Ronnie and Nancy (11 page)

Lester Weinrott, who worked with Edith on
Betty and Bob
, described her in those days:

Her face was beautiful, a classic face; her smile warmed the eye and the heart of the beholder. Her hair, under her Bes-Ben hat, had begun to gray. She wore a smartly tailored suit, white kid gloves, mid-heel pumps—and—a corsage made of two tightly wrapped white carnations. (No ribbon or fern—just the flowers.) She started each day at the Merchandise Mart (NBC). Her first stop was at Daskiel & Shapiro, the florists. Here she would select a single gardenia, two baby orchids, carnations or whatever. Here, too, she would tell a new joke. She seemed to have a new one every day.

Where did she get her stories? From the policeman who directed traffic at Lake Shore and Michigan, from the Drake hotel doorman, from a cab driver—she knew them all and they all knew her. It was not uncommon to be walking down Michigan Avenue with Edie and have a cabbie shout, “Hi, Miz Davis!”102

C H A P T E R T H R E E

IOWA

1933–1937

“Everything comes to him that waits”—But here is one that’s slicker: The man who goes after what he wants, Gets it a darn sight quicker.

An optimist is the one who sees a light where there is none. A pessimist is one who blows it out.

A “specialist” is one who knows more and more about less and less.

Keep your head cool—feet warm—mind busy. Plan work ahead and stick to it—rain or shine. If you are a gem, someone will find you.

From
As a Man Thinketh
by B. J. Palmer, founder of WOC Radio, Davenport, Iowa1

The memories of friendships dear

Give strength that we endure

And the Great Purpose of it all

Hold steadfast, and more sure.

From “My New Year Poem 1935–36”

by Nelle Reagan2

EDITH DAVIS WASN’T THE ONLY ONE PURSUING A CAREER IN RADIO IN THE

fall of 1932. After his lifeguard job in Dixon ended on that Labor Day, Ronald Reagan hitchhiked to Chicago in hopes of getting an interview at the National Broadcasting Company or the Columbia Broadcasting System, the booming new radio networks that had been established in the late 1920s by David Sarnoff and William S. Paley, respectively. Although the twenty-one-year-old Ronald didn’t even get to see the program directors at NBC and CBS, by 1934 he was becoming well known across the Midwest as Dutch Reagan, sports announcer for WHO in Des Moines, Iowa.

It is hard to imagine how omnipresent, powerful, and glamorous radio was in the 1930s and 1940s. The biggest stars at NBC and CBS—George 5 8

Iowa: 1933–1937

5 9

Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy—were as famous as, and made as much money as, the top movie stars at MGM and Paramount Pictures.

Amos ’n’ Andy
, which starred Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll and went on the air in 1928 (it stayed on until 1960), was so popular that some movie theaters installed radios and interrupted their evening screenings so that audiences wouldn’t have to miss a single fifteen-minute episode.

In
Where’s the Rest of Me?,
Reagan makes much of the first time he heard a crystal set, as early radios were called, at Nelle’s sister’s farm near Morrison, Illinois: “I remember sitting with a dozen others in a little room with breath-less attention, a pair of earphones attached tightly to my head, scratching a crystal with a wire. I was listening to raspy recorded music and faint voices saying, ‘This is KDKA, Pittsburgh, KDKA, Pittsburgh.’”3 According to Anne Edwards, “when the sound faded,” the nine-year-old Ronald stood up

“and imitated the announcer. Everyone laughed and he repeated the performance.”4 Edwards places this scene at Christmastime 1920, not long after KDKA, the first commercial radio station in the nation, had begun regular broadcasts that November 2 with the returns of the Harding-Cox presidential election.5

However, Edmund Morris quotes a 1984 speech in which Reagan said this momentous event took place “one Sunday afternoon” in Dixon. In this version, the Reagan boys had borrowed a crystal set from a neighbor:

“My brother and I and a couple of other kids walked all over town trying to find if we could hear something. And finally we went down by the river and something was coming! We passed the headphones around and heard this orchestra playing, coming out of the air! Let me tell you, that was a miracle. ‘This is KDKA Pittsburgh—KDKA Pittsburgh.’ We were actually hearing this. . . . Can you imagine our sense of wonder? You know, none of the developments that came after, talkies and television and so forth, were ever such a revelation as that day I first scratched that crystal with a wire whisker under the bridge at Dixon.”6

Ronald Reagan’s decision to go into radio came after a talk with Sid Altschuler, the Kansas City businessman who had become a mentor to him at Lowell Park during the summer of 1932. After graduating from Eureka College, Dutch, as everyone called him by then, was back on his lifeguard stand with no clear idea about his future—the only certainty seemed to be 6 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House that he would marry Margaret Cleaver. “This depression isn’t going to last forever,” the farsighted Altschuler told him, “and smart businessmen are willing to take on young men who can learn their business in order to have trained manpower on hand when things start to roll.” Dutch, whose father was unemployed and spending most of his time campaigning for FDR, later wrote that it was “literally the first note of optimism I’d heard about the state of the nation.” Altschuler then asked him the question he had been avoiding since graduating from Eureka that June: “What do you think you’d like to do?” Dutch said he didn’t know. “When you determine what line of work you want to get in, let me know,” Altschuler told him,

“and if it’s one of those areas where I can help, I’ll get you a job.”7

Dutch spent several sleepless nights mulling over his future before going back to Altschuler with an answer. “Out of the things that Sid had talked about came a new approach. No longer did I speculate about a paycheck and security. I really wrestled with the problem of what I would be happy doing for the next few decades.” Thinking back on the thrill of winning a prize for his acting in
Aria da Capo
the year before, he admitted to himself that he had a “secret dream to be an actor” but was afraid to declare it “in the middle of Illinois in 1932” for fear he would be institutionalized, as he half-jokingly put it. He also reasoned, “Broadway and Hollywood were as inaccessible as outer space,” but there was a form of show business

“closer to home” that attracted him—radio, which was then largely centered in Chicago. He went back to Altschuler and told him, “Way down deep inside, what I’d really like to be is a radio sports announcer.”8

“Radio had created a new profession,” he later wrote. “Broadcasting play-by-play reports of football games, people like Graham McNamee and Ted Husing had become as famous as some Hollywood stars and often they were more famous than the athletes they reported on.” Parentheti-cally, he made an even more telling remark: “I’d seen several movies in which sports announcers played themselves and thought there was a remote possibility the job might lead me into the movies.”9 Reagan’s recounting of the thought process involved in his decision reveals a clever willingness to move stealthily and incrementally toward a seemingly unat-tainable goal, as well as an ability to make compromises along the way.

The goal, it is clear, was stardom.

Altschuler had no connections in radio, but he approved of Dutch’s choice, because radio was one of the few growing industries during the Depression, and he urged him to “take any kind of job, even sweeping
Iowa: 1933–1937

6 1

floors, just to get in.”10 In early September, Dutch went to Chicago. He didn’t make it past the receptionists at the big networks, though he did have a stroke of luck. On his second attempt to see the program director at NBC, a secretary came out and sat with him. “This is the big time,” he recalled her telling him. “No one in the city wants to take a chance on in-experience. Go out in what we call the sticks—we shouldn’t but we do—

and try some of the smaller stations. They can’t afford to compete with us for experienced talent, so they are often willing to give a newcomer a chance. I think you will make it—come back and see me after you have some experience.”11

He was only too happy to flee the big city: “I couldn’t afford cabs and I was afraid of the damn buses—as a matter of fact, the city itself scared the bejesus out of me. Everybody seemed to know where they were going and what they were doing, and I could get lost just looking for a men’s room.”12 He hitchhiked back to Dixon in the rain, borrowed his father’s

“third-hand Oldsmobile,”13 and headed for Iowa.

His first stop was sixty-five miles west: WOC in Davenport, a small city sitting on a hill just across the Mississippi from Rock Island, Illinois. The station’s call letters stood for World of Chiropractic; it was owned and operated by the Palmer School of Chiropractic and located on the school’s campus. He auditioned for the program director, a tough old Scotsman named Peter MacArthur, who was impressed enough by his delivery—Dutch recreated the fourth quarter of a football game in which he had played for Eureka the previous fall—to offer him $5 and bus fare to announce a University of Iowa game the following week. Three more trial games followed that fall, but as the holidays approached Dutch still did not have a full-time job.14 In November he voted for the first time—for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who carried forty-two of forty-eight states, including Illinois. (Herbert Hoover was so despised by 1932 that in Detroit his campaign train was greeted by chants of “Hang Hoover! Hang Hoover!,” and in many other cities his limousine was pelted with eggs and tomatoes.)15

Finally, just after the New Year, MacArthur called from Davenport to say that a position as staff announcer had opened up at WOC. The starting salary was $100 a month, which Dutch would apportion as follows: $32 for a room in a boardinghouse, $16.60 for meals at the Palmer School cafeteria, $20 for Nelle and Jack back in Dixon. After receiving approval from a Disciples of Christ minister, he also decided to send $10 a month to Neil, who was in his last year at Eureka, in lieu of his tithes to the church.16

6 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House The remainder—$21.40—was his to spend or save as he liked. (“You could get a made-to-measure suit with two pairs of pants for $18.50,” he wrote in his autobiography.)17

Ronald Reagan officially became a radio announcer on February 10, 1933.

A month later, on March 12, President Roosevelt gave the first of his Fireside Chats, reassuring Americans that it was “safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress”—thus launching the first radio presidency. Like Adolf Hitler (who also took office in 1933), FDR was quick to recognize the power of radio to sway a mass audience, to connect a country’s leader with its citizens in their living rooms, a possibility that had never existed before. One of the new President’s most avid listeners was young Dutch. “I soon idolized FDR,” he would later write. “During his Fireside Chats, his strong, gentle, confident voice resonated across the nation with an eloquence that brought comfort and resilience to a nation caught up in a storm and reassured us that we could lick any problem.”18

Reagan would later criticize Roosevelt’s “alphabet soup of federal agencies” as the first step toward “a form of veiled socialism [in] America.”19 In June 1933, however, he was grateful that his father’s efforts on behalf of the Democrats were rewarded with a job in the Dixon office of the newly created Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). That November, five months after graduating from Eureka, Neil Reagan was appointed district representative of the Federal Reemployment Bureau (FRB).20 Neither Neil nor Ronald mentioned this government job in their later accounts of this period, and Ronald would often cite his father’s supposedly frustrating experience with the federal bureaucracy as his first insight into why big government doesn’t work. Neil often said that he had registered as a Republican “six months after Roosevelt’s first inauguration”—perhaps
he
was frustrated by his New Deal experience. According to some sources, Jack considered Neil’s defection to the party of the rich a personal betrayal.21 In any case, his younger son was loyally defending FDR and the New Deal in heated arguments with Republican friends and colleagues in Iowa.22

Dutch did not get off to a good start at WOC, where his staff job involved “many hours of playing phonograph records, interspersed with the reading of commercials,” as well as announcing the news, weather, and sports scores, from early morning until the midnight sign-off: “This is station WOC, owned and operated by the Palmer School of Chiropractic, the Chiropractic Fountainhead, Davenport, Iowa, where the West begins
Iowa: 1933–1937

6 3

and in the state where the tall corn grows.” Advertisers complained about the novice announcer’s wooden readings, and after he neglected to plug the sponsor of a romantic organ music program, Runge Mortuary, he was fired. “It was the end of the world,” Reagan recalled feeling. Fortunately, his replacement, a local schoolteacher, demanded a contract, and, as Reagan put it, “WOC was not in the habit of giving contracts.” The teacher quit, and Reagan was rehired temporarily until a new replacement could be found. “I was mad, didn’t give a damn,” he recalled, and so he read his next commercial “freely, easily and with a pretty good punch. There was no more talk of a replacement.”23

Advertising was gospel at WOC, which was run by “Colonel” B. J.

Palmer, the son of D. D. Palmer, the mesmerist turned chiropractor who had founded the Palmer School at the turn of the century and the radio station in 1922.24 One of the Colonel’s favorite mottoes was “Early to bed, early to rise; Work like hell—and advertise.” Another was “Only mints can make money without advertising.”25 He was also fond of proclaiming, in lectures on salesmanship he gave throughout the Midwest, “Get the big idea and all else follows,” “Sell yourself in all your business approaches,” and