Might that be his scrawny figure running along the sidewalk, desperately looking up at me? Why does he throw his arms out in seeming supplication? Even as I stare down, the boy leaps and makes a convulsive contraction of his whole body, as though something has socked him in the stomach. Then he lands, straightens, and mimes a casual throw. A football fantasy! Perfectly acceptable by Dixon standards. But he better not pretend he’s Richard III.
Not that that’s likely. At fourteen, young Reagan has yet to act in a play at school. Recently, however, his mother persuaded him to deliver a recitation at one of her “readings.” The applause stirred vague longings in his breast–if not for the theater, then for some life transcending the local and the present. He draws well enough to see himself “earning a living as an artist.” Alternatively, he dreams of living in the wild with wolves, or joining his good friend Frank Merriwell at Yale, or following his alter ego Dick Falkner [hero of Reagan’s favorite inspirational Christian novel, “That Printer of Udell’s”] to Washington. Or perhaps he is a Warlord of Mars, and is about to deploy that planet’s Strategic Defense Initiative against my dirigible:
A great fleet of Zodangan battleships rose from the camps of the besiegers without the city, and advanced to meet us…. Our green Martian warriors had opened fire on them almost as they left the ground. With their uncanny marksmanship they raked the oncoming fleet with volley after volley.
That running boy, catching that imaginary ball, still leaps and contracts in memory. “It wasn’t play-acting,” one contemporary spectator recalls, “it was reality, even to the facial expressions and grunts.”
If so, then how much more real, and painful, it must have been for Dutch to hear, in the fall, that he was too slight to make the scrub at Dixon High. Purple and white varsity jerseys glowed in the window of Vaile & O’Malley’s Menswear, but they were cut for “men” more massive than his 125 pounds. Had he been baptized a Catholic like his brother Neil, he could not have more passionately perceived those colors as representing cardinal privilege and grace. “I just had to wear one of those purple and white jerseys.” The best he could hope for was to try for captain of the school’s B team, in the hope that by his junior year he could tilt the scales in his favor.
I saw–I registered–I calibrated–a square-cut youth of nearly sixteen, about five feet ten inches tall and one hundred and sixty pounds in weight. He was not yet grown to proportion (his legs lacked heft and his chest was shallow) but his shoulders were broad and he walked with extraordinary grace. There was none of the arms-out swagger that jocks affect, no sense either of hurry or hesitation, just flowing, forward, lynx-like momentum. His face irked me. It had an adolescent coarseness and an air of studied jollity, as if he knew he was being watched. When he waved at a cheering fan and grinned, his upper lip pulled to the right. His eyes had the rubbed, overstrained look of somebody used to glasses. I sensed that he was reacting to sound rather than sight.
“Who’s this fellow?” I whispered. Paul shrugged. The square-cut youth and I briefly exchanged glances. I had an odd sensation of blueness and blindness. A million miles away, a factory siren wailed. His purposeful body moved on, exuding liniment. I dropped the candy wrapper I had been holding–and as I reached for it, his wet sleeve brushed my hand.
“His name’s Dutch Reagan,” the boy next to Paul said, leaning over. “Didn’t make the first four games, but when we got licked 34-0 by Sterling, Coach fired the regular guard and took him on. Dutch gonna win his letter for sheer grit.”
I learned that Reagan was something of a river rat, having swum and paddled and skated most of the distance between Dixon and Grand Detour [where Paul Rae lived]. He had taken a lifesaving course at the South Side YMCA, and been certified for competence by the Red Cross. That meant, apparently, that he was able to “undress in deep water” and swim a hundred yards at top speed; to surface-dive eight feet down and recover no fewer than four heavy objects; to execute, repeatedly, four carries (“Head, Cross Chest, Tired Swimmer’s, and Arm-Lock”), to demonstrate “Double Grips” and “Strangle Holds,” left and right and front and back; and, last, to perform one and a half minutes of “Prone Pressure Resuscitation.”
These impressive qualifications, Paul wrote, had persuaded Mr. and Mrs. Graybill, the managers of Lowell Park Beach, to hire Dutch at a salary of fifteen dollars a week, plus all the hamburgers, onions, pickles, and root beer he could consume at the food stand. He had authority over all who came to swim or sunbathe, and the additional responsibility of keeping the Dixon sluice gate “free of drowned bodies.”
What thoughts ran through Dutch’s head on placid forenoons, when the river was an unbroken swell through his clip-on shades–only to be disturbed by the first busload of day-trippers bursting out of the forest? As it happens, we know. He doodled some “Meditations of a Lifeguard” and published them in his high school yearbook. Paul sent me a copy, superscribed “Mark Twain–move over.”
On they come, hoards [sic] of swimmers, bathers, sleepers, or what have you! A mob of water-seeking humans intent on giving the beach guard something to worry about.
A “frail and forty” maiden out to enjoy the rippling waves, and to cling tightly to the lifeline, as she squeals and giggles….
An answer to love’s sweet young dream–a proud little sweetheart dragging her manly catch down to the river’s edge….
A Sunday School class, from the picnic up the park, swarms over the lifeboats and raft, and keeps on swarming as long as anything remains to be swarmed over…. Like a low accompaniment to their shreiks [sic] and howls, the lifeguard paints the ether a hazy blue, by the use of lurid, vivid, flaming adjectives…
Dutch was (according to Paul) going steady with a very earthbound young woman indeed. Margaret “Mugs” Cleaver was definitely not the type to laze away the Lord’s time at Lowell Park–whose sands she equated with those of Sodom and Gomorrah. Darkly pretty, short, terse, and tough, she dominated her class at North Side High School. She was ambitious without push, cultured, and charitably inclined. She spoke, wrote, acted, and debated with easy skill.
By the end of 1927, I was hearing that Dutch–taller and broader now, a DHS squad regular–was Dixon’s “Model Boy,” just as Margaret Cleaver was its most brilliant girl. Ladies at the Christian Church Missionary Society were predicting their engagement in about four years’ time. He had been elected president of the North Side student body; she was president of the senior class. They were officers of the school Dramatic Society, cozily acting opposite each other in a play called “You and I.” Under her sophisticated influence, Dutch had been heard trying to speak French. She was writing most of the news articles for next spring’s “Dixonian”; he was its art director.
When I saw the volume half a century later, I found to my fascination that Dutch had laid it out in the style of a silent-movie storyboard. The various sections were given such title cards as “Directors,” “Cast,” “Stage,” and “Filming.” He had illustrated each of these cards with silhouette drawings of himself as an authority figure. He calls orders through a megaphone. He sits behind his desk, solitary and darkly directorial. To this day, when I show this last silhouette to veterans of Ronald Reagan’s White House, they gasp with recognition. The resemblance to the man in the Oval Office is almost occult.
“He drew it,” I tell them, “when he was 16.”
