stopped, but honey, you can’t
believe
that
purposefulness
! And do you know, later on, when he and I became such
dear
friends, he
never once
mentioned how I’d stood him up!

Like it never happened. That’s why I’ve always known Dutch can’t be hurt.

It’s water off a duck’s back.”51

Reagan didn’t get to Hollywood on his first trip to California, and Joy Hodges was cool when, on the one night he was in Los Angeles, he looked her up at the Biltmore Hotel’s nightclub, where she was the singer with the house band. (The Biltmore, with its 1,500 rooms, was the largest and most important hotel in town.) He spent three weeks on Catalina Island covering the Cubs. He arrived on a record-breaking 82-degree day at the beginning of March and couldn’t wait to get into his swimming trunks and jump into the Pacific, which was freezing—“Everyone knew that except hick me.” Three weeks later he packed his linen suits, white sports jacket, and white buckskin shoes and took the Southern Pacific Railroad back to Des Moines, thinking, he said, California was “a nice place to visit, but . . .”52

In 1937, WHO again sent him to cover the Cubs in Catalina. He arrived in Los Angeles on March 12, in the middle of a hailstorm, which made crossing to the island impossible that day. He checked into the Biltmore and caught a trolley out to Republic Pictures, where the Oklahoma Outlaws, a hillbilly group that had played on WHO’s Saturday night barn dance program earlier that year, were filming with Gene Autry in one of his cowboy pictures. It was the first time he had been on a movie set, and he found it entrancing. That evening he looked up Joy Hodges again at the Biltmore Hotel’s nightclub, and this time she joined him for dinner between floor shows. “I confessed to Joy,” he later wrote, “that sports announcing had actually been chosen years before as a steppingstone to acting.”53

“Take off your glasses,” Joy Hodges told him. He did, and she promised to introduce him to her agent. The next day he flew to Catalina on a tiny seaplane. The flight was turbulent, the plane made him feel claus-trophobic, and he vowed never to fly again.54 The day after his return from Catalina two weeks later, minus his glasses and barely able to see, he met with George Ward at the Meiklejohn Agency, which represented Robert Taylor, Betty Grable, and the still unknown Jane Wyman, among
Iowa: 1933–1937