Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [11]
Jack and Nelle spent the next eight years in Tampico, the first five in the apartment on Main Street where Neil and Ronald were born. Three months after Ronald’s birth, they moved up to a two-story frame house with modern plumbing that faced a small park with a Civil War monument and, just beyond that, the railroad tracks and a pair of tall grain elevators. Jack did well Early Ronnie: 1911–1932
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at H. C. Pitney’s General Store. He was in charge of the shoes and clothing department and made occasional buying trips to Chicago. Energetic and outgoing, he was a natural leader, serving during the years in Tampico as a councilman, an assistant fire chief, a baseball manager, and, though not much of a churchgoer, finance chairman of Saint Mary’s Catholic Church.19
Neil was baptized at Saint Mary’s, although Nelle had to be prodded by the priest to keep her marital promise to raise their children as Catholics.
Neil’s godfather, A. C. Burden, owned Burden’s Opera House, located above the bank on Main Street. Nelle and Jack were soon appearing in plays put on there by the town’s amateur dramatic group, for audiences of a hundred or so, seated on folding chairs. Neil recalled rehearsals at his parents’ house. “When the rehearsal wound up at the end of the evening, they’d all sit down and have a bowl of oyster stew and crackers,” he said.
“Ronald and I’d sneak down the stairs partway and look . . . at all the goings-on down there.”20
The most significant event of the Reagan family’s years in Tampico was Nelle’s conversion to the Disciples of Christ, a breakaway sect of Presbyterianism. On Easter Sunday, March 27, 1910, she was baptized by total immersion in the Hennepin Canal outside town. When Ronald was born the following year, she refused to have him baptized as a Catholic, and from then on she raised both sons as Disciples of Christ, taking them with her to prayer meetings on Sunday and Wednesday nights and to Sunday school, which she taught. She became a “visiting disciple,” helping the poor and the sick, sometimes wrote the weekly church notes in the Tampico Tornado, and was elected president of the Missionary Society.21
The Disciples of Christ had emerged out of the great religious upheaval that swept the American frontier in the early nineteenth century, as the new nation spawned new churches, including the Unitarians and the Mormons.
It was formally organized as a distinct denomination in 1832, and by 1900
had more than 1.2 million members. It was especially strong in the rural parts of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The Disciples called themselves “simple Christians” and their church “the Christian Church.” Unlike most other Protestant denominations, the Disciples made communion open to anyone who accepted Christ as the son of God and the New Testa-ment as the means to salvation. They rejected the Calvinism of the old Presbyterians, with its emphasis on predestination and the depravity of man.
Instead, they stressed individual responsibility, the work ethic, education, good works, and Protestant unity.22
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Like many nativist churches, the Disciples had an anti-Catholic streak, seeing Roman Catholics as foreign and morally lax, particularly with regard to alcohol, so Nelle’s choice of this church was something of a slap in the face to her husband. The Disciples of Christ were fanatically opposed to drinking, “the driest of the dries.” They were closely aligned with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. One of the most famous Disciples was Carry Nation, who, in the 1890s, led a crusade of hymn-singing, hatchet-wielding women through the saloons of Kansas, smashing bottles and furniture. The Disciples used grape juice, not wine, in their communion service.23
In the summer of 1913, the Reagan family’s peaceful life was turned upside down, literally and figuratively. Five years after Henry Ford brought out America’s first affordable