Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [12]
In comparison to his brother William’s alcoholism, which was so severe that Jack tried to have him committed in 1914, Jack’s drinking seemed under control. He tended to binge on holidays and when things were going well, but otherwise he would remain sober for long stretches of time.
Still, by the age of thirty-one he had apparently had enough of the small-ness—and dryness—of Tampico.
The Reagans would move five times in the next five years. Their first stop was Chicago, where they spent a miserable eight months living in a cold-water flat. Jack hated being one of three hundred employees at the Fair Store, which billed itself as the largest department store in the world, and was fired after being arrested for public drunkenness.25 Then came three years in Galesburg, home of the country’s largest horse and mule market, where Jack lost another job because of his drinking. (In Galesburg he tried to enlist for service in World War I, but as a father of two was turned down.) A year in Monmouth, a pleasant county seat best known as the birthplace of Wyatt Earp, followed. Finally, in 1919, Jack’s former boss, H. C. Pitney, who was going blind, lured him back to Tampico with an offer of higher pay and the chance to become a partner. The Reagans moved into an apartment above the Pitney store, right across the street Early Ronnie: 1911–1932
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from the apartment where the boys had been born. After five years of wandering in an attempt to move up in the world, they had come full circle.26
Yet young Ronald thrived. Buoyed by his mother’s faith and love, he was reading newspapers before he entered school, he earned a 95 average in first grade in Galesburg, and he skipped a grade in Monmouth. His teachers noted his nearly photographic memory, which he may have developed to compensate for his extreme nearsightedness, which was not diagnosed until he was thirteen. Although he was the perpetual new boy in town, he made friends easily. At the same time, he was also already learning to keep part of himself in reserve; he liked to draw, daydream, and wander in the woods. A girl in his third-grade class remembered him thus:
“He was startling to look at (not only good-looking but he had this air about him). . . . His jaw was always set—as though somebody was going to take a poke at him and he was ready for the punches. I looked at his thrust-out chin every day, and wondered ‘Why?’ ”27 At nine he made his theatrical debut in the Tampico Christian Church with a recitation entitled “About Mother.”28
Reagan later called the move back to Tampico “the most fortunate shift of my life. My existence turned into one of those rare Huck Finn–Tom Sawyer idylls.There were woods and mysteries, life and death among the small creatures, hunting and fishing; those were the days when I learned the real riches of rags.”29 He liked playing tag in the town’s stockyard pens and having food fights with the refuse in the alleys behind the stores on Main Street, swimming in the “deep and treacherous” Hennepin Canal—he was the best swimmer among his friends—and learning to play football in the Civil War park. In the summer the Reagan boys picked strawberries for pay.
In the fall they helped the school janitor rake leaves and were rewarded with a marshmallow roast. They carried coal to the Opera House in exchange for free admission to the silent movies shown there. Both boys loved the Westerns; Ronald’s favorite stars were Tom Mix and William S. Hart.30
Most nights Nelle sat Neil and Ronald down at one end of the kitchen table and read aloud to them from such books as The Three Musketeers and King Arthur and the Round Table, while Jack read his newspaper at the other