Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [13]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Pitney’s and lived above it. One might even say they were the first rich people to take up Ronald Reagan.
“An elderly childless couple, they took a special fancy to me,” the future president recalled. “I had no grandparents and this sort of spoiling was delightful. The jeweler’s wife gave me ten cents a week as an allowance (a magnificent sum in those days) plus cookies and chocolate every afternoon. The best part was that I was allowed to dream. Many the day I spent deep in a huge rocker in the mystic atmosphere of Aunt Emma’s living room with its horsehair-stuffed gargoyles of furniture, its shawls and anti-macassars, globes of glass over birds and flowers, books and strange odors; many the day I remained hidden in a corner downstairs in Uncle Jim’s jewelry shop with its curious relics, faint lights from gold and silver and bronze, lulled by the erratic ticking of a dozen clocks and the drone of the customers who came in.”33
The one member of the Reagan family who wasn’t thrilled to be back in Tampico was Jack, especially after its single tavern closed when Prohibition went into effect on January 16, 1920. Nelle’s church celebrated the event with a midnight service.
When Ronald was almost ten, his parents moved to Dixon, another county seat in northwestern Illinois, and there they stayed for the next seventeen years. They did, however, move five times within Dixon, always to a smaller place. Reagan considered Dixon, where he completed grade school and high school and spent his college summers, his hometown. “All of us have to have a place we go back to,” he wrote. “Dixon is that place for me.”34 Dixon was where his commitment to the Disciples of Christ took hold, where his political views started to form, where his love of sports and his attraction to the stage began, and where his winning personality emerged—the cheerful determination that made his ambition seem more like helpfulness than selfishness.
Compared with Tampico, Dixon, which had a population of 8,191 in 1920, seemed like a city to young Ronald. In most ways it was typical of the small towns in rural Illinois—farmers brought their wheat and corn to market for shipment to Chicago, Omaha, and cities in the South on the Illinois Central and Northwestern railroads; dairy farmers supplied the Borden Milk Company’s condensing plant; there was one hotel, and Lincoln had stayed there. But nearly half its wage earners were employed by manufacturing firms—the Grand Detour Plow Company, the Clipper Lawnmower Early Ronnie: 1911–1932
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Company, the Medusa Cement Company, the Reynolds Wire Company, the Brown Shoe Company—and there was a large Irish Catholic minority among these lower-middle-class, blue-collar workers, many of whom were Democrats.35
That was part of Dixon’s attraction for Jack Reagan—the speakeasies of Bootlegger’s Knob on the South Side were perhaps another.36 He had persuaded H. C. Pitney to sell his general store in Tampico and back him in a shoe store in downtown Dixon. The deal was that Jack’s commissions would be deducted from his debt to Pitney, and when that was paid off, he would own half the business.37 Jack now called himself a “graduate practi-pedist,” because somewhere along the way he had taken a correspondence course from the American School of Practipedics—the newfangled, quasi-scientific study of the bones of the foot. There were already four shoe stores in Dixon, but Reagan’s Fashion Boot Shop, as Jack named the store, was the first to use an X-ray machine for fitting shoes.38 Despite the modern gimmicks, the shop did not get off to a good start, mainly because wholesale farm prices fell by nearly 50 percent between