Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [10]
But Jack and Nelle never made it. They never even owned a house until their son bought them one in Hollywood. As the Great Depression descended upon the Farm Belt in the late 1920s, and Jack’s drinking became more and more of a problem, the Reagans were reduced to taking in boarders, and Nelle retreated further into religion. There would be good years in business and happy days at home, but Jack would never achieve his dream of financial independence and respectable status. As a family friend candidly put it, “Jack always wanted to be ‘cut-glass Irish’; at best he was ‘lace-curtain,’ but that never had a way of registering with him.”10
The O’Regans came from Ballyporeen, County Tipperary, Ireland. Jack’s grandfather, a poor potato farmer, left home during the famine of the 1840s and lived in London for a few years, where he worked as a soap-maker and Anglicized the family name before crossing the Atlantic. Nelle’s grandfather, a Wilson from Renfrewshire, Scotland, fought against the British in Canada during the Mackenzie Rebellion in the 1830s. Both families settled in the flat, fertile farm country of northwestern Illinois sometime before the Civil War. Illinois was on the frontier then—the last Indians had been driven out of the state only in 1832, after the Black Hawk War—and it was still possible to stake a claim to undeveloped land and homestead it. That is what both the Reagans and Wilsons did near the small Mississippi River port of Fulton in Whiteside County, about one hundred miles west of Chicago.11 During this time Illinois came to be known as the Prairie State, and by 1860 it led the nation in wheat and corn production. But neither the Wilsons nor the Reagans prospered.
Jack Reagan was born in Fulton on July 13, 1883, and lived in a two-room farmhouse until he was orphaned at the age of six, after both his 1 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House parents died of tuberculosis. He was raised by an aunt and uncle who had opened a general store in the new railroad town of Bennett, Iowa. He left school after the sixth grade to help out in his uncle’s store during the depression of the 1890s. Around 1899 he returned to Fulton to work as a general clerk at J. W. Broadhead’s Dry Goods Store.12 According to Anne Edwards in Early Reagan, “Shoes became [his] specialty. He liked children, and particularly admired the graceful turn of a lady’s ankle. He talked about someday traveling west to pioneer. . . . But he remained at Broadhead’s for eight years, gaining a reputation as a young man a bit too fond of alcohol, a fact that made the parents of most eligible Fulton women (who were entranced by his beguiling manner and dark good looks) wary.”13 And then he met Nelle, who was earning her living as a milliner in Fulton.
Nelle Wilson, who was born on July 18, 1882,14 also spent her early years on a farm. Her mother, Mary Anne Elsey, had been born in England and immigrated to Illinois to work as a domestic servant. When Nelle was seven, her father left the family and moved to Chicago for reasons unknown. Like Jack, Nelle left school after the sixth grade. Her mother died when she was seventeen. Although Nelle had been brought up as a Presbyterian,15 and her father disapproved of Jack, probably because he was a Catholic, they were married in Fulton’s Catholic church on November 8, 1904.16
It was said that Nelle didn’t mind Jack’s weekend benders at first, but when his older brother, William, was jailed for six months for drunk and disorderly conduct, she apparently had had enough. In February 1906, eighteen months after they married, the Reagans moved to Tampico, a country town with a population of about eight hundred, where the local Law and Order League prevailed and liquor licensing was banned twelve years before national Prohibition.17 They were in their early twenties, full of hope, good-looking, and smart, even sophisticated by Tampico standards. Nelle was blue-eyed with auburn hair, petite and full-bosomed.
Jack was almost six feet tall, well built and handsome, with wavy black hair rakishly parted in